The Great Experiment: Japanese 2nd Graders vs. Indie Rock

Don't let my relative silence on the topic of teaching fool you; I do intend to abuse this privileged position to the fullest extent possible. I have realized the almost limitless potential that these children hold as human guinea pigs, ripe for whatever sort of experimentation I deem appropriate. I can only hope that future generations benefit from my hard work and sacrifice.

This week, I decided to perform my first such experiment: exposing elementary school students to external aural stimulus and recording the results. Of course, I was absolutely dying to push these children to unnatural limits-what would a 2nd grader's reaction to the Locust be like? Or Wolf Eyes? While these are, indeed, pressing questions, I decided to play it safe this time; if not to avoid the risk of children diving out of open windows then to see how the teachers would react to the alien sounds that would emanate from their classrooms.

Thus, I decided that the initial experiment should consist of mostly tame, inoffensive indie rock. At the last minute I included one hip-hop song purely out of guilt (I wouldn't want to bear the responsibility of creating entire classrooms of rockists) but did so without altering the general vibe of the proceedings. Anyhow, my goal was to select 10 tracks that can be seen as "classic" in some sense while still offering some sort of sonic variance. Thus, the decision to select Pavement's Dave Brubeck tribute over a more well-known cut, etc. Finally, I threw that D-Plan song on there because I thought they would find it pretty funny. Heh. The final tracklist:

1. Yo La Tengo - "Autumn Sweater"
2. The Smiths - "This Charming Man"
3. Neutral Milk Hotel - "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"
4. Pavement - "5-4=Unity"
5. Death Cab For Cutie - "Photobooth"
6. Radiohead - "Everything In Its Right Place"
7. A Tribe Called Quest - "Jazz"
8. My Bloody Valentine - "Sometimes"
9. Ryan Adams - "To Be Young"
10. The Dismemberment Plan - "The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich"

I then taught the kids five simple emotions in English (happy, sad, mad, silly and weird) and the structure "This music makes me feel ________." Finally, I turned on the CD and asked them to write a sentence using that structure for each track. The results, culled from three classes of roughly 35 students each (which I have processed into easy to read pie graphs), appear below by track:











As you can see, Yo La Tengo was overwhelmingly chosen as the happiest track while Radiohead received the largest number of "sad" votes (somewhere out there, Thom Yorke is reading this and actually smiling). Unsurprisingly, The Plan walked away with the award for silliest track, Pavement's take on white boy jazz was the weirdest and My Bloody Valentine induced a surprising amount of anger. All in all, I feel as if the experiment was an overwhelming success and everyone had a good time of it. Well, everyone except for this kid:

(By the way, if any other JETs want to try this activity with their students, I can email the worksheet I made which features phonetic katakana pronunciations as well as a Japanese explanation of the target sentence. Let me know.)