There’s a trend in comedy these days–I refer to it as “suffer comedy”–where a character has to “suffer” for it to be funny to an audience. This is not the stuff of Greek Tragedy, where the tragic hero has to take a fall because of his hubris. We’re talking getting hit in the groin with a football, or slipping on vomit, or enduring just about any physical or mental torture.
There’s a worse trend in school. It’s one where students find immediate success at the failure of others. I’ve taught for a number of years and haven’t seen it in such excess as I’ve seen lately.
There was a homecoming assembly today. Your basic assembly–students sang, danced, yelled, and had class competitions. But my student who is in choir, who sang today, told me and our English class that there was another performer who insulted her and choir, saying how bad they were, in an attempt to make himself better by comparison. Two performers–if one insults the other, it must be true and make the attacker the better performer.
But I wasn’t at that assembly, and the performances that garnered insults were cut from the second assembly, which I did attend.
I was in my English class today, though. Students were up and presenting their poetry. One of my students even brought a cajon, which can best be described as a percussive box that performers sit on and hit for a beat. It’s kind of a quieter drum kit in a box that’s probably perfect to accompany an acoustic guitar. Look it up.
What sucks is kids can’t “win” until someone else “loses.” In this case, the “losers” were the ones reading their poems aloud for a little extra credit. I write, and I used to read my writing in certain circles. It’s not the easiest thing–you have an audience judging you, and the last thing you want is to feel like an idiot. But that’s the only way some of my students can win. My students who didn’t even write the poem. Those same students who have no intention of passing the class or doing any work.
The first girl who read was going right along, reading one of those typical rhyming poems that has some cool words and tricky play in it. What? Someone is being clever? That’s when the “winners” pounce with a snicker, a laugh, or a quick derogatory comment. In their worlds it translates to “if I had written a poem AND stood up to read it, my poem would have been better than this.” However, their poem is not better because it does not exist.
It happens all the time these days. It used to happen in my wife’s Speech class, where a quick comment might get the speaker off his/her game and drag down the performance. You lose because of me, so I am better than you, even though I will not get up and do a speech.
The only problem with the argument is that most of the “winners” are F students. They don’t do anything. Olive branch after olive branch is extended to them, they have every chance to do well, but they choose to fail. This reared its head today, and it brought back the memories of my wife’s class and the underlying comments, which means it’s not new behavior.
It’s going to bother me all weekend, yet making them suffer from my end is not what I want either. And my olive branches are running low.