A high school teacher and his students took "Uptown Funk" and synchronized dance moves in the halls of their Texas school and created a viral video that has more than 8 million views.
Scot Pankey, a theater arts teacher, worked with students at A. Maceo Smith New Tech High School in Dallas to produce the five-minute video set to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars' song.
WFAA reported that the creative dance number took one run-through, one practice take, and about two weeks to plan.
Pankey told Dallas’ Fox 4 News that he heard the song before Christmas and thought, “I have the best students in the world and we can pull this off.”
As a project-based school, he said thought it would be a good activity to shake off the holiday funk when the students returned to school. “We didn’t even think anything about it going viral,” Pankey told Fox. “We just thought, ‘let’s have our friends see it.’”
Student Jackie Bennett told Fox that each class was organized for its parts of the video, and that Pankey encouraged the students, saying, “We got this. We gonna do this.”
Pankey said the value of working together on something like this for the students was important. He told Fox that he ended up leading the students through the dance because “we have a lot of timid students. They’ve never danced before. I really am not a dancer, and I (told them), if you will do this, I will do it with you. I just wanted to have their backs.”
What they learned was teamwork, he added, “That we can work together as a team to release their fears. Our students are technology-based students, they learn about technology,” Pankey told Fox. “This is totally taking them out of their comfort zone, showing them that ‘hey, I can do something that maybe I never thought I can do before.’”
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