Teaching in Worcester

At the end of the Spring Semester last year, I made the decision to stay local around here in Worcester for my summer vacation. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to spend my time volunteering during those months as a GED teacher at the Worcester Youth Center.

The Worcester Youth Center is a facility where youth between the ages of 14 to 24 can get together after school and during the day to socialize. The Youth Center has aptly been described as a “safe haven,” a place where at-risk-youth can safely spend their time, as an alternative to hanging out on the streets. The Center has an eclectic list of free programs that teens can get involved in; everything from hip hop dance classes, to a rap recording study, to a hair salon, to afterschool programs, all run under the heavy influence of youth participation. I was lucky enough to join the GED program.

The GED test is composed of five different subject areas: Math, Science, Social Studies, English Reading, and English Writing. In our classroom, the two subjects that seemed to give the students the most trouble were the reading and writing portions of the test. On the surface, it seems to be a puzzling question. What is it about English that gives the students the most trouble out of all the subjects? Especially since, for many of my students, English happened to be their native language!

My answer? The cultural gap.

Here’s my question to the English department faculty: Do you know why people are jokin’ Jay-Z?

How many of you can say that you know what the word “jockin” means, or for that matter, what the entire phrase is a reference to?

Right away, my GED students would be able to tell you that people are “jockin Jay-Z because he got a Mercedes and you know about his ladies!”

Translation: People are jealous of the rapper Jay-Z because he has come into a lot of money and fame during the last few years, which impels them to spread rumors about him in an attempt to discredit him. Jay-Z’s ensuing rap song is an attempt to address these dissenters by going over their specific claims in detail and refuting each point.

Any of my Worcester students could tell you this!

Rap music is something they can connect with and understand on a fundamental level. And isn’t rap just a form of poetry? So if rap lyrics are understandable to them, then shouldn’t we be able to go through any other poem together and pull out the key elements as well?
One afternoon, a student and I spent quite a significant amount of time on trying to understand Emily Dickinson’s, “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” and by the end of it he was not nearly as close to understanding it as he was Jay-Z’s, “On to the Next One.” Why?

It’s not as if Emily Dickinson isn’t relevant to their lives! Her poem speaks brilliantly about hope always being present, ever enduring, and even more beautifully: hope never asks anything of you! Of course the students can understand that. Hope is specifically something important that I’ve seen a lot of my students cling to.

But why aren’t they able to pull that out while reading the poem? Why does a poem seem so daunting to them, whereas rap lyrics are so accessible?

Perhaps we need to start teaching poetry with Jay-Z:

Who is the speaker of the song and who is his specific audience? What is his tone and what words give you these clues? What is the overall message of the song? Symbolically, why does Jay-Z trade in his gold watch for a platinum Rolex?

Maybe we need to start with something that the students are the most familiar with. Rap culture is in their face every day! Perhaps if we start with something as relevant as this, they will be able to build up the skills they need to read a Dickinson poem. They will learn to pull out key words in poetry, learn to ask questions of the poem that they are reading, just as they already do with rap music.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from teaching in Worcester, it’s that teaching isn’t just a matter of getting your students on board with you. Rather, it’s more about getting on board with your students; meeting them at a level of their understanding first, on their terms. Then afterwards, once you’ve built up their own skills with something so familiar, we can move on to the unfamiliar. Start teaching by closing the culture gap.