Only In America by Brooks & Dunn

Only In America by Brooks & Dunn

I love being a teacher. Every day I work with students through their struggles and sometimes get to witness their triumphs. Contrary to their belief, I’m trying to make their lives better and more fulfilling in the long run by teaching them not only academic skills but life lessons. It’s a lot to do in the seven and a half hours the students are with us but we do the best we can.

Even though I love my job, I don’t love everything about my job. Often 7:15am is a little bit too early to start work, recess duty isn’t exactly a thrill and as entertaining as the students are, and sometimes the logic of a elementary students can simply be baffling.

example:
Me: Why do you take the crust off of you peanut-butter and jelly sandwich?
5th grader: because it taste like poo.
Me: Well, how you do you know what---
5th grader: [interrupting] and I would know because I’ve tasted poo.
Me: wait, what?!?
5th grader: don’t worry, it was my brother’s poo [reassuringly]

The kid was totally serious. SIGH

These things can be annoying but what really gets to me on an emotional level is when kids through not fault of their own are put difficult situations that me as a teacher can do nothing about. It can be something as small parent promising a student that he will come to a school play and not show up all the way the unthinkable tragedy of child abuse.

Last week, I got a dump truck full of this stuff and while it was all small things and all my kids are ok, it all added up. Last Thursday, my day started hearing about one student’s problems and as I went to gym with the kids I was not in a great mood. I felt I was already emotionally drained by P.E. and it was only 9:30 in the morning.

Thursday was the first day of the dance unit. I watched as the kids learned some basic line dances and worked on them during the period. I sat their unengaged and not really all that into what the students were doing.

As the day went on, things kept piling on, it was just one thing after another and by the time I hit my lunch break at noon, I felt like I didn’t have much left for the rest of the day. During my lunch period, I often visit the fourth grade class I worked with in the beginning of the year (I have since moved to a mixed grade level class). I decided to go say hi to them during my break and I found them at P.E. learning line dances.

I don’t know if it was the students, or the enthusiastic P.E. teachers but I decided to join in and learn to line dance.

Here’s the thing, I have an irrational dislike of line-dancing. Whenever the electric slide gets pumping I will almost always take that as a cue to get a drink of have a seat during a party. Without evidence I often make the line-dancing jokes about it being a way of dancing for people who have no hope of dancing otherwise.

So it took some doing to get out there and line dance.

Here I am, in a elementary school gym surround by fourth graders learning the “American Stomp.” Of course, I’m over-thinking the steps and how they fit within beats as opposed to just feeling it. So after I got my brain to shut up, I got in the groove of it and I became aware of the group of fourth grade girls around me earnestly trying to figure out how to do this dance.

It was possible one of the cutest things I’ve ever since seeing these girls, eyebrows furrowed, not really only on the beat but trying as hard they could. I got the girls attention and started talking about the moves “right stomp, left stomp, right stomp, left stomp, right 2-3-4, left 2-3 turn.”

As we worked through the dance, their furrowed brows relaxed and the I could see from the look on their faces that their brains were relaxing and slowly smiles developed on their faces and at least for a small part of the song we were all dancing in unison.

In four and a half minutes, I went from being disengaged, emotionally drained and feeling like a wreck to feeling energized, overjoyed and truly happy. And all it took was a little line dancing.

The song that we danced to was Brooks & Dunn’s “Only In America.” The song was released in 2004 and speaks about all the great possibilities of America. There are lines about “dreaming in red, white and blue” which really don’t make a whole lot of sense but nonetheless captures a sense of patriotism.

The song itself seems to be designed for line dancing, the accent of the beats are clear and phrase lengths consistently match 16-beat dance pattern. Without dancing to this song I would have thought this song predictable and not very creative but that would be missing the essential connection between the song and the dance.

Dancing brings us closer to music and line dancing does it in a way that makes the experiences a shared one. On a dance floor when everyone is doing something different there isn’t a sense of unity and togetherness. However in line-dancing there is feeling of community sharing the moment with a room full or in my case a gym full of people.

I don’t know how many people can say that they spent part of their day at work line-dancing but I think we’d all be a lot happier if we did.

If you have line-danced you probably know the great feeling line dancing can bring and if you haven’t line-danced before, try it. Let yourself go, even if it seems a little dorky. You’ll be surprised how a sharing a simple dance and a great song can turn your day around.

It's a beautiful feeling.