Break on Through
This week, we explore how Kool-Aid Man can inspire your writing, how pop culture can revive a legend, and how late a 1990s song be released and still be a 1990s song, and some other things.
Welcome back, friends. As always, I hope you are well. Thank you for giving this endeavor a chance, especially since you now have some evidence as to what we’re going to do here. I hope you continue to find it enjoyable, or at the worst, not a waste of your time. So let’s get to it, shall we?
Kool-Aid Man Theory
One of the unexpected things that has happened throughout my career is that I have developed some theories about how to do certain things in my class. Teachers get the notion of repetition becoming a great honer of one’s skills is writ large, especially if you are fortunate enough to keep the same schedule for several years in a row. Even as things change around you, be it standards, standardized tests, school culture, you learn to adapt and adjust.
I have also found that food and popular culture are great ways to explain things to high school students, as we briefly discussed last week (my goodness, we’re not even two weeks into this thing, and he’s already doing callbacks! It’s OK; I presume not everyone does the reading. It is a trade risk that I’ve become accustomed to in my career.)
Some of you who are Facebook friends with me know that I have shared a lot of my professional life, if anonymized, on that feed. The Closet Count, “from the ______ files of Mr. Barker’s class,” and the like. I have also shared some of my theories. So I am bringing over a classic to here, with some updates, partially because of recent internet events.
An Internet friend of the Barchive, JoannePistonFan, alerted us to this tweet last Friday, moments after our first edition went live (we promise this was not placed here as a former of compliment seeking. We’ve already done that elsewhere.):
The tweet in question:
This was a massive philosophical conundrum, one for which I lacked the epistemological or theological knowledge to tackle properly, especially on a Friday morning. However, minutes later, we learned that the Man himself had weighed in.
γνῶθι σεαυτόν came into play at this point. The wisdom of Delphi was too strong to pass up.
But I know that JPF alerted me to this because of my abiding affection for Kool-Aid Man.
Kool-Aid Man is one of our better-known pop culture icons. In an era when he likely should no longer continue to be because peddling sugar water to young people is seen as untoward at best and a root cause of a public health crisis, Kool-Aid Man has endured as a symbol. A beloved member of the KraftHeinz extended universe, Kool-Aid Man’s tears, like that of a phoenix, can heal, even bring legumes back from the beyond. He has been a muse to Seth MacFarlane. But he also is the framework for The Kool-Aid Man Theory of AP United States History essay writing.
To set up: The current set up of the AP US/World/European History exams require a 55 question stimulus-based multiple-choice section, a section of three Short Answer Questions, a break, and then a Document Based Question (60 minutes) and a Long Essay Question (40 minutes.) The latter is essentially a standard college final exam question, except you have no real warning about what the question will be about, save that they give you an option of three time periods, primarily 1491-1800, 1800-1898, and 1890-present. This makes up the whole of the test. So one of the skills an AP teacher needs to teach is writing under constraints of time. That is where we begin with this theory.
To be a great essay writer, you need many skills, but you also need one very critical thing: time. No essay written in 40 minutes will be anything more than a first draft, and, even then, will not be anywhere near something with which you would be happy. But given the artificial universe of the Long Essay Question (LEQ) on the AP History exams, we must acknowledge the universe and make it work.
When examining the constraints placed upon you, it must be acknowledged that you will lose some things. One of the critical things you will lose is nuance. It is tough to be subtle when you don't have time. Subtlety requires lateral thinking, a willingness to engage counterarguments, divergent viewpoints, facts that do not quite fit narratives. Qualities that make many essays worth reading. And you will not have time for them.
But that's OK. Once you accept this, once you know that you will likely not have time for them, you can accept a different path to walk, the path of the Kool-Aid Man.
Have you ever really thought about the physics of Kool-Aid Man? He is a giant, anthropomorphic glass pitcher filled with juice. Well, juice-like beverage. And he is known for smashing through walls to deliver the news of kool refreshment to children around the world. But I mean, how does he do it? How does a giant glass pitcher smash through the walls of a home without shattering himself in the process? It doesn't make sense. Unless you believe in the power of belief. Kool-Aid Man WILLS himself through that wall. Oh yeah!
So what is my point here? It's simple. For the 40 minutes you are writing that LEQ, you must believe with your whole heart that you are not only correct but that no one could disagree with you. Because you're running through that wall. You are going to bring your SFI, you are going to close your logic loops, you are going to have a robust cogent thesis that makes a claim and lays out how your argument will be developed in the body paragraphs, and you are going to close it out. You're going to do that with a tenacity of a living juice pitcher whose sole purpose in life is to get you to drink his product. OH YEAH!
So yes, it's not excellent writing, but for those forty minutes, it's what you have to do.
Belief is a powerful thing. Like any tool, wielded incorrectly, it can cause great harm. But used correctly, amazing things can happen. Oh yeah!
Old Time Hockey
I sometimes wonder about the idea of the memory of a person being preserved for an entirely new generation through a reference in another work, be it a novel, a television show, or a film. Storytelling as a whole is one of our most recurrent traditions in human existence, and it is how we pass down the legends of the past. To wit, I would likely have no idea who Eddie Shore was if not for this moment from 1977.
The more remarkable thing is that Eddie Shore was likely a touchstone for hockey fans of that era. He was selected as one of the NHL’s 100 greatest players for its centennial season:
The “Eddie Shore gets to Montreal one way or another” story has become legendary. I first encountered in The Best American Sports Writing of the 20th Century when I was in college. Stan Fischler wrote in SI in 1967 about how almost any Eddie Shore story you heard actually might be true. To become a legend, you have to do things larger than life, and you have to have people to keep the flame. A reference to Shore as the epitome of “old time hockey” in one of the most beloved sports movies of a generation helps to do that.
Knock Down Walls
I didn’t intend to have there be a theme to the topic/music selection, but sometimes when you’re sitting there, and you’re writing about Kool-Aid Man, the music selection is an obvious one. From November 1999’s Sugar, this is Tonic with “Knock Down Walls.”
This song is about as late in the 1990s as I can get and still consider it 1990s, as it peaked on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart on December 25, 1999, at #20. This song got a lot of airplay for the follow-up single (“You Wanted More”) on a sophomore album, but my memory of it is mainly that the Sunday Night Football music people loved using it for bumper music as they went to commercial.
Tonic, an L.A. band, is another compelling case of a 1990s phenomenon that is hard to replicate in the modern era, a band that placed a lot of songs on soundtracks. Tonic had songs on the Scream 2 soundtrack, The X-Files: The Album, and the soundtrack to Clay Pigeons. “You Wanted More” shows up on the American Pie soundtrack. There is a thesis that Tonic took too long to follow up on the success of 1996’s Lemon Parade, and the soundtrack holdovers were not enough to build their fanbase. I can’t speak to that. The musical tastes of the late 1990s were shifting rapidly. But Tonic always reminds me of the essence of basic rock of my college years. Nothing groundbreaking, but a reliable “hey let’s remember some guys” band today.
Barker Randomness
Not every day, but many days, when I am not yelling at my students to not line up at the door, I frequently close my classes with “Be careful, be safe, be smart, and remember that only you can prevent forest fires.” Smokey Bear is not wrong here, and the advice is sound, regardless of its applicability to one’s specific post-class plans. (One student did tell me one time they had a camping trip planned for that weekend, so it actually has been good specific advice at least once.) But the rest of it is sound general advice an older person can give to a younger person. Be careful; act with care. Be safe; make good choices. Be smart; make informed choices. If you do those three things, by and large, things tend to go better.
Our friend Adam Jacobi, over at Oops Pow Subscribe, does a lot of great things, but one thing I like is that he ends every edition of OPS with an affirmation. In the wrong hands, that could end up being cheesy, but coming from Adam, it feels genuine, real, and well-won. I don’t know that I have that kind of power, but I do hope that if you are careful, safe, and smart, good things will happen. I cannot promise they will, sometimes that may be bad advice, but I hope that things get better as you fight for better days. Thank you.