Today’s Students Are Unstuck in Time
Or: Postmodernism in Education
When was the last time you thought about Nickelodeon’s 1997 seminal buddy comedy, Good Burger?
If you spent any time in my classroom this year, you could honestly have been forgiven for thinking the film, now twenty years old, had just been released. For nearly a month, I overheard constant references to the film, including (but not limited to) Kel Mitchell’s immortal, melodious catchphrase:
“Welcome to the Good Burger, home of the good burger, can I take your order?”
If it sounds like I’m being facetious for the sake of comedy, you’d only be half right. In truth, Good Burger was actually an important part of my childhood — I remember very clearly seeing the All That sketches from which the feature eventually sprang on my 13-inch CRT back in the day. I remember the primetime summer timeslots that were filled by the film itself years later. I remember renting the orange VHS from Blockbuster.
So, naturally, it shocked me a little that my students were so enthusiastically quoting a film that, by all rights, probably should have sunk away into obscurity sometime in the last decade or so, to be brought up only in bad “90’s Kids Will Remember” listicles. When I tried to explain this to my students, however, the reaction was nonchalant.
“Oh, that’s cool, yeah. I guess the movie is pretty old then, huh?”
My students are not covertly passing VHS tapes to one another in the hallways, or at least I think they aren’t. It only struck me a few days later that Netflix had recently acquired streaming rights to Good Burger, and that, in some ways, the film had just seen its widest release yet. And, to an age group that is constantly plugged into both social media and streaming services, a new set of titles available on Netflix is easily just as relevant as a new big-budget Hollywood release.
Perhaps, due to its instant availability, Good Burger became even more relevant than movies that needed to be seen over the weekend, for an additional price. There’s a conversation to be had here about Netflix as an arbiter of culture, but Good Burger is just an example of something I've noticed about my students in general:
They don’t really seem to care when something was made, when it was popular, or even what the context was behind a popular piece of media. Rather, they’ll enthusiastically consume and react to just about anything, as long as they can find an entry point for themselves therein.
(That last part is very important, but might be the topic of another article.)
This is not to say that today’s youth don’t have a distinct and constantly developing shared set of cultural signposts, but rather that their set has expanded, in some ways, independent of novelty. Or, perhaps, novelty has been re-defined to include whatever has been newly remixed, re-released, or recently memed.
With that observation made, then, the question remains:
What does this mean for instructional strategies?
This is actually where I struggle to find next steps. I, of course, welcome conversation and feedback about what exactly this trend of being “unstuck” means for today’s students.
My gut reaction is that there’s an opportunity here to connect students to content based on a robust library of media both new and old, but caution should always be advised when attempting to harness a trend.
This is not an invitation to start using memes in lecture materials, is what I’m saying.
I also don’t believe that this phenomenon of constant access and wider cultural knowledge necessarily fixes the problem of irrelevant content. The release of 2013’s The Great Gatsby did not suddenly reinvigorate modern students’ interest in the self-obsession of rich socialites in the 1920’s. By far the most important determinant of student interest is still absolutely whether or not they connect personally to the material, not whether or not there’s been a moderately successful Baz Lurhmann adaptation of it.
The vague and somewhat unsatisfying answer to how educators can use students’ increasing tendency to pull popular culture from multiple eras into their self-identity may be that connections are more important than content, and that no single work should be off the table when it comes to embracing its potential as instructional material.
Good Burger is not a particularly complex film, but if it’s the flavor of the season, and students want to take a complex look at it, then that’s absolutely something to be embraced. A analysis of the film’s humor, depiction of race, anti-corporate sentiment, or place in the buddy comedy genre canon, would not only fulfill standards, but would open conversations that go beyond rote repetition of long-understood and canonized literary symbolism.
Common Core standards tell us to focus on skills, rather than specific content. The media climate encourages students to focus on media they like, regardless of its age. Maybe the goal with embracing today’s “unstuck-in-time” culture, then, should be about tracking patterns of popularity, iterations of ideas, and media movements.
When access to cultural artifacts is unlimited, students’ toolboxes must also be unlimited by a sense of what constitutes meaningful culture in the first place. And, as educators, it’s our job to figure out how to give them that toolbox.
Also, Netflix, if you’re reading this, please get the rights to stream Clockstoppers.
Brad Decker teaches Theater, English, and Film to high school students in Northern California. When he’s not being an enthusiastic supporter of their success, he runs The Synapse and Panel & Frame on Medium. If you like what you’ve read, be sure to check them out!
If you’re just as unstuck in time as he his, consider reading his obsessive ramblings about Star Wars in this recent article:
