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Manteca High teens get the Shake
Take-off of Harlem Shake thats gone viral
WED-Harlem-Shake-LT
Manteca High has joined the viral dance craze, posting what is believed to be the areas only tribute to the Harlem Shake. The video was filmed in Donna Taylors math class. - photo by Image courtesy of YouTube.com

VALLEY SHAKE

• Students from Enochs and Central Catholic high schools are organizing the “Valley Shake,” a Harlem Shake video shoot for all Central Valley teenagers. The students will meet at Silva Park in Riverbank on Sunday at 2 p.m. The event is free, but donation will be accepted to benefit the PALS program.
• VIDEO: To see Manteca High’s Harlem Shake video, visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiT1sNxljTI

From Australia to the set of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to the depths of a college pool, the Harlem Shake has canvassed the globe in a series of short Internet clips.

Count Donna Taylor’s math class among the meme’s thousands of backdrops.

Manteca High has joined the viral dance craze, posting what is believed to be the area’s only tribute to the Harlem Shake.

“This is how we learn math,” read a comment on the “Harlem Shake Manteca High School Style” page on YouTube.

The video was organized by seniors Seayer Zadran and Mario Gaytan and posted on Friday, Feb. 15, just before the Manteca Unified School District broke for a three-day holiday weekend.

Since then, the video has garnered 270 views – far less than the University of Georgia swim and dive team whose underwater mob scene has garnered nearly 20 million views.

“We didn’t do it for views,” Gaytan, 17, said. “We just wanted to have fun at our school.”

The video took two days to organize and seven minutes to shoot. When the music stopped, Taylor’s Pre-Calculus class went back to work.

“We missed one reading problem but we made up the time today,” Taylor said, “so no loss of time in that area.”

The Harlem Shake made its Internet debut on Feb. 2, according to its Wikipedia page.

The original video is of five Australian teenagers, known as The Sunny Coast Skate, hanging out in what appears to be a college dorm room.

The video opens as all do – with a single dancer either masked or in helmet, bouncing to the beat of electronic musician Baauer, while his friends or the surrounding crowd pay no attention at all.

When the bass drops at about the 15-second mark, the video jumps to a wild party scene: Suddenly the entire room is dancing wildly to the music.

The central character bounces in place, his arms cast to his side limply. Two flop about the bed. Another stands on a chair facing the wall. And the fifth, wearing nothing but underwear, dances with the central character.

The video had been reproduced approximately 44,000 times as of Feb. 15, according to Wikipedia, each with their own variation or twist, set of costumes, locations and crowd sizes.

A search for “Harlem Shake” on YouTube on Tuesday produced 78,300 results.

The track tops the iTunes charts in the United States and Australia, and is No. 2 in the United Kingdom and Germany.

Manteca High put its own spin on the Harlem Shake.

The video is shot from the teacher’s perspective and the open moments capture a class of approximately 20 students studying.

Suddenly, a boy wearing a Manteca High football helmet, letterman jacket and jean shorts jumps from his first row seat, fist-pumping the sky with both arms.

No one notices.

When the video switches, the boy is wearing a blue bucket on his head and waving a tennis racquet.

The crowd has every oddity you could imagine: two students stand facing a whiteboard; Hulk makes an appearance, smashing about the foreground with giant green fists; one student plays a horn; three students play the limbo; and another waves an American flag.

Even Taylor got into the act. She can be seen at the back of the classroom waving a multi-colored stuffed animal.

Taylor agreed to the shoot last Thursday, after Zadran and Gaytan had their request rejected by another instructor.

“Pre-Calculus can get dry at times and you like to keep your students awake and into things,” she said. “It was a spicy way to have an interlude; to show the kids that you’re real at the same time. They got a kick that I joined in.”