Anyone who has even a passing awareness of the circle of life, so to speak, understands that every human being will, at some point, lose their grasp on “the vibe.” As a result, they’ll swiftly enter the cultural territory reserved for Facebook moms, barbecue dads, and, ostensibly, film studio executives. The average age of this detachment, however, is shrinking every day.
Now that millennials are beginning to occupy more senior positions of the workforce, the tomfoolery inherent to our culture nowadays is able to keep a steady flow through more and more generations and professional interactions. No one, however, seems to be championing this dynamic quite like TikTok‘s @matthewcpittman, a college professor who sees openings for organic memes, and dives right in.
While giving his class of indeterminably-leveled students a lecture on how to write goodly, Professor Pittman spied a few of his pupils catching a few too many Zs under the fluorescent lights that so often accompany higher education. A less-hip professor might have called them out with a disgruntled sneer, another might have whacked their desk with a ruler, and another still might have ignored them altogether and let them miss out on his valuable instruction that they paid thousands of dollars to listen to.
But Professor Pittman has a PhD in Hip, and so his response to the students counting sheep was an impromptu, occasionally megaphone-enabled cover of all the music we all tried to be really, really sad to when we were younger, including greatest hits from Green Day, Blink-182, and Secondhand Serenade. Presumably, he left Linkin Park out of this particular rotation on account of the band being a touchy subject at the moment, something only a professor as “with it” as Professor Pittman would have the foresight to do.
Now, Professor Pittman’s TikTok following is already pretty sizeable (238.8K followers at the time of writing), so of course the comments section boasted a surplus of old fans and new ones, tipping their hat to this Warped Tour-coded lesson plan that, evidently, isn’t isolated to this one lecture. Villain of the week goes to the girl who hit him with her blanket after waking her up and telling him that his eyeliner sucks.
In all likelihood, Professor Pittman is just exercising his sacred oath as a force of chaotic good, but for all we know, his unencumbered scene persona could be helping his students learn quite a bit more than they would otherwise (keeping them awake in class notwithstanding). According to the study Cognitive Crescendo: How Music Shapes the Brain’s Structure and Function, published in the National Library of Medicine, a song from one’s past is chemically capable of bringing back memories associated with the music, which further correlates with areas of the brain responsible for storing and retrieving memories.
Memory, of course, is a very helpful tool for any college student, particularly those studying philosophy, who need to remember their imperatives from their categoricals or whatever the hell Kant was on about. Whatever his reason, or lack thereof, we all commend Professor Pittman for single-handedly keeping the emo alive in us all. With any luck, we’ll see the sales of Edward Scissorhands Blu-rays begin to skyrocket before the year is out.
