party in the usa

Since I have my freshmen class four times a week, I regularly play them English-language songs on Mondays, which I have cleverly dubbed "Music Monday". I play the song while they look at the lyrics, some of which I have blanked out so they have to listen for what the words are. Just this week I realized I could greatly enhance Music Monday by showing them music videos downloaded with some unnamed downloading client (because as of now, we shadily are not allowed internet access in the classrooms...). iTunes' top downloads list tells me that some song called "Party in the USA" is quite the hit back home, so I searched for it and downloaded a live performance.

And that's how I learned about this pole incident which looks to have been a real flurry in the media that I thankfully missed before we left.

Here I thought Miley Cyrus would be a nice window to American culture as a solid representation of current American pop music. What a tragedy that she really is a current icon of American pop! She is not such a nice window to American culture for these Chinese students. There's no way I could show this to my class of 20 year-olds: Megan and I drew out the lyrics for "The 12 Days of Christmas" and the boys couldn't even be mature about her stick figure drawing of 9 ladies dancing. Plus, I don't want to show it to them, which is really the sad thing, that what's "popular" in my country would embarrass me as a cultural ambassador to my students.

At least they now know who U2 is. Can you believe Bono was unknown in a corner of the world?