Slapsdick

I threw myself across three unoccupied desks yesterday, leaving a jumble of faux-mahogany furniture and aluminum legs akimbo to extricate myself from...all to prove a point I was making that had nothing at all to do with what I was teaching.

Though the class enjoyed it, I fear I’m becoming a caricature, a cartoon-version of my already cartoonish self.
As long as you’re willing to slightly hurt yourself, laughs in a large group are abundant. However, these pratfalls are the physical manifestations of my desire to get certain points across, regardless of how little importance said points may carry. In fact, the more mundane a point, the less it actually matters, the more I feel the need to make it clear...
I tried to reference the dead baby with the twisted head and dead eyes who crawled across the ceiling inTrainspotting, but upon hearing that none of my sixteen-year-old students had ever even heard of the movie, I collapsed to the ground; this was not for their benefit, but because I wasn’t then able to get across the analogy I was making, which was, in and of itself, incredibly valid.
How could referring to a scene from a film about heroin-addicted Scots to explain the perils of not making a blind-spot check not be valid?
In my mind, teaching, like many things, is like playing baseball: if you aren’t worn out, filthy, and ready to fight the umpire by the end of it, you haven’t done your job.
Suffice it to say, not a lot of other teachers share my philosophy...