I’m an old fart, so I don’t know. I went off on a tangent about the word diabolo with my elementary-school-aged students and wound up showing them this YouTube video of a kid doing tricks with a diabolo:
The song was playing in the background. I found it strangely charming, so after I got off work, I went to the diabolo video, listened to the song, and googled some of the lyrics, and that led me to Wikipedia and to YouTube.
But in my view, this is what was cool about the whole thing:
The original video that I was showing was from a site called pond5.com. It was a video of some elementary-school-aged boys playing with yo-yos. I thought these yo-yos looked like smaller versions of diabolo yo-yos, and I said as much. My students said that the smaller yo-yos were not diabolo yo-yos, and that led me to the YouTube video. I don’t know, probably my students were right and I was wrong.
But here’s the good part. The boys in the video looked as if they might be Chinese, and I asked the children what nationality the boys were. Some kids said they didn’t know, but some kids said something in Chinese that I didn’t understand, so asked them what it meant, and some of them said “earth people.” I thought that I might have misunderstood them, but they repeated “earth people.” Then one of the girls smiled and gestured at herself and some of the other students in the classroom and said, “We are earth people.”
There may be hope for us yet.
And I like the song.