Música Madness 2017
After using Dustin Williamson’s Navidad Madness bracket for holiday commercials in Spanish, I wanted to do another bracket tournament. After all, my kids loved it in the fall, and I’ve got a new class this new semester. So as the spring basketball tournament approached, I wanted to follow suit of other teacher I know and do a music bracket challenge.
So I combed the internet and Billboard lists of the best Latin music hits of all time and recent years. There were folk anthems like Guantanamera and groundbreaking thees like El gran varón. New hits by Shakira and Juanes and Enrique Iglesias, and some cheesy older songs like Gerardo’s Rico Suave. 64 songs in all.
NOTE TO SELF: 64 songs is WAY too many. Maybe 32 songs next year. Heck 16 would be nice.
It was difficult for me to come up with songs, and actually as I realized the “oldies” outnumbered the “newbies” by a huge amount, I replaced some of my original songs with newer, cooler ones. I did this before we listened to those songs. I didn’t give the kids copies of the bracket until round 2, so there was no problem with making the switch. Next year I’m going to consult Sharon Birch’s database! She has something like 1400 songs and counting!!
PREPARATION: Not wanting to be able to lose my results, I created the bracket online at Challonge.com. It was simple, and free. Just plug in the list of participants and it makes a randomly structured bracket. This program can handle double- and single-elimination tournaments, and even set up byes for tournaments with an odd number of participants. After a little playing around, I figured out how to edit my list of songs (“participants”) and report winners. I also went to YouTube and found a version of the song with the lyrics in the video. More often than not, these weren’t the actual video, but a home made karaoke style video, often with questionable spelling. I did this because I thought it would give students the best leg up in understanding the song, although at this point it is mostly voting based only on what their general impressions of the song were, rather than anything much deeper. I put a picture and the name/artist on the Smart Board, with a link to the lyric video for each song. This took a LOT of work.
NOTE TO SELF: Save these links for next year. Even songs that got voted out, they might be winners in a different class. And it will save a ton of work later.
Each day during round 1 (64) and round 2 (32) we listened to 2 songs. On a couple of days we ran out of time or wanted to move things along quicker so we did two battles, 4 songs. Students voted by a show of hands which they preferred. Beginning in the round of 16, my plan is to spend a few minutes looking at the lyrics of each song and being a bit more in-depth with what they mean. In the round of 8, we’ll talk more about the artists and also do some partner conversations about why they like certain songs more than others, with the help of a vocabulary cheat sheet for things like “rhythm” and “lyrics”. We will also watch the official videos for these songs, if I can find them.
Here is a link to our bracket, feel free to follow along live and see which ones win! Round 2 starts on April 3.