Like a Rollling Stone

Today, I told my students I gave in (at least for one day) to student demands for "music and movies." In the first half of the class, we analyzed "Like a Rolling Stone." I brought in my computer and played the song off of that and wrote the lyrics on the board. I told them this was by the greatest American folksinger and was recently voted the greatest rock and roll song of all time, in order to let them know this song really does contain part of the American soul. We actually worked our way through the first chorus and after I explained some language: "bums," "dime," "in your prime," "doll," "kiddin' you," hangin' out," "scroungin'" and, of course "rolling stone." It turns out there is a saying in Chinese that is roughly the equivalent of "A Rolling Stone gathers no moss." And we talked about that saying and what it means and how it relates to the song. It took a little work to get them to understand the story of the song and even more to get them to consider the question of what a rolling stone in and whether it is good to be one. Most of them came down against being a rolling stone, a wanderer, and wanted to be in one place. But I felt we could have had more discusison on this point actually. But I stopped discussion and I told the class that this was my favorite song and asked the students for theirs. This was probably the best idea I've had this whole week, and they really enjoyed telling me their favorite songs, and even a few volunteered to sing after I led the way. I didn't know many of them, though most were AMerican songs. "Country Road," by Bob Denver, "Yellow Submarine," by the Beatles and the theme song from Titanic were among the ones I recognized. That was the first part of class, which went pretty well. The second part, which consisted in showing some of The Sopranos did not go so well in part because I had to show it on my little computer screen and in part because, well, I just don't think they got it. Organized crime, mafia, etc., were simply foreign concepts that I had trouble explaining. But as I said, if you want to understand America, I think you really have to understand the role of organized crime in American moves--but that is a subject for a different class. I tried to bring it around to a discussion of whether a bad man like Tony Soprano could be happy. But again, that discussion did not get off the ground.

One difficult thing is we have classes of twenty or less right now, and only a single class, and when we start teaching we will probably have seven classes with forty or so students each (the normal load is for each class to meet once a week for 90 minutes). So anyway, when I'm not sleeping, I will be doing some lesson planning. Zai jian.