You're all familiar with Ben Stein's role in Ferris Bueller's Day Off? For those of you who aren't, he plays a high school economics teacher who delivers a famously boring lecture about the Great Depression, particularly about the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930.
I gave that same lecture today, since we've moved up to the 1930s in my U.S. history class. It took all of my self-restraint not to deliver it in a Ben Stein voice; even if I had, though, I doubt many (if any) of my students would have caught the reference, all of them having been born after 1990.
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Last semester I broke out in the "mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony" monologue from Monty Python. (I'm sure it was relevant.) Two students laughed.
Whaaat? They don't see Ferris Bueller's Day Off anymore?
Sad.
no...no they would have to get it. it's ferris bueller!! surely the children must watch that movie still.
All of them born after 1990?! That seems impossible, somehow.
After 1990....weird....
feel old? anyone? anyone?
Well I may not be very familiar with Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but I could quote that scene in Monty Python before I had even seen it. :)
For what it's worth, I went home and asked my two teenage boys if they'd have gotten the reference if you'd gone through with it. (You actually paid enough attention to what he said to know the topic of the lecture? I'm AMAZED! I tuned out his words when I heard his tone. Which was the point. Anyway.) The child born in 1989 said he's probably have gotten it but didn't know if he'd have laughed or not. The younger one wasn't sure what I was talking about. And they both agreed that most kids their age wouldn't have gotten it. So good call.
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