On Rapping With the Inner-City School Dude

Today, in American schools there is a self-perpetuating crisis caused by inadequate communications skills of both teachers and pupils. Integration, busing, changing life styles, and other societal pressures have thrown together diverse groups of people who do not initially understand each other. Their attempts to communicate with each other have too often resulted in chaos and psychological injury rather than constructive teaching and learning. This communication breakdown is not communicating. For example, the teacher calls the roll and discovers that John, or Sally, has not attended class for several days, or even weeks. Her solution may be to report the name(s) to the counselor and because of excessively large classes, adopt the attitude, It be's like Don't understand what that means? Don't feel badly; to a large extent, this is what rapping is all about. The quotation, It be's like is street language which means fatalistically, that an inevitable event has occurred and that's that. Of course, the matter does not end with this statement. After John and Sally, X is very likely to miss Moe, Mary, and Jane. Now this becomes a bit much. The counselor reports to the Assistant Principal who summons X to a conference. Sad to tell, this almost daily occurrence probably goes something like this? Teacher X, there are entirely too many students dropping out of your class. Why? (Now we get into the game.) X's answers are likely to run the gamut from student irresponsibility to school policy but rarely, indeed if ever, to one that remotely suggests self-guilt or communication breakdown. One might go so far as to say, I had good intentions, without realizing that intentions don't count, performance does. Let's leave this pleasant little chat and assume that somewhere down the line X is made aware by the Principal, Assistant Principal, or even this article, that her ineffective communications could cause dropouts. How could she remedy the situation? One

Inner city · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Child Development and Digital Technology · Digital Storytelling and Education · Education and Technology Integration