I love social media. Like anything else, it’s a course you must navigate wisely to get your point across without offending people. One thing that social media has taught me, though, in recent years, is that people are still clever. NOW, I don’t know how old some of these people are, because they are clever on Twitter, where you can follow a hashtag and it will lead you to a bunch of smartypants looking to pun. I’m too lazy to look at their profiles–I just laugh because, most of the time, people can be pretty funny.
#DullDownaMovie. My posts were The (Middle School) Graduate or 500 Days of Bummer. I know, right?
#Elderlyscifi. Check out Star Wars: The Force Awakens at 4:00 am, or Mad Max: Blurry Road, or Children of Much Older Men. Hilarious!
I’d be curious to know how many teachers actually laugh in class because of something clever that a student said. OH, we laugh every day in all my classes, but it’s usually from someone saying something off topic or strange. Perhaps that goes along with humor found in movies and tv these days, but I digress. We laughed today at the memory of a student’s description of To Kill A Mockingbird. Early in the year, he explained the yearly classic as that one where the kid broke his arm at the start and end of the book. That’s funny, but there was no cleverness happening.
That’s just the way it goes these days. My students don’t know who Dave Chappelle is. I have no idea who they find funny. Years ago, that was Dane Cook, and then people figured things out.
However, today, a clever Facebook friend came through with an ARTICLE about a robot that can give people automated blessings. He even included my favorite Faulkner quote–“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, salvation is just words, too.” Now that’s the way to start a day. Instead, I started mine with a late start where the entire faculty was together, there was an assumption we could talk as a group, yet no one had the opportunity and the meeting ended 25 minutes early. But, once back to my room, I got to see the article, and it made me laugh.
Because the robots are coming, folks. And they may not look like the robots you’re used to from the sci-fi movies. They could look just like teachers on the outside, but these folks might read entire books to students. Or, they could be behind the desk and hard to see around the wall of packets. If you look harder into the Word Search you’ve been handed, there’s a code explaining all of this.
Bless me Fatherbot, for it’s been three weeks since I’ve touched your interface.