I performed Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ at my school’s faculty talent show [Video]

In my first book ‘Reluctant Disciplinarian’ I made a big deal about how it is risky for a teacher to be too nice or too fun or, in some ways, too ‘human’ as it might cause students to lose respect for the teacher and lead to discipline problems.

But that was 25 years ago and over the years I have found opportunities to lighten up. Now my reasoning is that some fun can actually increase teacher effectiveness — just don’t over do it. So each year I make a spectacle of myself with involved halloween costumes which the students at my school really seem to enjoy usually.

About three weeks ago, the Stuyvesant student union announced there would be a faculty talent show on April 19 after school. When I was in 4th grade I started playing the trumpet and that was a big part of my identity all through high school and even college. For the past 20 years I have been messing around on the piano. I never got very good at it, though I do like playing Billy Joel songs a lot. As far as singing goes, I have never practiced singing.

So I thought maybe I’d play some kind of Scott Joplin ragtime song. But then I thought that students wouldn’t find ‘The Entertainer’ so entertaining so I decided instead to play a Billy Joel song and to do my best to sing it too. But once I got comfortable with the idea that I would sing in public for the first time in my life, I thought about what other song might I sing that would be fun for the students to see. And in a flash of insight I came up with either the best or the worst (you will have to decide) song I could think of, Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ about a really bad ex-boyfriend. If you are not familiar with the song you might want to listen to it here first.

So for about two weeks I set to practicing. I knew it would never be ‘good’ but the plan was to be sincere in my effort and not just try to make a joke out of it. For about 3 hours a day I worked on this. I also got coaching from various musicians I know including some of my students. By the day of the performance I had the lyrics and the chords down and the tempo and all that.

When it came time for the actual performance I was feeling confident. But then I made a little mistake in the first verse and then in the first chorus I skipped a chord so the music was off. I still powered through so it ended up generating a lot more laughs than it was intended to. After I started to relax, the last half of the song was about as good as I was capable of doing it.

The original song has some curse words in it, so I used her ‘clean’ lyrics though you will see at the end I made it almost seem like I was going to give them the opportunity to hear a teacher say a curse word. That ended up being the best moment of the performance and I think it will excuse all the musical mistakes.

I do hope that I gave students a memorable experience seeing their nerdy math teacher attempt this power ballad.