CCSS - Calculated, Creative, Subversion of the System

Common Core State Standards are here to stay (at least for a little while). Far too much planning and money have gone into it for it to disappear with nothing existing as a replacement. Education and politics have been inundated with common core pros and cons and facts and myths since 2009. Common core has been simultaneously demonized, canonized, and politicized through conjecture, hypothesis, hyperbole, misinformation, and disinformation for the past six years. Regardless, common core is here to stay, for now.

While both sides of the argument have legitimate concerns and there are some serious issues to settle regarding teacher evaluations, politicized attempts to co-opt curriculum, and the role of  charter and corporate schools complicating funding issues, teachers need to embrace the amazing opportunities common core offers while simultaneously fighting the system that implemented it. In fact, why not use common core as one of many means by which to fight that system.

The thing is that the common core, like anything else relatively new and untested, has the opportunity to be used in ways in which it may or may not have ever been intended. As a teacher at a high school with a student population that is 96% ethnic minority, with a majority of that population classified as English language learners, I whole-heartedly embrace the opportunity, as implied by those that champion common core, to focus on the students' education more so than their graduation, understanding that an educated student will most likely graduate.

After over a decade in the classroom, I don't know much, but I do know that...students want to learn. Most successful teachers I have encountered are effective with students because those teachers have a distinct ability to infuse their passion for learning into their pedagogy in a way that promotes and honors their students' desire and ability to learn. In my estimation, common core clears the path to allow that to happen on a much greater scale.

I also know that most of my students like hip-hop and most of my students love learning about underlying truths that have been hidden from them for most of their natural born lives. With those two pieces of knowledge and the mandates of common core to teach depth instead of breadth, the doors have flown wide open.

When students learn and see that over the past forty years hip-hop went from a voice of the oppressed, after civil rights legislation still left many African-Americans impoverished and disenfranchised, to a multi-billion dollar business that packages hyperbolic urban fantasy as a potential real world lifestyle choice for themselves and their peers, students want to learn more. (A brief, be it incomplete, collection of hip-hop videos that outline the changes in the genre over the past forty years can be accessed here.)

When students learn that much of the music they consume is controlled primarily by three international multimedia corporations which misleadingly promote ignorance and violence as a viable and lucrative life choice for ethnic minorities, students want to learn more. (An independent documentary called  What Ever Happened to Hip-hop does a decent job of explaining this on a basic level.)

When students learn that the incarceration rate in the United States is the highest in the world, that it is disproportionately made up of ethnic minorities, that the increase in incarceration rates coincides with the beginning of the Civil Rights era and the start of the war on drugs, and all of that parallels the evolution (or arguably the devolution) of hip-hop, and all of that has a direct impact on the community in which the students live, students want to learn more.

And when they want to learn more they begin doing things like analyzing, synthesizing, connecting, critiquing, creating, proving, and applying concepts on their own. Once that happens, they are much more willing to struggle through complex texts on the subject, on their own. They are much more willing, on their own, to find supporting facts and evidence that will help them show their friends and family that they've all been screwed by the system.

And once that happens, hip-hop provides an opportunity to create an authentic, relevant, cross-curricular experience with real world implications that incorporates story-telling, poetry, tone, figurative language, social justice, civil rights, economic inequality, self-advocacy, community empowerment,  music appreciation, and artistic expression, through the process of research, analysis, synthesis, critique, and the remaining laundry list of buzzwords associated with current pedagogical trends.

It is now the duty of educators to make those buzzwords work in their favor. As much as "experts" try to hypothesize, proselytize, compartmentalize, compromise, commercialize, surmise, or agonize over the future of education, no one can be certain of what the current national education experiment will produce.

With that in mind, teachers need to realize we are at the edge of a new frontier, much like hip-hop in its infancy. Similar to the early progenitors of hip hop, teachers need to create strength and unity from the confusion in which we exist. We need to seize the opportunity to create and promote a new way of approaching education that flies in the face of tradition and has the power to redefine an aging institution. It's time to spread the message, and fight the power, by all means necessary. The choice is yours.
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A song with the sentiment: As  a lover of music I get many ideas and much inspiration from the music around me. As a result, I aim to include a song or video with each blog post that echoes at least some of the ideas shared in that particular posting. Enjoy!

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Thanks for reading. Please share your opinions, comments, stories, strategies, suggestions and well articulated criticisms. Follow me on Twitter @teachtothetruth or contact me via email at teachagainst@gmail.com