#classroom pranks

So I am an absolute troll on April Fools, and for the last couple of years I have been unable to indulge since it’s fallen on a weekend. But NO MORE! My first three classes (grades 5, 4/5, and 5/6) were all treated to a very earnest short lecture on how when we play together in larger ensembles, as we’re going to for the spring concert, we have to make sure that everyone’s rhythms are balancing with each other and that we’re all interlocking properly. And then I had them practice this by… wait for it… playing math puzzle games. In all three classes, it took at least 25 minutes before a student finally put their hand up and asked some variation of “Wait, why are we doing math in music?”, at which point I was able to really pointedly ask “Why would we be doing that TODAY?”

The groans and shouts of “How COULD you?” were GOLDEN, and apparently the 4/5s who go directly from music to (you guessed it) math were particularly enraged.

Second round: Grade 8/9 Drama, who were given an equally earnest and serious lecture about different “fads” in the history of drama, including speaking in rhyme (they identified this as a Shakespearean thing), and the fad of speaking in complete gibberish so that body language, tone of voice, and facial expression would be the most important things. I then got to listen to 25 teenagers yell complete nonsense at each other for half an hour while acting out a variety of Scenes from a Hat. When I asked what time period they thought the gibberish was from, it took them several minutes to finally clue in to what day it was.

The outraged screeching was BEAUTIFUL.

Grade 7 Band, thanks for the prank idea to my colleague from the High School post I had a couple of years ago, again received a completely serious lecture about “that time in music history when composers wrote music that could be played backwards and forwards, and sound good both ways”. They thought that was an amazingly cool idea, and got really excited about trying it, so we turned one of our pieces of music upside down and I gave them a few minutes to figure out what their new notes were. The struggle was real, and they gave it a solid and impressive try. I even started conducting them, trying to play it together as a full band. There was much commenting on how difficult it was, how they weren’t even sure what a few of the notes were because they were now way higher or lower than they were used to. As with Drama, I asked them to narrow down the period when this composition trick was used.

The BETRAYAL. OH, the BETRAYAL. There were HOWLS. My name was CURSED throughout the land. I was VASTLY entertained. There were threats of VENGEANCE MOST TERRIBLE. I haven’t laughed that hard in AGES.

The grade 3/4 music class was treated to the same math prank as the 4/5/6 groups this morning, with one noteable difference: one of the grade 4s figured out something was wonky about 5 minutes in and started calling me out, so they actually got to have most of their regular music class and now are LORDING it over the older students.

I elected not to prank the grade 1/2s, on the grounds of my own sanity.

Other highlights: the serious and amazed conversation between four of the band students about how, when every other bar number ended up wrong or weird looking when upside down, bar 69 looked exactly the same in both directions. (Also known as the 2 minutes where Miss S. had the hardest time out of the entire day keeping a straight face and not giving the prank away…) Bless clueless children, who know not what they say…

Serious talk with some of the grade 9s at lunch about issues in the upcoming Provincial election, which led to me getting to listen to how they would redesign the entire planet to solve all the world’s problems. Honestly, their solutions would work, if every society on earth was restructured to eliminate money… it was a great conversation!

Grade 5 boys who declared that Cat Farts should be an instrument. SIGH.