The Jersey Shore

The Jersey Shore: Miami’s season finale aired last Thursday. The Jersey Shore is, I believe, a current pop culture phenomenon. One cannot escape the Jersey Shore, Hollywood is even jumping on the bandwagon by inviting them to guest star on sitcoms, wresting and award shows. Hollywood is also putting on spoofs about the show such as South Park and the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. (Here is a video clip of Craig Ferguson’s Jersey Shore spoof.)

The Jersey Shore stars 8 guidos and guidettes from the Jersey area. MTV had the ‘brilliant’ idea to put them all under one roof and film the chaos that ensued. The show deals with situations (no pun intended to Mike ‘the situation) involving alcohol, stereotypes, womanizing, dating, cheating, etc. The actions on this show are questionable. Yes, that cast is hilarious and fun to watch, but their actions are not exactly moral.

Jersey Shore demonstrates to its audience the value of going out and partying every opportunity they can while chasing down the opposite sex. The men on the show constantly say they want to find chicks who are DTF (down to f*&%). What kind of example is that? I don’t want high school boys to get the idea that they are allowed to scope out lose women. Besides the casts’ lack of morals, the show is a hit none the less and I think we, as future educators, need to get on board. Whether I like it or not, almost every student either watches or knows of the Jersey Shore and some of its crazy antics.

During my 10 day unit, I tried to generate examples from modern media into the classroom. Like for connotative language I used the Jersey Shore. (Denotation: situation - manner of being situated; location or position with reference to environment; condition; case; plight; the state of affairs; combination of circumstances; a position or post of employment and the connotation: ‘the situation’ – Mike Sorrentino from the Jersey Shore; another example is denotation: grenade - a small shell containing an explosive and thrown by hand or fired from a rifle or launching device and the connotation: grenade - a not so attractive female/male). I used those examples in 4 of my 11th grades classes to help explain connotative language. I could tell that some of the students really enjoyed the fact that I had used examples that they could relate to.