¡Dejen de hacer música!: The Wooly Video That Got Buried

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There are Wooly videos that teachers have been using for years... and then there’s ¡Dejen de hacer música!

There's no way to cushion it: It’s the least-watched Wooly video in our catalogue.

We originally released it as the secret prize at the end of a massive Wooly Week scavenger hunt. Students spent hours solving more than 40 clues to unlock a brand-new Wooly video that nobody had ever seen before, not even their teacher.

And... well, this probably wasn’t the video they were expecting.

The timing didn’t help. We filmed it during the pandemic, so everyone in the classroom is masked. By the time we released it, people had spent two years staring at masked classrooms. Frankly, I don’t think anyone was particularly eager to see one represented in a video.

¡Dejen de hacer música! is a Señor Wooly Spanish music video built around dejar de + infinitivo, in which a teacher’s increasingly controlling lesson eventually pushes his students into open rebellion.

But timing wasn’t the whole story

¡Dejen de hacer música! is a little bit different than the average Wooly video. I suppose it has a little more edge, a little more vulnerability, and it might embrace more cringe comedy than some people prefer.

Plus, the teacher is not particularly in control, and he’s not especially likable either.

He’s trying so hard to make the lesson work that he doesn’t seem to notice that it’s actively bombing. He responds to his students’ confusion and apathy by getting more and more confrontational: “You’re going to have fun whether you like it or not!”

Now, I’d love to say this teacher was a purely fictional creation. But I definitely channeled him from my early days of teaching when, in my near-pathological need to keep class interesting, I may have weaponized fun a little bit.

I wrote about that same impulse in How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Sing-Along. Turns out, wanting students to have fun and insisting that they have fun are two very different things.

So, yeah, the teacher in this video (played by me) is kind of a bully. He’s so busy trying to force the fun that he can’t see that nobody is having any.

Then the students rebel

The students stop cooperating with the teacher’s intricate plans. They push back. They get loud. And yes, they dance!

As an aside, I just love this part of the video. These student actors threw themselves into the dancing and musical improv with an abandon that could not have been more inspiring.

But back to our teacher. He wanted the students to have fun, sure, but he wanted it to be on his terms and within the context of his lesson.

Now he’s desperately trying to drag everyone back to the lesson he planned.

As the chaos dies down, he makes one last-ditch effort to turn their rebellion into a teachable moment. An opportunity to finally land his lesson about dejar de + infinitivo.

But it doesn’t work. The students haven’t learned a thing. And he has to face the reality that his lesson has failed.

And I totally get that feeling. When we’ve put our heart and soul into a lesson and it lands with a thud, it can feel utterly devastating. Whether a lesson works becomes a referendum on me. If it goes well, aren’t I awesome? And if it bombs, well, don’t I suck?

So yeah, the teacher hits his breaking point. His lesson has totally failed. But this time, sitting at his desk, he looks out and actually takes in his students, and after a moment, he takes a deep breath, and he finally does something different.

He joins them.

And my favorite part of the video?

The moment he does, they welcome him into the fold.

I think that’s why I still feel so attached to this awkward, rebellious little video that never found its audience.

Sometimes the lesson has to lose. Sometimes the curriculum just doesn't matter. 

And sometimes the only way to get back to the learning is to push learning to the side and be present with our students.

Want to show it to your students?

Maybe the best way to use it is to learn from the mistake the teacher makes in the video.

Don’t do too much with it.

We never built a big lesson plan around ¡Dejen de hacer música!. If you’ve read Don’t Click Play Yet, you know I usually want students to build a connection to the language and story before watching. But for this particular video? Maybe this is the exception. Maybe just press play. Step away from the whiteboard. Let your students watch it and form their own opinions.

Don’t try to force them to have fun with it. Don’t immediately turn it into an important teachable moment about dejar de. When it’s over, just ask them what they thought. In fact, let them know that it's the least-watched Wooly video in the catalogue.

And if they didn’t like it?

Let that be okay too.

Want to watch it?

You can find ¡Dejen de hacer música! in your Wooly account. Watch it yourself first. Then decide whether it’s right for your students.

Sign in, then look for ¡Dejen de hacer música! in the video catalogue.

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