Whip It! Kids Turn to 80s Music For Classroom Makeover

Kate Tuttle — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:58:00 GMT

Today's adorable kid-vid: first-graders in the Woodrow Cummins Elementary School in Conway, Arkansas, entered a contest to win a high-tech upgrade for their classroom, and they chose the best possible soundtrack: Devo's "Whip It," re-mastered as "Click It," now a schoolkid's exhortation to go forward, move ahead, and finish that damn long division lesson already.

While other classrooms used music to sell themselve, including a cover of The Romantics' "What I Like About You," the Devo-loving kids were the most inventive, joyful, and irreverent. And their teacher looks like the kind of teacher we all wish we'd had at least once. Voting ends today!

Girl Wins Hannah Montana Tickets With Fake Essay

Madeline Holler — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

I have had countless conversations about Hannah Montana over the past couple of weeks, which is stunning, considering I don't think I had uttered the rather catchy (and fake) name more than once or twice total before that. In any case, all of the discussions involved one or more of these three elements: first-graders (first-graders!); $450 concert tickets (for a fake singer!); mothers living through their daughters (in this day and age!).

Until today, the sickest anecdote came from my aunt-in-law, a second-grade teacher, who told me about a first-grader at her school. The girl's mom shelled out nearly $2,000 for four concert tickets, plus transportation and dinner for the mother-daughter pairs in a limo that was taking them on the four-hour round trip. Did they open the wet bar too? Stand through the sunroof and lift up their Hanna Montana concert tees?

That story got trumped, though, when I came across this: one Texas mother's strategy to get her daughter (a first-grader ... it's always first-graders!) to a sold-out Hanna Montana concert.

The details:

Club Libby Lu, a Chicago-based store that sells clothes, accessories and other crap for young girls (we'll need to table our discussion of THIS particular merchandiser of hooker lifestyle for the pre-breast-budded for another time) sponsored a writing contest. The prize was a makeover at Club Libby Lu, a blonde HM wig and tickets for the Albany, N.Y., concert (where the debt-ridden Disney fans go to hang out with other first-graders and their moms, I presume).

The winning essay began: "My daddy died this year in Iraq." You know where this is going.

The girl's daddy didn't die this year in or out of Iraq. The named father wasn't even listed with the defense department. Instead, like customers leaving Libby Lu, the adoring fans of Hannah Montana, and anyone with a vagina appearing on the Disney Channel, that heart-breaking winning essay was all heavily made up.

Says the mother:

"We did the essay and that's what we did to win," Priscilla Ceballos, the mother, said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. "We did whatever we could do to win."
Charming! Inspiring! A real warm holiday story, plus years of therapy for her humiliated and/or devastated daughter.

Here's the kicker for me: the company is reviewing the matter and "considering taking away the girl's tickets." Considering? This isn't a case-closed kind of thing? Oh, and that would also mean the mother -- already far behind the starting line on modeling, for her daughter, honesty, perspective, pride, those kinds of things -- hasn't given the tickets back? Doesn't she ...? Isn't she ...? Can someone please explain this to me?

Wasn't I just saying people are such entitled jackasses?

Strollerderby : first-graders

Whip It! Kids Turn to 80s Music For Classroom Makeover

Girl Wins Hannah Montana Tickets With Fake Essay