If I recall correctly, mine seemed to like watching Walter Lewin’s MIT video lectures, Bill Nye the Science Guy episodes, a bunch of recent Blockbusters on DVD, and Jeff Dunham’s act.
More seriously, one thing I remember that that got student’s attention in high school pretty quickly was cool and/or surprising experimental results shown to them. My chemistry teacher got everybody excited by performing a precipitation reaction for us, because seeing liquids combine and result in some dust forming and falling down to the bottom of the beaker with our own eyes was awesome. When watching Lewin’s videos, nothing got more praise than his dramatic demonstration of the conservation of mechanical energy (the drama was important; my physics professor in university did the same thing, but didn’t get nearly as much of a reaction because he didn’t play it up like it could be his last lecture, despite doing the demonstration live). And people in my psychology class were very fond of both the selective attention test / awareness test videos and a practical demonstration of the sunk cost fallacy (he had 4 of us bid on a dollar bill with the highest 2 results paying but only the highest result getting the dollar; needless to say, both top bidders ended up losing money).
A how-to-swear video would be entertaining, but I suspect it would not meet their criteria.
I’d be fascinated by one that did, though. At least, it seems plausible that there’s interesting cognitive structure underlying the common linguistic and emotional aspects of swearing (the culture-bound specifics, less so).
Maybe I could make one but I’d need some memetic assistance. What are high school science classes interested in watching?
If I recall correctly, mine seemed to like watching Walter Lewin’s MIT video lectures, Bill Nye the Science Guy episodes, a bunch of recent Blockbusters on DVD, and Jeff Dunham’s act.
More seriously, one thing I remember that that got student’s attention in high school pretty quickly was cool and/or surprising experimental results shown to them. My chemistry teacher got everybody excited by performing a precipitation reaction for us, because seeing liquids combine and result in some dust forming and falling down to the bottom of the beaker with our own eyes was awesome. When watching Lewin’s videos, nothing got more praise than his dramatic demonstration of the conservation of mechanical energy (the drama was important; my physics professor in university did the same thing, but didn’t get nearly as much of a reaction because he didn’t play it up like it could be his last lecture, despite doing the demonstration live). And people in my psychology class were very fond of both the selective attention test / awareness test videos and a practical demonstration of the sunk cost fallacy (he had 4 of us bid on a dollar bill with the highest 2 results paying but only the highest result getting the dollar; needless to say, both top bidders ended up losing money).
Sex, explosions, taboo things, swearing, illegal things, and how-tos for most of those.
That’s mostly for high school boys (I expect that at High School level, science classes aren’t boys-only yet).
A how-to-swear video would be entertaining, but I suspect it would not meet their criteria.
I’d be fascinated by one that did, though. At least, it seems plausible that there’s interesting cognitive structure underlying the common linguistic and emotional aspects of swearing (the culture-bound specifics, less so).
It’s an old joke that the first and most frequent thing a kid checks on a dictionary are the swear words.
On Wikipedia, the phaenomen remains but is extended to writing.