This month we are challenging our you to document your life. Each morning we post a daily mini-challenge on GOOD.is, Twitter, and Tumblr, along with a testimonial from someone on the GOOD team who’s already completed it.
Join us tomorrow, when we challenge you to document the inside of your fridge.
Once you’ve snapped a photo, be sure to share it with us on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook by using the hashtag #30DaysofGOOD. We will then post a roundup of your images later that day.
Middle school seems to operate on its own strange laws of physics. One minute, two kids are arguing over who stole someone’s seat. The next, a student reports every detail of lunch gossip like breaking news.
Navigating that restless energy is middle school teacher Mr. Lindsay. In his TikTok video, he shares some of the chaotic moments that have viewers laughing while perfectly capturing the goofiness of teaching adolescents.
Lindsay offers a small peek behind the curtain at a day in the life of a middle school teacher. It’s even funnier because he captures the experience in such a visceral way. Here are some highlights from his day teaching middle schoolers:
“It started off bright and early with brain-rot attendance. So I called out their names, and they were one-upping each other about, like, using brain rot to say that they’re here.” (Brain rot is a slang term describing a shortened attention span caused by overconsumption of online content.)
“And then we’re doing some review for state testing. So we’re talking about fractions, and one kid’s like, ‘How do I get, uh, how do I turn a whole number into a fraction again? I’m trying to turn two into a fraction—do I put the one on top?’” Lindsay explains that you place the one underneath, because it’s two divided by one. “Two wholes divided by one.” The kid starts laughing: “Two holes.” Lindsay says the student couldn’t contain himself, so he had to address it with a conversation.
One kid stands up and asks, “Mr. Lindsay, would you slap me for a million dollars?” Lindsay responds, “And I was like, ‘Dude, give me $10.’” Even though the whole class erupted in laughter, he acknowledges that he probably shouldn’t have said that.
“Another kid’s like, ‘This class smells like farts.’ And another kid across the room is like, ‘It’s probably ’cause of your breath.’”
He describes two kids walking quickly around the room. Lindsay says, “What are you doing? You should be working. Why are you not, like, sitting somewhere?” One of the students responds, “Well, he keeps telling me to sit down. Good boy. So I’m not going to sit down anymore.”
What makes the scenarios even more entertaining is the energy and performance Lindsay brings to describing the events. He sums up the experience, sounding a little tired yet exhilarated: “And so that is a little bit of what teaching middle school is like.”
A teacher gestures as students raise their hands. Photo credit: Canva
People flood the comment section with appreciation
Sometimes, a teacher’s perspective might sound more like a comedy than the reality of a typical day. In this case, people filled the comment section with appreciation and validation. Middle school has its own ecosystem, and many people can relate:
“Middle school teachers are champions of patience and masters of chaos!”
“Highly accurate. I had most of these today. Except as an art teacher, I also have to deal with people making butts and other body parts out out of clay as well.”
“He is not exaggerating”
“Love this. makes me feel so much better. “
“‘Is Santa Clause a religion?’ – a question one of my students asked me today”
“Just a normal day in the life of a middle school teacher”
“Herding cats would be easier!”
“My college students LIVE for your updates. Keep doing the good work”
Students and a teacher in science class. Photo credit: Canva
The video offers more than just humor
Lindsay accurately captures what many of us remember about middle school. It’s a time when kids feel things deeply. Every tiny inconvenience can feel like a major catastrophe. Relationships can swing wildly from “friends for life” to “don’t even talk to me.” It’s simply one of the most awkward times in our lives.
A 2025 study found that middle school is often a mismatch between developmental needs and rigid school structures. This age group craves independence, identity-building, and peer recognition.
Another 2025 study found that almost every small social or academic moment feels monumental. Each day, classroom experiences directly impact how students feel emotionally.
A student raises his hand in class. Photo credit: Canva
How teachers interact with students matters
Among the many moments to reflect on and laugh about from the video, it’s important to remember that middle school teachers have a significant impact on their students’ lives. Teachers are constantly diffusing tension, redirecting chaos, and keeping lessons on track. More often than not, educating young people is a labor of love.
A 2025 systematic review covering 165 studies found that teachers capable of course-correcting a stressful classroom moment have remarkable value. They foster stronger student engagement while creating a better classroom atmosphere.
A 2026 study on middle school motivation found that students want classrooms with not only emotional breathing room, but also space to ask questions and make mistakes. Blurting out random thoughts, oversharing, and derailing a lesson with unrelated questions are all normal parts of development.
After all the interruptions, mini-dramas, and systematically weird moments in the classroom, Lindsay’s enthusiastic recap of the day is simply fun. The video captures what we all remember but may have forgotten over time. Middle school is full of friendship, emotions, growth, chaos, and lessons that begin to shape us into young adults. We can all laugh at these moments, but it’s the patience and guidance of teachers like Lindsay that give them depth and meaning.
The 1974 Genesis double-LP, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, is one of the most ambitious (and, to some, inscrutable) concept albums in rock history, following a character named Rael along a cosmic journey through the shadowy New York City streets, elaborate chambers of 32 doors, surreal cages filled with stalactites and stalagmites, underground rivers, and caves with spooky creatures. It was like a proggy Pilgrim’s Progress as envisioned by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
When it came time to translate that vision to the concert stage, Genesis made a risky choice: debuting the entire 94-minute saga, front to back, with large chunks of the audience likely unfamiliar with the songs. (The first date of the tour, November 20, 1974 in Chicago, occurred two days before The Lamb hit stores.) The visual side of the project was as trippy as the lyrics, including scene-setting projections and a number of bizarre costumes for front man Peter Gabriel—like one particularly grotesque monstrosity, The Slipperman, that drummer Phil Collins later called an “inflatable dick.” (“It was all very Spinal Tap,” he said in an interview for the album’s 2007 reissue.)
If you ever wanted to appear naked onstage, this was probably the perfect time to do it—and one of the band’s roadies pulled off that hilarious prank as the tour neared its end. The silliness was especially notable, given the brooding atmosphere within Genesis—Gabriel, feeling constrained by the band’s schedule and eager to stretch his wings, had already informed his bandmates that he planned to leave following the Lamb tour. Perhaps the roadie, whom the band recalls being Geoff Banks, was attempting to add some levity. What we do know is that he made his nude cameo during one of the final shows, building on the suspense from a visual trick.
“There was a point in The Lamb where Rael sort of splits, and we did that on stage,” Gabriel told filmmaker John Edginton in a full-band documentary interview. “I would be in the Rael outfit, and there was a dummy on the other side in exactly the same outfit. There wasn’t a lot of lighting, so it would explode, and you wouldn’t know [which was which]…Of course, for the crew, as we approached for the end of things—first of all, [Rael’s] jeans would have their flies undone with a banana hanging out. Gradually, they’d have more and more fun…”
Keyboardist Tony Banks also talked about this infamous moment in a passage from the 2007 book Genesis: Chapter and Verse. “No one apart from the group, and the immediate circle of the group, knew that Pete was leaving and that this could well be our last tour ever,” he said. “And the roadies always had to have some fun. There was this moment in the show where Pete would be on one side of the stage with a dummy on the other side, and the strobe lights would flash on them so you couldn’t tell which was which. And, of course, for one of the last shows, one of the roadies got up there naked on the other side and took up the pose in place of the dummy…There were people watching this, my wife, for instance, practically in tears because they thought that it might be all over for Genesis, and we had a naked roadie on stage[—]was this how it was all going to end?”
But all’s well that ends well, and Genesis managed to carry on after Gabriel’s departure by upgrading Collins to the dual role of drummer-singer. In a testament to their continued friendship, Genesis even reunited with their old singer in 1982 to help him escape mounting debts.
This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.
Photo credit: Screenshot from YouTube / @LiveAid – U2 singer Bono embraces a fan pulled out of the crowd during the band's 1985 performance at Live Aid.
By July 13, 1985, U2 was a massively popular rock band: riding the wave of two successive chart-topping U.K. albums (War and The Unforgettable Fire), even being anointed the “Band of the ’80s” in a Rolling Stone cover story. But their definitive moment of that year was a performance at Live Aid, a benefit for Ethiopian famine relief staged before 72,000 at London’s Wembley Stadium and broadcast to well over 1 billion TV viewers. They were already larger than life, but now they had the perfect venue and grandiose crowd interaction to showcase it.
Their short set featured a 12-minute version of their atmospheric 1984 song “Bad,” which they stretched out to include some quotes from The Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” and, more famously, to accommodate the stage maneuvering of front man Bono. Halfway through the track, the singer gestured to the audience with a “come on”-type motion, eventually requesting a few female audience members be lifted out of the crowd by security.
According to some accounts, including viral social media posts, this was some kind of “rescue” attempt, and while it’s unclear precisely why Bono took action, the story has become a staple of the U2 canon.
In the above clip, you’ll see two fans guided to the apron area in front of the stage, where Bono briefly embraces them. But the most notable moment is when he jumps into the muddy area by the barricade, asking security to hoist over a teenager, with whom he slow-dances and offers a kiss on the cheek. Cameras, of course, caught the whole thing. Bono was a showman from day one, after all.
Over the years, there’s been a lot of debate and discussion about this Bono-meets-fan moment. In a detailed breakdown of the performance, Rolling Stone reports that the third fan was 15-year-old Kal Khalique. Someone by that name shared their Live Aid memories with the BBC, writing that they weren’t even at the show to see U2: “My sister and I were desperate to see Wham!, so we had made it down to the front of the stage. Half way through the day U2 came on suddenly Bono was pointing to me in the crowd and after a [number] of other girls were pulled out, he finally jumped down and got the security guys to pull me out and danced and hugged me, and I even got a kiss. I’ve been a huge U2 fan ever since.”
In 2011, The Guardian cited an article by The Sun, who apparently tracked down Khalique. “The crowd surged,” she reportedly claimed, “and I was suffocating—then I saw Bono.” But The Guardian also notes that Bono “had long made a habit of pulling girls out of the audience and dancing with them.” Was this just another example, only amplified by the drama of a hungry rock band playing the biggest stage imaginable?
Reasoning aside, it’s the kind of larger-than-life moment that came to define U2. It also happened at an ideal time, just ahead of their next album, 1987’s The Joshua Tree, a critically acclaimed and multi-platinum blockbuster that topped the Billboard 200 and spawned some of the bands most enduring singles, including “When the Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You,” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
Live Aid also spawned one of rock’s most celebrated performances ever: Queen’s triumphant eight-track set featuring anthems like “We Are the Champions,” “Radio Ga Ga,” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” That show was even etched into film history with an exacting recreation in the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.
