Dr. Beat, etc

So now we're reading a little biography of Gloria Estefan. Halfway through reading it to my first class, I realized that her husband, Emilio Estefan, is not Emilio Estevez. Everything seemed so much clearer.

I thought I knew everything about Miami Sound Machine- they made like 2 songs that were popular when I was 7, and played at the Clearfield Fair once- but in fact there's a lot more to it than that. Like apparently their first hit was "Dr. Beat". I had to explain to the kids that this is a different beat than your mom beats you beat, but they still think (quite rightly) that's a really funny name for a song. Then I looked it up on youtube, and sure enough if you wanted to make a parody of everything weird about the 80s, you couldn't do better than this video. Except the song is really catchy, so now my students and I all go around singing, "Doc doc doc doc doctor beat."

We've also been working on having them research a country in Latin America in their books and on the internet. One girl was having a particularly hard time finding the leader of Grenada, and instead of teaching her I just searched for it myself and told her to click the first link that came up. Five seconds later: "Teacher, why did you find this?" Somehow that link, along with an article about the governor-general of Grenada, included a picture of a slightly overweight middle-aged man in a flesh-colored body-suit that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. It was pretty funny. The bummer is I cannot find that picture to share in my blog. I even went back to the computer she used and clicked on the entire history from that day, but no dice.