Alaskan Bulgarian

Hatred and the Black Eyed Peas

My students seem to pick up on musical trends pretty easily. They spend a lot of their time watching MTV when they aren't in class or doing homework. They'll play the more recent Bulgarian stuff--Usually a mix of pop-folk with the occasional chalga which is a strange Turkish-sounding form of overly annoying pop. They all insist they hate chalga. HATE IT! they say. Yet they still play it...strange. But most of the time, when I come into a classroom, the students are playing Sean Paul, Beyonce, or--shudder--the Black Eyed Peas.

I used to like the Black Eyed Peas. I even, God forgive me, liked "Where is the Love?" the first few times I heard it. But here in Bulgaria, they're inescapable. If a cafe isn't playing "Where is the Love?" the restaurant next door is playing "Shut Up!" and "Shut Up!" is what has become the bane of my classroom existence. "Where is the Love?" was a little like "Ice, Ice, Baby." I'd heard it just about 1,345,657 times too many. Not a bad song. Maybe even a good song, but without a doubt it got overplayed, at least here in Bulgaria. "Shut Up!" has the same problem, but the students have taken it as a new anthem, and that, I cannot accept.

It always goes down the same way. The students get a bit noisy while I'm trying to talk. I get annoyed. I start out with your basic "shh!" then move on to a very calm "quieeeet." That used to calm everybody down. These days, that same "quieeeet." is, without fail, followed by a student in the front of the room saying "Shut up!" This, of course, prompts a student in the back of the room to start singing that horrid chorus: "Shut up! Just shut up! Shut up!--Shut it up! Just shut up! Shut up!" and some other student in the front of the room starts singing along. This strange disease infects even the best of my students.

Tomorrow the words "shut up" will be outlawed in class. I let it go as long as I did because some of the other English teachers in my school seem to get a little pleasure out of telling their kids to shut up, and I didn't want to give the kids some kind of a complex. But the whole thing has gone too far, and it must end. Short of offing the Black Eyed Peas themselves, something I don't really think would stop the music anyway, I think this is the best option.