This is the fifth of six observations from last summer’s language immersion programs in Minnesota, at Concordia Language Villages.
I’m met at the German building called the Bahnhof (though there are no trains) by the leader of the high school program. We decide to go to the learning group that is listening to and creating rap songs. I’m ushered into a room with five very energetic German speakers, fairly fluent, especially the teacher, who is the most energetic of all. This group is fired up.
Within a minute they are listening to fast rap, the words projected on a screen. The words go by faster than I can keep up with, but the students are reading out loud as the text goes by. Apparently they are going to be doing some songs from the musical Hamilton in this class, too, the German version. The students find this particular rap text tricky (“This is so hard!”), but the teacher reminds them of Hamilton coming up soon, they are going to have to be able to hang with the tempo and the sheer amount of words. Oof. Viel Glück!
I get a little bit of the context when the teacher stops the video to explain part of the text. This is the story of the Disney Fantasia, which is based in part on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (Der Zauberlehrling) a poem by Goethe written in 1797. I also am getting that the students worked with the story yesterday, they’ve drawn pictures that go with the text, they’ve seen the text before. That’s good because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a high school language class delivered at this pace with this much energy. There is NO time not to pay attention, I notice the pace is influencing me, too, I’m typing frantically. I’m out of breath! Please excuse any typos.
And then in a rush they get to the end. For the first time the students discuss a bit in English, and then something tips them back into German, I’m not sure what it was, the teacher didn’t have to ask them, they just switched back.
There’s lots of talking over each other, especially the two girls next to me and the teacher, loud and fast, simultaneous. Since the goal here is fluency, hurray!
The teacher moves them to the next rap, based on “The Elf King” (Der Erlkönig), another poem by Goethe. Today they are going to listen to the musical rendition by Schubert. In a future class they are going to create a rap version of the story. I bet Goethe would appreciate the creativity. I imagine he’d also be impressed that his work is still current more than two hundred years after he wrote it. There is a video which starts with two riders, a father and a son, racing home on a horse. The students have the words in front of them, they sing with, under their breath. After the first stanza the teacher pauses the recording to check on comprehension. The students and teacher discuss a bit, write some notes. There is a moment to practice a grammar point: articles in the dative case. The student to my right says “Ich hasse Dativ.” I try not to chuckle out loud, every student of German goes through that, although I suspect this particular student loves the challenge of all the different forms of “the” that German speakers get to slot in at the right times.
As the teacher describes the story of the Erlkönig I focus on her hand gestures. Language teachers use them so often they sometimes can’t quit even when they aren’t teaching. Here it is necessary. She pulls on the shoulders of her T shirt when talking about clothes, waves her hands back and forth to help explain fog, mimics riding on a horse. Her arms are in constant motion. Between gesture-filled explanations we hear the baritone, accompanied by piano, singing to us the story of the Erlkönig, the father and son on their horse, deep in the foggy woods, the shadowy figures in the woods, something terrible is going to happen, I know the story. Do the students know? The son is panicked, pleads with the father, the father doesn’t get it, he thinks the son is just hearing the wind, seeing things in the fog. But there is more going on here.
“Sei ruhig, mein Kind,” says the father, as fathers will do. “Take it easy, no worries.” Usually fathers are right. This time he is not. Now and then my kids remind me of times I didn’t really hear them, times I was too wise as an adult to believe their child’s perception of things, though they were, actually, right, while I was wrong. Thank goodness the consequences were not so severe as in this poem, as what this singer will soon describe.
And then the baritone arrives at the end. Schubert uses a stark V to I chord progression, making the end horribly final. The son is dead. The Erlkönig was real, in some form or another. Fathers everywhere, take heed.