Washington Township High School math instructor Sharon Serano brings fun to the classroom
While taking online classes to earn her master’s degree from Rowan University, Washington Township High School math teacher Sharon Serano saw a picture that would eventually send her life on a different path. The meme was a picture of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, portrayed by Patrick Stewart for the TV show “Star Trek,” putting his palm over his face in frustration with top and bottom text saying “When Mrs. Serano assigns more homework.”
A meme, defined by dictionary.com as “a cultural item in the form of an image, video, phrase, etc. that is spread via the Internet and often altered in a creative or humorous way,” gave Serano another avenue to bond with her students who embrace meme culture.
“I thought ‘this is fun!’ I could make this an extra credit project,” she said. “And I could put it together as a video, I could show the kids on Pi Day. I just went with it.”
The original meme project was used as extra credit for Serano’s students.
“They can submit up to three memes about anything algebra, anything math in general, about Pi or anything about our class, something that happened in our class,” she described. “I took the better of the memes and put it together in a video and put it on my YouTube channel.”
Serano’s YouTube channel currently has more than 800 subscribers and 48 videos. The original meme project video has more than 6,400 views.
“It keeps getting hits, it’s crazy,” she said. “It’s been seen around the world.”
Two of the 48 videos on her YouTube channel are the meme project — one for 2017, one for 2016. Add her one introduction to YouTube video and that leaves 45 educational videos on her channel she uses to teach her students. Her videos can be found by searching “Sharon Serano” on YouTube.
“The way I make the videos, they look like cartoons,” she described. “The program is called Powtoon so it’s more than somebody at the board or a disembodied voice and somebody writing on the screen. I think having the cartoon in there makes it more relatable and the math not as scary.”
With a propensity for integrating technology and the classroom, Serano decided to put pen to paper and write an article involving her meme project.
“This is actually kind of cool, it’s kind of fun,” Serano said. “I bet we could use this in more ways in the classroom than just extra credit. I sat down to think about what would make sense, what are some things we could do in the classroom and I thought I should make an article about this.”
Her article titled “5 Ways to use memes with students” was published to the International Society for Technology in Education website.
“ISTE is the premier standard of using technology in the classroom,” Serano said. “Absolutely №1. They said they only print 30 to 40 percent of articles that are submitted.”
In December 2017, Serano was contacted by the ISTE saying it wanted to include her article in its textbook titled “EdTech for the K-12 Classroom.”
“I said ‘great!’ They let me look over the original article and make corrections,” she said.
From the humble beginning of her son showing her a meme in passing, Serano never thought it would blow up this much.
“I just thought it was a really neat idea and it was good enough to share,” she said. “As far as the response that I’ve gotten, people citing my article for their writings or research, no I didn’t expect it. That was really exciting to see.”
