YouTube Wasn't There When I Started Teaching in 1970

YouTube wasn't there when I started teaching in 1970.  In fact, I was in Tonga, and electricity and running water weren't there either, at least not in my hut.  The school had maybe a lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.  I can't quite remember.  But most of our light was daylight. I taught songs to my students a very different way.

But today,  our only problem was that we were locked out of the building.  (I called Buildings and Grounds, and it had been reported and was about to be taken care of.)  I showed my students a new version of "The Impossible Dream," which I'd planned to give them in copies so they could annotate, something they won't do in their books because of the resale loss.  But all my copies had disappeared except for the overhead transparency, which I used to introduce both the original (so they'd know the melody for the changed words and also to use for certain vocabulary and the concept of the im/un/in  prefix as a no) and the re-write.  One of the students in the class knew who Don Quixote was, and the students seemed fairly interested in the original and amused by the changed lyrics.  Since I hadn't been able to give them copies, I created a pdf file and put both versions online.  I wanted to include a version they could watch on YouTube, so I Googled "The Impossible Dream" and got a very touching 8-minute segment of the movie. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfHnzYEHAow

It brought back such good memories because this was one of the two plays my father took us to in NYC in 1969, a year after he and my mother separated and right before I went to Molokai for Peace Corps training for my two years in Tonga.  This was the perfect play for Daddy's idealism.  He was always after the Quest!