This Uplifting 'Friends' Parody Nails What It's Like for Kids Stuck at Home

Sabrina Rojas Weiss
·2 min read

Click here to read the full article.

How much do your kids miss school? It may be hard to tell, especially if you have older kids who seem perfectly content to play video games all day — with the occasional passing attempt at their homeschool assignments. But if the students of a middle school in New Jersey — and anyone else with eyeballs and a heart — watch this Friends parody video their teachers made for them, we’re sure they’ll get a little nostalgic for their long-ago school days.

“V.M.S. the One Where They Learned Remotely,” reads the Friends-style title card of the video, uploaded by Voorhees Middle School’s STEM Teacher Christine Blizzard-Wrobel.

More from SheKnows

What follows is the kind of patched-together video we’ll all see a lot more of, now that everyone has to stay socially distanced from each other, but it forms a pretty sweet whole. One teacher plays the electric guitar intro to the Rembrandt’s “I’ll Be There for You,” as others do some umbrella choreography to kick off their version of the Friends theme.

Then each teacher delivers their own lyric of the song, rewritten to reflect the current reality of staying at home during the pandemic:

“iPad’s a joke, it’s broke/ and you just sit all day.”

“You’re still in bed, it’s 10 … school began at 8.”

“You burned your breakfast, so far … things are going great.”

Some teachers put action sequences into their bits — pretending to splash water at each other, jumping on trampolines, holding up instructional materials. Others sit at home with their own kids. And well, some of these educators are certainly more musically inclined than others.

The point is not that this is a polished piece of art. But when the world out there is so scary and uncertain, it’s beautiful to realize that the teachers of this school wanted to send a message to their students that they’re really thinking about them.

“We’ll be there for you,” says the final card. “Love your VMS teachers.”

Controversial statement of the day: This beats watching Courteney Cox and her daughter on TikTok.

If you need to wean your kids off of reruns and YouTube, here are some other activities that will keep them busy.

Launch Gallery: 21 Ways to Keep Kids Busy During School Closures

Best of SheKnows

Sign up for SheKnows' Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.