Thursday, November 8, 2007

Unpack Your Adjectives

I drove the boys over to the high school to sign them up for wrestling. There is always wrestling going on in our house and it drives me crazy, so I figured this was a way to get them to do it in a place where there aren't any table lamps and maybe release some energy. I can get my money back if they don't like it after the first two practices so I agreed to the sign up even though Sharon told me that I will hate it. I suspect that she is right but we'll see what the boys say.

Anyways, we were driving home and Jeffrey was poking Tim in the back of the head and I had to holler at them to be quiet and don't make me have to stop the car! So it was quiet for a few moments as we drove along and then I heard a little lilting voice singsonging: Un-pack... your ad-jectives...at first I wasn't sure if it was coming from the deep recesses of my inner brain, like a leak or something. I asked "What was that?" Timmy hesitated, and then said, "we're learning about adjectives in school, and the teacher played a video." So the rest of the way home the three of us sang the chorus loudly and repeatedly, and when we got there we looked it up.

It is, of course, from the Schoolhouse Rock series of mini-cartoons that played in between Saturday morning TV shows as a sort of mental experiment on the young Generation Xers to see if they could sneak some education into our brains sideways in between episodes of Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo. I don't know if it made anyone smarter but those SONGS will be forever burned into my memory. I just wasn't expecting one of them to come out of my own kid's mouth like that.

It turns out that this one was first shown in 1975. I was ten, about the same as Jeffrey is now. And try not to think about this: Tim's 7th grade teacher that showed this video was born in 1981. He probably thinks of it as some quaint retro curiosity. I suppose it is.

So you too can have this tune playing uncontrollably across your consciousness, here it is. This is my first time posting a video on this blog, let me know if it causes you any problems.

2 comments:

LYNN said...

My favorite was "Conjuction-junction, What's Your Function!" And they must have worked well for us if they are still using them in School...RCS also uses them :)

Teacher Teacher! said...

I actually bought the DVD for my kids for the multiplication stuff. Remember "3 is a magic number..." My kids have watched this DVD on numerous occasion from beginning to end. It's great for those insanely long drives.