6/18/10

So I finally executed this stupid gag at school-- it's rather Andy Kaufmanesque: we started reading an essay on Modernism and then I asked the kids if it would help if they could see a video clip about this topic before they wrote their essay and they said yes (of course) and I agreed with them that sometimes it helps to see what we're reading about, especially if it is about art, and so then I played a video of me reading the exact essay on Modernism that we just read and then I asked them if that helped . . . being able to see it, and they laughed, but next year I want to do this gag once a month, so that just when they think I'd never do it again, I do it again (and I show enough actual video clips that they would forget) so I've got a lot of filming to do . . . I feel like it will work especially well for Hamlet . . . would you like to see this scene? It's a great one to actually see . . . and then I'll play a film of me reading it in a horrible British accent . . . and then I'll use the same accent for A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, because, oddly, my British and Irish accents are identical and they are also very high-pitched, I think the students enjoy my bad accents more than if I could actually do a convincing accent . . . and if you're wondering about the relevance of this tangent, I think it fits into the category of comedy that is also Kaufmanesque.