What we’re enjoying in class this week:

1. Halloween Awakening (really thematically rich if you feel like digging; stop motion, natch.)
2. Ooga Halloween Trick or Treat Video (prime Halloween prank that stays well within the bounds of good taste; not stop motion, mercifully.)
3. Trinity Lateral Miracle (fifteen laterals, thirty-nine yards in one play; announcer at the end calls it the greatest play in all of division iii football, totally without irony.)
4. Jen Stark’s paper sculptures (i’m a sucker for this kind of geometric art; kids didn’t mind it either.)
5. English Pronunciation (“If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.”; i’m also a sucker for junk science stats like that; select a few stanzas, have your kids try to read ’em aloud.)

There’s a shot halfway through this music video where a stalk of broccoli floats dreamily across the screen – frame left to frame right – shot at 60 frames per second. (Or something fast.) On the weird power of that shot alone, I showed the entire music video to my class, which follows the standard arc of boy-meets-girl-who-throws-an-entire-produce-section-at-his-head-in-slow-motion. ¶ After they watched it, several students agreed with me about the broccoli shot, though we were all stumped for an explanation. The broccoli just spoke to us.

This is one of the best pranks I’ve ever seen, but then I’m a sucker for anything that requires rigorous rehearsal and planning. ¶ This is entirely in German, no subtitles, but, on the evidence, math ain’t the only universal language; outright befuddlement translates pretty well too. [via Coudal]

or: Welcome to the Good Life

Last month, more than seventy people climbed Mount Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, hoisting up a deconstructed Jacuzzi along with them. The pictures define ebullience better than the definition of ebullience does. If you’ve got a digital projector in your classroom, how are you not showing your kids stuff like this? Take a break from diagramming sentences, fire up all the pictures one after the other, and tell the story.

Here’s an English translation of the page, courtesy of the Google.

For us, the idea of a whirlpool is to hold a festive event, in places or situations unusual and exceptional. It is a leisure, conceived and organized by our own means and with the help of our friends. Indeed, to organize such an activity in the most insane, it is not enough to spend evenings calculations and construction, the most important thing is to have lots of friends.

Exactly.

The final entry in the Bravia trilogy. Stop-motion plasticene bunnies take over Manhattan. (Man. Has anyone released a viral short in the last two months without stop-motion support? Seriously.) ¶ Awesome, if only ’cause I maintain a serious soft spot for rabbits, even if the whole thing is kinda overstuffed. (The bunnies turn into a wave which turns into a larger bunny which turns into … a bunch of color cubes. Um. Okay.) ¶ The other Bravia entries are well worth the zero dollars you’ll pay to watch them and the behind-the-scenes is good supplementary viewing. ¶ P.S. Anyone who knows what track is underlying the bunnies ad the behind-the-scenes gets a dollar. I’m sure it ain’t “Sæglópur,” so don’t try that one. [via everybody]