User blog:Skyrocket/Total Drama Music Battles

I’ve mentioned before that I’m an English teacher in South Korea. I *love* to use funny pictures in my lessons and put a lot of work into finding them. Some time back I grabbed a TON of TD pics to use for a game that ultimately didn’t fly with the Korean teachers I work with. I was bummed but at the end of the day it is the Korean teachers’ classes so they get final say.

Anyway, I hung onto those pics figuring I’d be able to use them again later. Recently I was able to do that twice. The first time one of co-teachers asked me to come up with a lesson in a hurry. I just had to have two pictures a person and a few sentences talking about what the person was like so the kids could practice descriptions. I dug into my photo stash and picked shots of Alejandro holding a panda and Gwen having to kiss a fish. The sentences were things like “He has a necklace,” and “Her hair is green and black.”

Due to some weird things with that weeks’ schedule I wasn’t able to be in the classes that used those photos. But the next week I was grading notebooks and saw that about FOUR kids had doodled a guy holding a panda in their notebooks. None of them really looked like Alejandro. But given that those kids were all eleven that’s no surprise. I still got a big kick out of knowing that some Korean kids actually took the time to doodle a TD character.

The second lesson came this week and again, I was working with another teacher at the time so I couldn’t be there to see the kids’ reactions. This time it was a lesson talking about people doing actions. “He is cooking,” and “She is swimming,” and the like.

So among the dozen or so PowerPoint slides I used to give examples I worked in two TD shots. The first was of Harold in his rapping outfit. Then, just to make it funnier, I added a picture of Busta Rhymes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Busta_Rhymes_2005.jpg Thus, basically giving Harold the chance to have a rap battle with Busta Rhymes. Which is something he’d totally do if given the chance.

The other one was a shot of Duncan with a guitar, looking to the right with a VERY unimpressed expression. That was too good to pass up so I poked around on Wikipedia and grabbed a picture of Eddie Van Halen from 1977. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eddie_Van_Halan_-_77_in_New_Haven.jpg Eddie is *shredding* so it looks like he and Duncan are having a mini battle of the bands and Duncan is totally unimpressed by Eddie. Which is pretty in keeping with Duncan.

Oh, and I posted this to a website where other English teachers in Korea share lessons with each other. So far it has been downloaded 76 times. I have no way of knowing how many people who downloaded it will actually use it in their classes. But odds are at least a few will. So it’s nice knowing more Korea kids will get a little taste of TD even if they don’t know what it is.