Eleven years ago today, Google introduced the world to Gmail, with an unbelievable 1GB of free storage.1 Like everyone else in 2004, I thought it had to be an April Fool’s joke. 2

Say what you will about Google as a company3 — they have had some GREAT April Fool’s jokes4 — their Animal Translator will always be one of my all-time faves. 5

I’ve always wanted to incorporate a crazy April Fool’s joke in my class, but I could never get around to planning anything that was worthy. In fact, the only prank I’ve ever really planned that might have been a decent one, I didn’t actually have the nerve to pull off:

It involved teaching the first day of class of the year with a really bad asian accent6 for the entire class period. 7 The rub would be that I would only do that for ONE class period, and not the other two8 so that when those kids would talk to people in my other classes, their friends would be like, “What the heck are you talking about? I understood him just fine!” Ahhh… if only I’d had the nerve.9 10

Incidentally, tomorrow is April 1st, and we are STAAR testing tomorrow…

1. Hotmail was the king of the hill for webmail in the day, and they offered a measly 2 megabytes. If you’re tech-illit, 1GB is a thousand megabytes. [↩]
2. Ah… 2004. That’s the year the Lakers had Karl Malone and Gary Payton. Along with Shaq, and rape-trial Kobe. A couple of months after Google introduced Gmail, while I was overseas, the Lakers traded Shaq. I wished that was an April Fool’s joke… [↩]
3. hint: I don’t trust them. [↩]
4. One of these years on April 1st, Google will announce that they’re changing their name to “Skynet”… only it won’t be a joke. [↩]
5. Perhaps my favorite April Fool’s joke ever, however, was the EGM Street Fighter II “Sheng Long” dig. You’d have to be my particular generation of vino to appreciate that one… [↩]
6. you know, the kind that you get with those college TA’s that makes you fear for the future of your academic well being… [↩]
7. Intended effect: Kids would walk out of class saying things like “oh $#!& I gotta drop this class, I can’t understand a think he’s saying [↩]
8. since we teach on a block schedule, we teach 3 classes a day with one planning period [↩]
9. Or the ability to actually fake a really bad asian accent. That’s actually really difficult to do for 90 minutes… [↩]
10. As it is, this was a prank I could never pull off back at McNeil since everyone knew who I was already — and similarly I won’t be able to do it next year at Round Rock — so the boat has sailed on this one. [↩]