By Bridget Valls
Somehow, Justin Bieber became the focus of a College Algebra class.
On Wednesday, April 29th, students in Ms. Howard’s class shared their songs and music videos to teach various math concepts. This year, it had a new name: “Howard-chella.” Which is a play on Coachella, or this year’s Bieber Chella.
It earned its name from the group that covered all of Justin Bieber’s songs in honor of his amazing performance at Coachella. Juniors Zarin Sapra, Lane Rodts, and Sunjna Hebbar worked very hard on their video and insisted that I come watch.
The first video we watched at “Howard-chella” was by juniors Harris Young and Tyler Ebbert, a parody of Vance Joy’s “Riptide.”
Harris was quick to tell me that he “woke up at 6:30 for this” and that for this project, “the grind didn’t stop.”
The video depicted Tyler and Harris singing the lyrics “I was scared of inverses on graphs.” Mind you, they had zero emotion on their face while singing.
I quickly learned that this was intentional. “We did that on purpose because math is serious,” Tyler told me.
Once their video wrapped up, Harris turned to look at me with the biggest smile and said, “Bridget wasn’t that the best thing you’ve ever heard?” He and Tyler looked so proud that I couldn’ttoo proud for me to say anything but “absolutely amazing”.
Next, we watched the video by seniors Butler Lesley and juniors Maddy Eford and Ashton Hightower, a parody of “Mrs. Right” by Mindless Behavior.
An even bigger audience of senior boys came in just to watch this one, and it did not disappoint.
“Where’s Ms. Howard? I gotta see her,” Butler and Maddy sang on the screen. Followed by Ashton singing, “Get me on the line, I gotta plot her.”
This music video was definitely more elaborate, even featuring Ms. Howard.
Overall, it was a great performance, and if it were posted on Instagram Reels, I’m sure it would do great there. I wish I had seen it before taking the first semester of precalc.
The final video we saw was apparently (all opinions) “the best for last,” as Lane said. And this is the video that gave this project the name of Howard-chella.
They started with a parody of “Beauty and a Beat” by Justin Bieber, which was played at this year’s real Coachella/Bieberchella.
This is for sure the video I am most connected with, just because I am probably Justin Bieber’s biggest fan and a proud Belieber.
Some of their lyrics included “find zeros tonight, I wanna find zeros oh oh oh,” and “what you got, the function equals to zero oh oh oh.”
Then they transitioned into ANOTHER Bieber song. And honestly, I didn’t even have FOMO from real Bieberchella anymore; I felt like I was there after this performance.
They switched to one of my top 3 Bieber songs, “Confident.” Which really got the lyrics “She got division I ain’t never seen anything like that” stuck in my head.
I had to give a huge round of applause to all these videos because they were truly impressive, and I could tell how proud they all were.
Next year, get your tickets to Calgebra’s Howard-chella!
