Its okay to be funny

This is the second year now that I am teaching a class on communications technology. The four units I take the students through are: video, audio production, graphic manipulation, and web design. In order to teach my students about the various aspects of making videos, I have them do several labs where they film 20-30 second segments and then we watch what it is they came up with. I myself am a very serious person and take my filming and teaching so. My idea of students completing the lab successfully is to do get things done, not take forever doing it, and show the techniques I want them to show. Well, teaching 8th grade students they take a little director's liberty when creating their videos. They add things, they embellish lines, in essence they 'have fun.'

At first this sort of annoyed me that they did what I considered to be stupid things in front of the camera or made fools of themselves. But I came to realize that as long as they were doing the assignment, I shouldn't be flipping out. For example, one of the labs I have them do is on lighting. Each group is supposed to film the same sequence or set of lines, but with different lighting. The line I got from a Laffy Taffy bar- what do A's and flowers have in common? Answer- B's come after them. So check out the videos my students came up with- while they are goofy, they did the assignment.