Thursday, 24 August 06

Only 2 students today, my two new students. It is too bad the class is so small, but on the other hand they are both very nice and I hope they enjoy practicing English conversation in such a small group. I have encouraged them to bring other students to our class.

As usual on Thursday I distributed The Stranger and Seattle Weekly newspapers. As we leafed through the papers I mentioned something about the Crocodile Cafe and how it is owned by the wife of REM's guitarist. But neither of my students were familiar with REM (bio). I played the video for "Losing My Religion" to see if it sounded familiar. Nope. But they liked the song. Grace asked what the song is about (lyrics) and I said one of the features of REM is that their lyrics are more like impressionist art with splashes and fragments of ideas put together rather than narrative.

The sparked a tangent on the subject of art and we really did not return to music until the very end of the class.

I forgot to play Dixie Chicks for them, so we will do that next session. Grace in particular wants to learn more about bands from Seattle. Neither she nor Yumi knows any Seattle bands, to my surprise not even Nirvana, which is usually the one band *everyone* knows. So I said that the next session they will have to tell me more about which music they like, then I can tell them about Seattle bands which match their taste.