Shirley's Challenge: Now that's Edu-tainment!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I clearly remember being in the seventh grade and being introduced to something that the instant that Sr. Mary Herman Goerring wrote it on the chalk board my brain just went:

What in the heck do I need to know this for?

Diagramming sentances.

Examples: here

I cannot tell you how many times I flubbed this and more horrific were the times I had to go to the chalkboard and demostrate my stupidity for all my classmates. My brain refused to accept any input other than Nouns and Verbs. Anything else was held as suspect and automatically sent my thoughts to *Woolgathering Mode *. I also depended very heavily the number one rule of schooling: *Never Make Eye Contact With The Teacher. *

I have never had a need or situation in my life that has ever come up where I had to figure out the prescent participle or the present perfect tense or a *present perfect past tense with a back flip double Sao Kao * of a sentance. No job application or interview had any questions relating to pronouns, dipthongs or conjugating verbs, which sounds dirty too me.

Hell, I still have to ask when MAD LIBS come along, which is never enough, for my sophomoric pleasure " An adjective is a what?"

And then do the School House Rock song:

*Got home from camping last spring.
Saw people, places and things.
We barely had arrived,
Friends asked us to describe
The people, places and every last thing.
So we unpacked our adjectives.

I unpacked “frustrating” first.
Reached in and found the word “worst”.
Then I picked “soggy” and
Next I picked “foggy” and
Then I was ready to tell them my tale.
'Cause I’d unpacked my adjectives. *
I mean, really, all we really need to know in edumacation can be learned from School House Rock. (And a few broadway songs. I cannot spell one certain state until I hum the chorus to O-k-l-a-m-o-m-a!)
**The Challenge **So, I have gotten to thinking, that with all the clever, crafty, musical type Dopers (and OCD Googlists and plagarists) on board, that maybe we could come up with new lyrics for higher education.

Make Shakespeare snappy!
Tap your toes to Tennessee Willliams!
Do the rumba to Calculus!
Physics Tango anyone?
Rock and roll to Pi.
Newton’s First Law Rap

The possibilities are endless, much like most of my threads.

But, it’s not about me, people, it is about making the future of education zippy!

Rules:

  1. Know your subject.

  2. Feel free to use someone else’s melody if it helps. *I’m * not the one breaking international copyright laws. :slight_smile:

  3. Points for creativity will be given.

  4. Points given for inside jokes that only other dorks like you will get. (Sorry, I meant Advanced Sentient Being.)

  5. If you have a ditty that was taught to you as a kidlet, please put it here.

  6. Points will be given for most obscure subject matter which will be determined by me or possibly other dopers who are much smarter than me.

  7. Extra bonus points for large pretentious word usage.
    That’s it.

This should keep you from real work on a Monday Morning.

You can thank me later.

2

I’ve never heard of the musical Oklamoma. Is that off-Broadway?

3

Are you cereal or am I being whooshed?
In case you haven’t heard of it:

Here is where you can hear the lead song played on a peppy hammond organ. Lyrics are provided.

4

Just a bad attempt at a joke. Oklahoma vs Olkamoma.

5

http://www.leoslyrics.com/listlyrics.php?id=114848

Obviously I didn’t write it.

6

I wasn’t good at sentence deconstruction either. Embarassingly, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a “prescent participle”. See?

7

Why lieu, it’s a participle that can see the future.

8

Geography: Wakko’s America.
Science: The Planets.

9

Okay, I’ll play.

For some inexplicable reason, I wondered what would happen if I tried putting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to the tune of Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods’ “Billy Don’t Be A Hero.” (No, I don’t know why I thought of those two things simultaneously either. It must be due to the fact that it’s Monday.) Anyway, here’s what happened:

BRUTUS, DON’T BE A TRAITOR

The soldiers all came back from a battle
The Romans cheering really loud
The seer said, “Beware the Ides of March,”
But Caesar just waved to the crowd.

He should have listened to the warning
Or at least read Shakespeare’s book
'Cause Cassius thought he’d get to plotting
He of the lean and hungry look

Brutus, don’t be a traitor,
Don’t be a fool with your life
Brutus, don’t be a traitor,
Come, put away your knife

But as he started to go
Brutus struck the fatal blow
“Et tu, Brute,” they heard him say
“Then die Caesar.”

I heard Marc Antony asked
Friends, Romans, and Countryman
To lend their ear and hear the story
Of how Brutus joined the plan
And Brutus was an honorable man…

Well, it’s an attempt. If I can come up with other better ones, I will.

10

Heh. I whooshed myself. :wally

11

And here I was thinking the Museum of Modern Art had opened a branch in the Panhandle State.

12

Best.Science.Song.Ever.

The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas… A gigantic nuclear furnace.

13

Way, way back, just shortly after dinosaurs ceased roaming the earth, there was an actual pop song called “The Battle of New Orleans.”

In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mightly Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans,
And fought the bloody British in the town of New Orleans…

It goes on, but I’ll spare you the rest. To our friends in the U.K., yes this was played on normal radio stations, and the word “bloody” did not have the vulgar connotation it does across the big pond.

14

MLS I loved that song when I was a little kid… I liked to sing about paddling the gator’s behind :slight_smile:

Ya know I actually heard it on the radio a year or so ago flipping stations!

Worse than that though was the PT109 song that admonished "the heathen god of old japan thought they had the best of the mighty good man’

And just to round out the trio do you remember the song about sinking the Bismarck?

15

Please don’t throw tomatoes, it is Monday after all…

Here’s the story of a plain young lady,
Whose life was harsh as a young child.
This orphan girl was sent
off to Lowood,
Her dearest friend there died.

She left Lowood to go to Thornfield,
Where Ed was living with a french child, not his own.
She fell in love then, and almost married.
Lachrymose she fled alone.

‘Til the one day she collapsed right on the doorstep,
Of her long-lost cousins’ lovely little home.
There she inherited lots of money,
Then went back to Edward nevermore to roam.

But he was blind,
Yet still inclined,
They had a kid & now Ed can see just fine.
It’s supposed to be Jane Eyre (to the tune of the Brady Bunch).

:eek: sorry!

16

tanookie,
Yes, I do remember the Bismarck song – but I can’t remember the lyrics!

SeGate, that’s just terrible.

17

All I remember is something like:

‘We hit the decks a runnin’ and we swung them guns around… we found the german battleship and we’re gonna bring her down’

Gonna sink the bismark that’s been making such a fuss
Gotta sink the bismark cause the world depends on us…

It’s been a long time and that’s as close as I can get MLS… watch me wake at 3 am with it stuck in my head :slight_smile:

18

Y’know, the Bismarck and the New Orleans songs have the same rhythm; I bet you could sing them to the same tune.

19

What I love about the Bismarck song is the opening line:
“The year was 1941, the war has just begun”

Riiiiiight… :dubious:

20

Oh, well, nobody said it was supposed to be ACCURATE history. Oh, wait…