Thursday, January 19, 2012

Chuck Mangione

One of the hardest parts about being a high school teacher is well...not laughing at dirty jokes. This literally happens on an everyday basis. Some kid quotes Family Guy, Old School, whatever and if I let out even so much as a smirk it is totally over. Today my students in music history were giving a presentation on Jazz artists. I'm always torn if I should do presentations. I've read that the one who is talking learns and remembers the most so I think it's valuable for students to create and then practice speaking but then after some less than stellar, monotone voices, and some extremely obvious copy and paste situations, I wonder if anyone is learning. I usually really enjoy it when students are creative and add humor to their work. Everyone always remembers a story or joke and this usually works...


Until you have a senior who is so far down the senior slide and takes any opportunity to make your class his comedic forum. This particular student presented on a Jazz artist who began playing the trumpet.

Slide one began with the following header
"He's too saxy for your shirt" (if you don't get I'm too sexy for your shirt references, you are either too old or young to be reading this) which of course resulted in a roaring laughter from the 27 male athletes in this class. I keep it together and ask the young chap to continue.
Slide 2 and 3 are fine and then slide 4
"It's SAX time" with a red and black heart shaped background.
SERIOUSLY?
Obviously, these are not my real students. However, this is what you find when you creeper google students laughing.
My students went cray cray. I quited everyone down and kept my cool. I have to admit, this stuff is... funny. I can't help it. It's cheap, stupid, and clever. The moment you show any weakness though it's totally over. Finally he continues to the next slide that included facts about the Cold War (which at this point I have no idea why is included but I'm just praying for this episode to be over) which he types "ended around 2000 or so".

NO RESPONSE.
I looked around to see if anyone else noticed this huge error and not a peep. Sax time was a second away from a standing ovation and an obvious mistake over the Cold War dates got nada. Okay, so you might argue, I don't know when the Cold War ended. But you would probably know the basic time period and secondly, these kids have history every day for years! It should be fresh on their minds.
Nope. Sax time.

For Natalie's News this has been, Natalie-Corinne.

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