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The YouTube Approach to Housekeeping: Lights, Camera, Clean-up.
By Todd Nelson
By 2:00pm on any given school day it was movie time in my classroom—making movie time.
The room has been the set for homeroom, several language arts and social studies classes for five grades, la classe de français, lunch, touch-typing sessions, and homework time. It is ready for a good, thorough, two minute and nine seconds movie…to get it all spic and span.
Nothing cleans quite like a little QuickTime movie starring fifth and sixth graders.
The film genre was born quite by accident. It was a slow clean-up day on aisle two, and I really wasn’t thinking beyond an amusing ploy when I said, “Why don’t we make a movie of clean-up time?” The result: Instant dharma. Lights, action, camera, whirling dervishes…clean. Chore turns to limelight.
The movie opened with a long, panning shot of the clock on the wall. Ingmar Bergman, would have been proud—a symbol of man’s wrestle with eternity, temporality…and elementary school dust bunnies. But what followed looked more like a Three Stooges micro-burst. On the count of three, cleaning mayhem breaks out.
As the cameraman circuited the room, glue sticks, scissors, pens and pencils, rulers, and paper were magically returned to storage. Chairs leapt on the desks. Books and notebooks were stacked and ordered. Two minutes and nine seconds later, the focus returned to the clock. Déjà vu. Sorcerer’s apprentice, without the OCD broom disaster.
Now we add a soundtrack—instant music video. I recommend ‘Vertigo’ by U2.
This has spawned clean-up film competitions: Shortest Whole-Room Clean-up, Best Clean-up By Half the Class, Best Interpretation of a U2 Song in an Animated Primary Grade Clean-Up, Best Counter-Clockwise Multi-Third Grader Pencil Sort.
It’s the kind of short films posted to YouTube, where we find an international “conversation” about everything from current political campaign speeches and gaffes to dumb pet movies to garage band covers. You name it, it’s “in there.”
I realized that this is the generation for whom there has always been MTV, for whom “music” and “video” have always been inseparable, for whom there is a sound- and video-track for everything. You almost get the feeling that for something to be real and valid, it has to have been recorded. We are all celebrities of our own digital record keeping; all paparazzi of same.
How does the camera stimulate such an outstanding clean-up performance?
When you’re filming kids in action, willing workers suddenly abound. It’s a pretty powerful tool! And it’s the vernacular tool of this generation. But does this mean that clean-up time, AKA chores, has fallen prey to the neon glow of celebrity culture, where in order to get credit for something worthy it must have publicity potential, a media outlet, or peer tube review? Is this the new intrinsic motivation?
Time for an upgrade of the age-old Zen koan: If a tree falls in the forest and it doesn’t show up on YouTube, did it really fall? Or perhaps, Life imitates YouTube.
It’s all good. Whatever gets the crayons off the floor without nagging.
Todd R. Nelson is head of school at The School in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania.
