Teaching goes viral.

Tuesday is probably the most dreaded day of the week. Not because it’s the busiest day for me (which it is), but because I face my two toughest audiences of the week in the same day. My second and third period classes on Tuesday are notoriously unenthusiastic. Seriously, it’s brutal. Answers are usually half-hearted inaudible mumbles, and eyes are facing deskward. Nothing I do to boost their morale or capture their attention seems to work, and I'm often left feeling like I'm riding an  elevator with a stranger. Except in this case the elevator ride is 40 minutes long, and once I step off that elevator I have to board a new elevator with an even worse stranger. I have to endure this every week.

But today was different. Today I pulled out something magic, something the kids and I can both relate to. Today I pulled out…. The YouTube viral videos.

For fifth grade we have begun a lesson called “It’s under the table.” It’s exactly as inane as it sounds, and the kids have some difficulty getting into prepositions, despite their importance. Sometimes [read: most of the time] the book’s recommended activity is underwhelming, and it bores the students, and leaves me feeling terrible. I feel like they are insulting to the children’s intelligence. So last night I decided to bust into my ‘favorites’ list on my YouTube account to find something, anything, that I could use from there. Cue bear video.

“Where is the bear?" "He’s in the tree! He’s on the trampoline! He’s on the ground! He’s under the tree! He’s in front of the trampoline!” The kids got it, and laughed their asses off too. The same basic questions were applied to a video of a fat kid on a diving board.

Grade six is beginning a lesson called “Do you like spring?” I opted out of the book’s recommended activity ("Show flash cards while saying true/false statements and have the students guess!" Barf.) Instead, I found four entertaining videos that were seasonally specific enough to get the students answering questions; What season is it in the video? What are they doing? For the summer example, I stuck with the diving board clip. (Seriously, it's a classic.) Winter had an Eskimo being eaten. Fall had a car being crushed by an enormous pumpkin. Spring was my personal favorite, with a cute flower prank.

Browsing YouTube... I never knew work could feel so much like unemployment.