Irony of the week

On the outside of my classroom door, one will find a weekly posting called the "Irony of the Week." After introducing my classes to the concept of irony early in the school year (a fun, interactive, multimedia lesson involving examples from the "News of the Weird" column, scenes from "The Simpsons," a live-in-the-classroom guitar/vocal performance of the hideous parody I wrote of the song "Last Kiss" as well as a deconstruction of the Alanis Morisette song "Ironic" followed by a reconstruction of it with the students rewriting it), the kids can't help but start to see irony in their lives at every turn. Which is my objective. It's a hard concept to understand, especially when 90% of the time they see the word used in sports journalism, or hear it from the lips of Oprah, the term "irony" is taken to mean simply "coincidence." Anyway, once the kids start noticing it, they tell their examples to me and I select one per week to post on the outside door. It's one way to make Monday mornings a little more exciting. Anyway, I figured that maybe Rockumentary readers might like a little piece of this action and so I'll start posting them here as well. We have a little catching up to do and I'll get to that later. For the moment, here was the first irony of the week from last September:

The term for a person who has an excessive fear, or phobia, of long words is a hippopotomonstrosesequippedaliophobic.

(This irony of the week brought to you by Tess C.)