Music Madness

Inspired by this 2014 post from @spanishplans March Madness with Music, I decided that this year I would give it a try!

I searched through top 40 hits on Latino radio and I found 16 songs that I thought the class would like… but this didn’t leave room for any of our class favorites. It was tough because I knew a new song would have no chance against a song the class was familiar with!!

O 

 In the end I selected 8 of our class favorites to add to the competition.  Our business teacher has a program that makes brackets and a poster printer so he set me up!  We gave the 16 new songs pairings in the first round and all 8 familiar songs had a bye.

Each day, students got a ballot with a space to write each song name and a space to vote for the favorite.  Their votes were based on a score.  They ranked the melody, rhythm, tempo, and instruments between 1 (low) and 5 (high).  The song with the highest score was the “favorite” and the song with the most votes at the end of the day advanced.

Round 2 (byes vs round one winners) held a few upsets.  My favorite song, Solo Soy by Dr. Krápula lost by more than 50 votes!

We are in round 3, the quarter finals right now.  I was SHOCKED that la Gozadera (which I love) beat Soy Raka by los Rakas, a class cult classic! 

  
Yesterday Sonny Monreal’s You are the One (the first song we do in Spanish 1 and everyone’s first love) got knocked out by Enrique Iglesias/Nicky Jam’s El Perdón.  It was tied at the end of the day  and my class said I couldn’t break the tie with my vote because everyone would get mad at me… so we brought in Cory the janitor and he watched the videos and chose!  🙂 I would have voted for  El Perdón anyway but I was glad I had him to blame when the Sonny groupies were mad.

In round 1, we watched the whole video (where appropriate, when it wasn’t appropriate we  watched a lyric video). In round 2 about 2 minutes of the song/video.  In round 3 we are only watching about 1 minute of each because they have downloaded them all already!

A fun side effect has been that they’re downloading THESE songs but also downloading other songs by the new artists.  It is such a small investment of class time to get them all kinds of Spanish listening at home!  Those lyric videos… they just made them want to go home and watch the real thing! 🙂  So many minutes of Spanish!

Try this next year!  We have bonded over the ups and downs of these battles!  Thanks @spanishplans for the inspiration!