My best class

In my enrichment class today we got to talking about Glee from last night and the dancing football players (if you saw it, you know what I mean!). At the end of class, I pulled the video up on youtube and showed the kids the scene. After laughing about it, I realized I needed to pull it back to writing - so I went into a spiel about how the writers of the show took two completely opposing ideas (football and glee club) and melded them together to get this great climax. What made the scene so great aside from the fact that it was just funny as hell watching these guys in football uniforms dancing was the contrast of two opposing ideas. By joining them, they were able to get a story that sustained not just this episode, but from the looks of it on into more of the season. I also talked about how the writers had to earn that moment. I told the kids a brief summary of what led to that moment and then said that yes, the visual in and of itself is funny enough, but the build-up through the episode gave the writers the right to show us the scene AND made it that much funnier. I told them to take away two things from that: 1) if they need ideas, do the what-if of contrasting two ideas that might not normally go together, and 2) they need to EARN their "football players dancing" moment.

Now, this was with my awesome, perfect class, so I don't know if the lesson would work in other classes, but I was pretty impressed with my own ingenuity in using the clip!