The semester has reached the point at which energy reserves are low and no amount of fracking will replenish them.
Thanksgiving is a full month away, and classrooms are filled with tired people staring at one another. When faced with such a dilemma, a teacher has only two choices. Cancel class or hurl a great ball of chaos at his students. Enter Groucho Marx.
English: Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx, cropped from group photo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Sometimes his daemonic, chaotic energy is just the thing I need to push through the prison walls of my ivory tower. Case in point.
Today, I decided to drive my students just a bit crazy. In the midst of yet another revision of their visual analysis papers, they showed up to a classroom in which the theme song to Mission: Impossible was blaring. As soon as class started I ran around the room, frantically passing this assignment sheet out:
Now panicky themselves, my students leaped from their seats, and shouted to each other as if my classroom was the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
They ran out of my room and returned 15 minutes later. Out of breath? Sure. But re-engaged with their own educations.
Chaos is beautiful.
The Arnoldian Project 
where did you get you teaching degree?
I don’t have a teaching degree!! 🙂
What a great idea! You are SO RIGHT about the glazed malaise that sets in around this time of the semester…
I just ran a class in which I told the students to do a kamikaze peer review, switch papers, do another kamikaze peer review, and then put that assignment away and begin something completely different. A bit of Monty Python (or Groucho) does awaken the snoozing beauties.
I may have to steal this Marxist plan. Thanks!