Flashback Friday Moment of The Week: 1/17/2020

by Just Juan
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During the Table Topics portion of yesterday’s Toastmasters meeting, I spoke about energy use in the building and how one of my key duties as a Building Management Specialist is to reduce usage. I incorporated a little bit of “The Energy Blues” from the Schoolhouse Rock! series. It was a really good 72-second speech. I got a few chuckles from the audience. That brings me to this week’s moment in the Flashback Friday series: the Schoolhouse Rock! series.

How I first came across this moment? My first coherent understanding of the Schoolhouse Rock! series was back when I was watching cartoons in the early 90s during the ABC Saturday morning programming block. The very first Schoolhouse Rock! short I saw was “Conjunction Junction”.

What it meant to me then? I was very much intrigued by my very first Schoolhouse Rock! exposure. I liked the song and I remember dancing to it. As I grew a few years older, I started understand the significance of each episode short I was watching on Saturday mornings. The series emphasized a lot of what I was learning in the early grades of my education—like verbs as action words, the constructs of subject and predicate, the American Revolution, the legislative process, and electricity. Of course, my favorite Schoolhouse Rock! short of all-time is “Telegraph Line”. I used parts of it to explain my project on the nervous system in the 4th grade. Even though each short was about 2-3 minutes long, I felt like a better person for having watched as it pretty much drummed in the stuff I was learning in a down-to-earth, interesting song. It was good stuff.

What it means to me now? I still feel the same way about the Schoolhouse Rock! series as I did nearly 26 years ago. It was good stuff. Today, it provides me with quick refreshers of the stuff I learned so long ago…stuff that should be common knowledge at my age but is often forgotten for the same reasons.

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