In my ongoing and increasingly desperate attempts to appear young, hip, and with it to my tenth graders, I planned a lesson that included some musical selections. "Yes!" I thought, as no doubt many of you have also thought. "They will think this lesson is relevant and interesting! They will rap and human-beatbox their way through author's craft like those kids in Dangerous Freedom Mind Writer Kids Leaning on Me! I can TEACH ALL THE THINGS" etc. etc.In fact, I was so excited for this lesson that I decided to include a snappy PowerPoint with some celebrity pictures from the Google Images on the Intertubes. These pictures were of the artists in question, whose music I had deemed at least tangentially relevant to the lesson.
The lesson was going swimmingly. I played the first two songs. The students nodded with approval at the photos of Jay-Z and Rihanna. "Wow, Miss Eyre, you know Jay-Z songs?" one young man asked me.
"I sure do!" I said, my excitement bordering on zeal, about to gleefully shout "H TO THE IZZO" were it not for my principal's office being just down the hall and my classroom door being wide open because the thermostat in my room read (no joke, this) 86 degrees.
Then we got to the last song and its accompanying artiste photo. "Yo, miss, who that?" asked one of my young lady students skeptically.
Hesitantly, I asked her to identify who she meant.
"Him," she said, pointing to the only photo left. "The old guy," she added, in case I didn't get it.
I sighed. "That's Bono," I said.
"Bono? Who's he?"
"He's from the band, U2," one of my other students thankfully assisted.
"Oh," said the first student. "Man, he's ugly."
That moment, I sensed, would not have been the time to tell her that Bono was the celebrity crush of pretty much all of my galpals from college. Not the time to tell her, "But he was SO HOT when he was younger."
I was already old. That would have only made it worse.
And, by the way, young(er) teachers: If you haven't had this moment yet, it is much, much closer than you think. I'm not yet 30.
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