Meme Me Up, Scotty

Inspired by the wide variety of teacher memes making their way around the interweb, I decided to add a little snark to my first-day-of-school overview of class procedures with some personalized memes that will be impossible for students to ignore.

The Meme Generator at IMPFlip.com is a handy little tool if you want to give this a try, but I ended up making all of my own from scratch, so to speak. All you need to do is paste the background image you want onto a Powerpoint slide and type with the “Impact” font that comes standard on most Microsoft products. Impact is the hipsters’ universally recognized meme font of choice, I was told by two teen girls wearing chunky black-framed reading glasses. So, you know, I have it from the source.

Directing the meme characters to say all of the unfiltered things I want to say to my students (but edit for the sake of professionalism) was surprisingly cathartic. A few of my creations were too catty to include in the final lecture presentation (this will be given on the first day of school, after all, and I don’t want to terrify the darlings), but it sure felt good to release some of my psyche’s silent screamers.

A sampling of the memes that made the final cut and will be included as lecture backdrop on the first day of school (click here for a PDF with even more options!) :

Feel free to grab any of these or be inspired to make your own.
Teach on, everyone!