Cringe is hard to explain. The sound of the word itself does a good job to begin with. When you say the word, you just can't help squinting or puckering up some part of your face. And what exactly lands something in the category of cringe? Older folks might think that little gal in the front is doing a fine job with her clogging dance but I think most of us can feel the cringe. Perhaps we need to turn to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 quote on obscenity: "I know it when I see it."
Viewing this YouTube clip makes me cringe on two levels. First, I cringe remembering myself as a middle school kid. My gawky display at cheerleading tryouts. The streaks of orange in my hair, that were supposed to be highlights, from spraying Sun-In on selected clumps. Reading aloud to the class a report on oceanography -- all of oceanography - that I had captured onto 8 pages using an IBM Selectric typewriter.
The second level of cringe is present day. I cringe as a teacher because this scene could have happened in my classroom. Rap and dancing like this has happened more times then I can count. There was the time the entire plot of The Cay was relived by three boys, one reading the rap, the other busting moves around the room, and the third going at it with drumsticks on an overturned plastic bucket. Another time there was a poetic-costumed-musical interpretation (not sure what to call it) of suffering and death from the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages.
Why do we do it? Why do we allow the foolishness, the sometimes elaborate preparation followed by awkward displays, time-consuming costumes changes and furniture rearrangement while we grin and bare it? We know full well it's a stretch, at best, to align the frolic with Common Core. And we know full well that the outcome is bad. With the exception of a very few, most of the time middle school kids just are not good at presenting. We can coach them and give them rubrics, but in the end they're just not there yet.
But still we do it. We give them the time and the space, the projects and the prompts and encourage them to walk right out there into the land of cringe. Because that's what middle school teachers do. The outcome will be bad, almost always, but we must never let them know that. The important thing is they put themselves out there, show their true colors, give it a try and hopefully laugh a little too. It's 'A' for effort. 'A' for risk-taking. If you look real hard at whatever evidence flutters down after the fallout of the display -- the tattered script or a google doc that the group used to plan -- you may even find 'A' for content.
Years later they will cringe at themselves, but in that moment they must never know anything other than it was absolutely amazing.
They are going to cringe at themselves when they realize that this video that was meant to be fun in the classroom was posted all over the internet.
ReplyDelete"The important thing is they put themselves out there, show their true colors, give it a try and hopefully laugh a little too." This is the heart of the activity.
I never want learners to feel discouraged in taking risks, or to feel like the classroom isn't a safe place because someone might be videoing an awkward presentation and posting it to the world.