University Of Texas-Austin Lecturer Hits All The Right Notes In Classroom: VIDEO

AUSTIN, TX -- Is Excel mastery a desirable skill for a college graduate to possess? You Bieber beliebe it.

Clint Tuttle, a lecturer at UT Austin teaching Information, Risk and Operations Management, likes to end each semester on a good note -- literally speaking -- as his students prepare for their finals. Last week, he continued this tradition, taking the Justin Bieber song “Love Yourself” and turning it into “Learn Excel” instead. It’s something he’s long enjoyed doing for his students -- both to infuse levity as they sweat final exams but also as a refresher to remind them of what they’ve learned in his class.

But this time, his end-of-semester ritual has gone viral.

UT officials put out a video of Tuttle strumming his guitar while parodying the song for Excel purposes, and it’s been shared a multitude of times. The video starts off sotto voce, in quiet tones as he repurposes the Bieber song to correspond with his students’ lessons:

For all the times you sat up working really late

And those Excels that had you cursing my name

You said it’s way to hard and it hurt your GPA

And now you’re beggin me to raise up your grade

In a telephone interview with Patch, Tuttle said he’s been parodying songs for some time now. He studied piano as a child, but then taught himself the guitar starting in middle school, he said. Today, his wife serves as sounding board/critic, letting him know the funnier lines of his spontaneous compositions at home.

“She’ll yell from the other room ‘That’s funny!’ ” he said. “She’s there to give me her thoughts on everything.”

He said he got the idea from his good friend, Mark Rogers, a charter school teacher in Round Rock who has used the device for the amusement of his own students while imparting surreptitiously imparting reiterated knowledge.

“This one kind of blew up more than I would’ve ever imagined,” Tuttle said of his latest composition. His main audience on that one comprised non-business majors seeking a certificate in business.

So I simply want to write a song

To remind you all about the things that you learned in this class

Pivot Tables kick...butt

And you got your functions on!

Use countif, sumif, average, even vlookup too

Maybe 3-d charts too

“I had already been playing music for my class at the end of the semester, and I had a teacher who did that,” said he 35-year-old Tuttle, a graduate of the McCombs School of Business (along with Rogers) where he now teaches.

He’s appropriated other songs in the past with makeshift lyrics, including Lorde’s “Royals” (retitled as “Employable”) and Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk (reconstituted, with Rogers, as “Excel Funcs”).

He noted his old college friend is no slouch in the parody department, turning “Blurred Lines” into “Curved Lines” to musically discuss circular angles and turning “Gangem Style” into “Triangle Style” in conveying other angles.

“It’s not that I’m a huge Bieber fan or anything,” he said of his last composition. “I try to choose songs that have been popular that last four or five months. My cousin said this song is on the radio all the time.”

In the video of him singing (with some spoken asides to his audience), the laughter and hand-clapping of his students illustrates how receptive they are to the novel approach. But the overriding theme -- learning to use Excel as a marketable post-university skill -- is key, he said.

“There’s so much more in business that is data-driven,” Tuttle said. “It’s always something analysts have used to store information, summations and report and people also use it from a financial standpoint. I’m more focused on the data use of it.”

Tuttle said he’s surprised at the number of students he encounters after they graduate who tell him how prominent a role Excel figures in their jobs.

“Excel is not necesarily a huge data analytics tool, but it’s used a lot in business,” he said. “They may need to export data or splice and dice that data. It can also be used for 401K calculator forecasting, sales analysis trend analysis.”

Several former students have told him how they were able to help their bosses at work by utilyzing Excel spreadsheets, he said.

“A lot of students getting jobs out there are having to help crunch numbers to help their bosses answer questions.”

The palpable enthusiasm with which he speaks of Excel was replicated back in the classroom, as seen in the video. Tuttle’s in full crescendo by the final verse, no longer sotto voce but blowing the roof of the place in full voice.

Cause if you want to get the skills you need

Oh, baby, you should go and learn Excel!

And if you think I lie, just ask your boss

She’ll tell ya ‘you should go and learn Excel’

The students’ cheers and applause at the end vividly illustrate Tuttle is hitting all the right notes in the classroom. For more of Tuttle’s greatest hits, visit YouTube.com/clinttuttle.