vindication

Everyday, the kindergarten classes at my school all get together for a 20 minute session called play songs.  Teachers are assigned categories of activities and days of the week to do them on and expected to develop their own curriculum.  I do P.E. on mondays and games on thursdays.  I taught them red rover last thursday, and kicked myself for not doing it sooner.  It is fully awesome to watch a toddler charge a wall of his peers, in defiance of social anxiety and safety standards.

Another teacher has music with them twice a week.  She plays internet videos and they all sing along.  Usually it's the kind of gratingly inane crap that gets produced specifically for their age group.  That trend, btw, has driven me to a hatred of the wiggles (and their ilk) that I'll explain another time.  Last wednesday, I walked by the room and saw that she and our boss were failing to capture their interest with a Beatles track.  The kids were staring blankly (and quietly) into the middle distance and she looked at me with a bug eyed shrug as if to say, "I don't know what went wrong here".

I figured that as long as they we're in a mood to play things that weren't imagination murdering pixi stix for the ears, I'd risk a suggestion.  I poked my head in the doorway and over the awkward silence and across the room I said, "you know, my kids love crocodile rock."  Which, if you haven't read the post, was the very song that led to a red faced chastisement by both of my bosses a few months back, and thus entailed a considerable degree of cheek.

Instantly, one of my kids shouted, "CROCODILE ROCK!"  Then the rest of them started chanting it, "CROCODILE ROCK! CROCODILE ROCK!".  By the looks on their faces, I'd guess that neither the other teacher nor our boss had ever seen such enthusiastic solidarity in a group of students.  So they acquiesced and before the video even started, my kids were already singing it.  By the end of it, even the 5 year olds were shouting out the chorus. Even I was surprised to see that my kids could already sing half the words.

So there are a few lessons I think we can take from this:

1. If you allow children to pursue their own interests, they WILL literally trip over themselves trying to learn it.
   
2. Don't try to make Ansible feel like an asshole for failing to meet your standard of positive obligation fulfillment, because you WILL regret it.
   
3. Elton John is so talented that it almost pisses me off, but I WILL let him touch my penis if he says please.