The last few weeks of school bring out the goofy in us all, perhaps in a last-ditch effort to survive until summer break.
Out of the blue last week a student asked, “Do you have underarms?”
Was I supposed to answer that? (I didn’t.)
In the spirit of the season, therefore, I decided that to motivate my students to take the end-of-year high-stakes test carefully I would promise to show them three videos of myself “in order of increasing embarrassment.”
Every last one of my students qualified for the showings, which began with the taped performance of a song by my band, which I didn’t intend to be at all shameful. Students seemed to agree it wasn’t, judging from their comments that ranged from “That’s not embarrassing at all” and “Of course not–it’s not supposed to be” to “Yeah right, that’s embarrassing” to the disappointed “That’s not embarrassing!”
The next video was one a friend made for a song I wrote and recorded in college. My band does this song, too, but now it’s tons better; in the college video, I pretty much just sang along with myself and looked melancholy in a series of truck-driving-themed clips of me walking around, standing on a porch roof, or greeting a truck driver at a truck stop. The videography is sickeningly amateurish.
Class reactions to this second video were mixed. The first class shrieked with laughter: “You had hair!” was oft repeated, and the most annoyingly vocal girl of the lot didn’t stop yelling at me from across the room throughout the entire three-and-a-half-minutes, “Is that really you?”
The second class was much more subdued when it came to my college self. They’re more academically advanced, so maybe they have a better grasp on time’s effects on the gentlemanly type, or maybe they’re more polite. Plus, they had without my permission invited another teacher to join in the viewing and she insisted on making graciously positive comments about the song itself. Perhaps they hadn’t prepped her on the shame-the-teacher aspect of the viewing.
The third class, though, just seemed to take a while to register the truth. Finally one girl said, “That was you? You had hair!”
The final video brought wails of anguished joy from many students. I can say this with only partial confidence because to play up my embarrassment I was hiding behind my file cabinets. But really, they shrieked at my dancing.
“I have tears coming out of my eyes,” one student said afterward; another told me, “I haven’t laughed that hard in years.” (Geesh–that kid is only 13.)
And then there was the last word of the afternoon, today: “Mr. Jacobs, that’s okay. I can’t dance, either.”