Student Expresses Concern That His Teacher Has ‘Breaking Bad’ Decorations In Their Classroom
She's not the only teacher who this hilarious mix-up has happened to, either.
Zurijeta | Shutterstock It's just a part of getting older — one day, you wake up and find that you and the youth no longer share the same understanding of things. The way the internet and social media have taken over our lives can make this gap feel even more pronounced, with often hilarious results.
Such was the case for Mandi Jung, a teacher on TikTok, for whom these cultural shifts manifested in perhaps the most face-palmingly amusing mishap possible.
One of the teacher's students was worried by her 'Breaking Bad' classroom decor.
Sixteen-time Emmy winner "Breaking Bad" is arguably one of the most iconic television shows of the past 20 years, so much so that even middle schoolers apparently know about it despite the fact it's been off the air for more than a decade (which is so long in our light-speed culture that "off the air" is a phrase today's kids probably don't even know the meaning of!)
The show centers on actor Bryan Cranston's character Walter White, a struggling Albuquerque high school science teacher who leverages his chemistry skills to begin making and distributing crystal meth to secure his family's financial future after he's diagnosed with stage-three cancer.
As you can probably guess, the show is dark, to say the least, and full of all kinds of "NSFW" and certainly school-inappropriate violence, language, and plot points.
So imagine Jung's student's surprise and concern when they spotted decor themed to the show in her classroom — or at least, they thought they did.
What her student thought was a 'Breaking Bad' poster was actually the Periodic Table of the Elements.
"A student asked me today if I was allowed to have Breaking Bad decorations in my classroom," Jung, who's known as @sabocat on the internet, said in a TikTok video. "I was like, what?"
She then panned her phone to show the decoration her student was concerned about. "It's the periodic table. That's what he was talking about!" Jung said with a laugh.
Given its chemistry-heavy concept, the Periodic Table figures heavily in "Breaking Bad's" design. The show's title card features the first two letters of both words in a style mimicking the periodic table's two-letter identifiers, as do the names of each actor when shown in the show's opening credits.
Clearly, the student had never encountered this anywhere else and just made the kind of assumption kids often do in situations like this.
Of course, it's easy to feel like this is a face-palm moment where those of us no longer in the bloom of youth yell "Do they teach kids ANYTHING these days?!" (YOU probably said that — I would never, given how extremely cool and hip I still am despite my recent arthritis diagnosis.)
But think about it — did YOU have any idea what the periodic table was before encountering it in middle school? I know I'd never seen it before, and if I'd been 12 in a "Breaking Bad" world instead of the days when such a program would never have been allowed on the air in the first place, I probably would have made the same mistake!
Jung's fellow teachers found the mishap instantly relatable.
For her part, Jung found the mishap hilarious — as befits her reputation as the "fun teacher" at her school, especially after HBO's John Oliver referred to her as such in a recent segment on his show "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver" about the struggle over school lunch funding in Minnesota, where she teaches.
Judging from the comments, it definitely seems like Jung isn't alone when it comes to this classroom mix-up. Several other teachers said it's all part of the job of teaching science nowadays.
"Girl, I teach chemistry in Albuquerque. I get it," one teacher wrote. Another commented, "I'm a bald chemistry teacher with a beard," like the show's main character, Walter White. "I'm sure that whatever you're imagining the kids say, I've dealt with it."
Even teachers of other subjects have had run-ins with the show's cultural cache among today's kids, for whom the streaming era has put all kinds of culture on kids' radar that never would have been there in previous times.
"In AP Lit., I was teaching 'Ozymandias' by Shelley," another commenter wrote, and the kids immediately told me that is the name of the most watched episode of Breaking Bad. We made it a cultural connection moment."
That opportunity for "cultural connection" seems to be something Jung understands, too, and her "fun teacher" spirit has resonated far beyond her students. After her appearance on "Last Week Tonight," she's received an outpouring of support, with several boxes of much-needed supplies arriving at her house after Oliver's viewers found her Amazon wishlist online.
It's well deserved by a teacher who seems to have what is arguably the most critical skill a teacher needs today — the ability to bridge the generation gap between her and her students by simply embracing their often hilarious foibles rather than considering them the end of civilization as we know it like so many often do.
Perhaps she'll one day have a similarly impactful relationship with a student that Walter White had with his former student Jesse Pinkman. Granted, their bond was a life of crime, but whatever!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.