There's a music store here in Hitachi that I visit every once in a while to tempt myself with buying an (Epiphone) Les Paul Guitar. It's not doing well though, partially because of the economy, but also, I think, because of this:

"Do not touch" signs. In a music store.

They don't trust their customers.

Can you imagine going into Nordstrom's and not being able to try on clothes? Or visiting Frye's and not being able to geek out while molesting the latest and greatest gadgets? Not only is it a slap in the face to customers, but it's also counterproductive to business: the power of touch does wonders to increase impulse buys!

The rationale is powered by risk aversion. If customers don't touch the products, there's little chance of damage, right? Maybe, but if you don't trust your customers, you also risk them not wanting to spend their hard-earned cash on your business.

 

My company trained us with a variety of activities and techniques to use in our teachings, but I've gotten ideas from other sources as well. L.A.'s Freestyle Fellowship inspired a lesson last year and another musician, Bobby McFerrin, has helped me teach pronunciation. 

Though students learn to read and write English, pronunciation is another beast entirely. Repetition addresses this but simple "repeat after me"'s get played out quickly, causing students to zone out or do it unconsciously(which leads to less retention). So I was constantly trying to figure out a better way to teach it.

And then this clip of McFerrin and the pentatonic scale started circulating:

After seeing it, and noting how the audience associated his physical location with relative pitches, I thought I'd give it a shot with my students. But instead of scales and pitches, I used vocabulary words and syllables.

For example, the word "communication" would be broken into 5 syllables, "com", "mu", "ni", "ca" and "tion", and I'd demonstrate each one at a relative location. In the clip, the audience was able to follow McFerrin as he physically (and sporadically) moved between pitches. Likewise, my students could follow me as I moved (sporadically) between syllables!

It turned out to be a great way to teach pronunciation. The McFerrin technique made practicing more puzzle-like, and their desire to solve each puzzle kept them attent and focused while participating.

Not only that, but by concentrating on the syllables, they ended up doing better with similar sounding words. A word like "immunization" would be intimidating until the syllabic breakdown revealed "mu", "ni" and "tion"--3 syllables they had already learned and felt comfortable with.

I wouldn't have guessed that you could learn something about teaching English from Bobby McFerrin; I only thought of him whenever someone said "Don't Worry, be Happy"! But by keeping an open mind, I was able to once again see how unrelated things can help you solve a problem.

Do a web-search for “Hip Hop” and you’ll get search results for Hip Hop as a culture (composed of 4 elements: breaking, emceeing, DJing, graffiti), a genre of music (rap) and now—especially if you filter for results only from the last couple of days—a tool for speeding up PHP sites and apps. This tool was  recently announced by Facebook and improves the performance of large PHP sites like it.

Whoever decided on the name did a much better job than Apple on their recently announced product but the name still draws up some obvious, unrelated imagery. I'm sure jokes are being dropped left and right in techie circles and some articles are already cashing in on the association to generate clever titles and content.

For me, just reading what people posted about HipHop (the PHP tool) with Hip-Hop (the culture) in-mind was a trip in itself. Some statements reminded me of Hip-Hop's presence. When Marco Tabini said that HipHop "has the potential to be an incredibly disruptive product”, I couldn't help but be reminded of how hip hop has affected the world, changing the lives of people from Congo to China.  Others conjured up messier memories. Mac Slocum's question, “How easy—or hard—do you think it will be for other companies to take advantage of HipHop?”, immediately had me thinking about Hip-Hop's relationship with Corporate America. One of the most interesting e-pinions, though, was from the creator of PHP, Ramus Lerdorf. After Facebook's announcement, he tweeted about it, saying "I think HipHop is cool and will certainly help the poor people stuck in framework soup." Replace "framework soup" with "poverty" and you've got PHP's creator summarizing the creation of Hip-Hop.

But the biggest coincidence of all was in the announcement itself: making HipHop open-source. By releasing HipHop to the world to be used, improved and changed, Facebook has made it closer to its namesake than it may have realized.

Though Hip-Hop is a culture, it's open-source. Anyone can use it, improve it or change it. It's been used by people all over the globe as a means of self-expression and empowerment. Over time, it has been improved by emcees like Rakim, b-boys like Style Elements Crew, DJ's like Q-bert, and graffiti writers like SKEME, all of whom raised the bar and elevated the level of their respective elements. And Hip-Hop has been changed in different cities, regions and countries as people looked at the source code and adjusted it to better reflect their area's style. It's great that Facebook is giving back to PHP community by open-sourcing HipHop. If it ends up sharing the same legacy as it's namesake, it'll become a transforming force for years to come.

There's a block party coming up in June and Ryohei--a b-boy I met at a hip hop show--and I are putting a routine together. Despite the language barrier, things have been coming along pretty smoothly. We put this first part together in about 10 minutes:

I find that amazing. Not the dance itself, but the fact that we were able to choreograph it so quickly without speaking each others' respective language. The routine itself isn't complex, but we literally only communicated using the music and the moves. And it was equally created so we both had to do some "talking" and "listening".

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said that "music is the universal language of mankind". Does that make dancing its sign language?

I had a lesson this week over the SVO sentence structure. That class is in the middle of learning different ways to construct sentences so I wanted to make it easy to remember this specific type. At some point, Freestyle Fellowship's "Hot Potato" popped into my head and an idea was born: use the words of Aceyalone, Mikah 9, P.E.A.C.E. and Self Jupiter to teach it!

First, I gave some background on Hot Potato and taught them the hook from the song:

Hot potato, pass the potato (x4)

After they got the words down, I taught them tempo and tune by leading the class in chorus and metronomic claps. I couldn't get them dancing but I did get some enthusiastic claps and a few head bobs!

Next came some rounds of Hot Potato. I paired them up and gave each group a "potato" to pass back and forth while singing their newly learned song. And then I snuck in the grammar.

While demonstrating Hot Potato with the JTE, I visually broke down the sentences "I passed the potato", "I passed JTE-Sensei the potato" and "JTE-Sensei passed me the potato" into their SVO components. And before I could ask them to make their own sentences (relative to their groups), some already had! I checked for their understanding (e.g.,"What did you pass?") and found that many could create and understand SVO sentences. After a few more rounds with newly paired groups, most of the class could. Success!

I wonder if Freestyle Fellowship ever envisioned this?