In defense of silly videos

Nothing I did last year – not the careful comments on papers, not the resources sifted from archives – seems to have had as enduring an impact as a music video of They Might Be Giants’ version of “Istanbul, Not Constantinople.” (That’s not the version I like, but I can only find the Tiny Toons one at the moment.) Kids come up to me in the hall singing snippets of it, and this year’s crop of 9th graders has made a joke out of asking about it daily, even though we’re still a good 3 months away from Byzantium. So this year I showed TMBG’s “We’re The Mesopotamians” after we finished with, well, Gilgamesh and pals. Lo and behold, kids are buying the song for their iPods, and reading ahead to figure out who Ashurbanipal was (he got a mention in the song, but we haven’t hit the Assyrians yet). I thought I was just being dumb and blowing off steam with them, but there is clearly something more going on here, and, even though I’m always feeling strapped for class time, I should keep showing these videos.

In order to enjoy “We’re The Mesopotamians,” one has to know who Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh ARE, to recognize those mysterious, enchanting ancient names. My students have earned this knowledge in their daily trudge through the textbook, having been diligently pushing pencils and flipping pages when they’d rather be eating ice cream and watching TV. The Mesopotamians seem especially quaint, distant, difficult to visualize: kings of a Fertile Crescent that no longer exists, speaking a language whose sounds we will never know. My kids are well-mannered enough not to ask when they are going to use this in “real life,” but I can tell more than a few are thinking just that. If one asked me, what would I say? I’d stammer something about how they are building the groundwork for a rich, full life. How they’re trailblazing neural pathways that will help them out in law school. Maybe I’d crack wise and say that MCAT stands for Mesopotamian Culture Awareness Test, without which you’d never make it to medical school. (If this were true, malpractice compensation haggling would be a thing of the past: Hammurabi says that all surgeons who screw up get a hand cut off. Bam!)

All cracking wise and philosophizing aside, though, I can’t give them a solid, practical, 9th-grade-friendly answer for why I am asking that they know who Ashurbanipal is. Because it’s on the test? Because I said so? Not a chance I’ll ever stoop that low. I’ll stoop almost as low, though: I’ll give them a silly, obscure little present and a wink. They’re in on the joke now. And what is high school but feeling perpetually out of the loop? I can initiate them into a dorky but relatively exclusive inner circle: the confraternity of people who can pick a ziggurat out of a lineup and who – like them – dissolve into giggles when they see TMBG’s droopy, emo Hammurabi rocking out with his axe.