As I’ve been leading a book study on Ratchetdemic, I have had to contend with quite a few conflicting responses to Emdin’s idea. Emdin, as you might recall me talking about, essentially is arguing that our system is set up such that both students and teachers are discouraged from being their true selves in school. His examples primarily center around hip-hop culture, how African-American students and teachers are viewed as a little too loud, too confrontational, too themselves, and that this is not viewed as scholarly behavior. The issue with this is that kids can be learning (and teachers can be teaching) material just as effectively through a hip-hop lens as they can through the Stepford ideal of happy kids sitting quietly in rows absorbing knowledge. (There’s a lot more to Emdin’s argument, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll stop there. Read the whole thing, as they say.)
Teachers who struggle with Emdin’s thesis do so for different reasons, but the one that seems to rise to the top most often is around a distaste for chaos. Kids who are able to constantly be themselves (maybe, as Emdin put it in the keynote I saw him give, “a little too much themselves,” can make for a loud, chaotic classroom. This doesn’t just extend to kids, but also to teachers. “What if a teacher’s true self is that they like to constantly drop f-bombs?” another asked me. “Would Emdin say that should happen?”
While the latter argument is a bit of an extreme straw man, I do think that it brings about an interesting question. There is a line between a kid “being themselves” and a kid “disrupting learning.”
Here’s a moment I’ve been thinking about.
I was recently asked to demonstrate a Structured Academic Controversy again. I took the students and gave them readings on whether the US should enter World War I in 1917. Half read a page saying why we should, half read a page arguing why we should not. Then, groups of four had to try to come to a consensus (using only information we knew in 1917). Should the US enter World War I?
That moment when I tell the students that they are no longer obliged to argue their assigned side on a SAC is one of my favorite moments of teaching. Sometimes, students come to a consensus in their foursomes pretty uneventfully. Sometimes, they spend some time trying to persuade. Either way, it’s a delicious moment of 100% engagement as kids talk and listen about the evidence in front of them.
In the midst of that, one young woman had some thoughts, and a serious desire to persuade her groupmates of her position that the US should enter the great war. As a result, in a class I was running, I heard this kid shout–yes, shout–this:
“They’re fucking with our boats! They’re fucking with our boats!!!!”
I have been thinking about this moment and what it stands for ever since, especially as I work my way through Emdin again. What exactly did we have there?
My teacher self was able to experience two things simultaneously.
The first, truthfully, was joy. This young woman was doing exactly the work and thinking I wanted her to do. She had considered the evidence, found something persuasive (the Germans were going after American boats, at the cost of American lives), decided it was an overriding concern that made everything else small, and went to tell her kids about it. The argument was thoughtful, compelling, and passionate. She was 100% engaged and interested. Germans attacled the William P. Frey and the Gulflight 110 years ago, but this young woman was still pissed off about it. She was all in on World War I.
I call that a win. This profane kid learned a lot that day.
But, as one colleague told me, “you can win and lose at the same time.” If a principal had been there to see this kid’s passionate argument, I strongly suspect that her first response would not have been to compliment my ability to get the kids excited about a somewhat esoteric subject. It would have been about the F-bomb.
Now, in the moment, I obviously did not ignore the f-bomb. I went up to the kid and said this: “Hey, I really appreciate the passion. Sounds like you’re really into this! Can we express our passion in a school-appropriate way?”
The thing that mattered to me most in the moment was complimenting this student. She was doing the work! I also would imagine that this kid, a kid whose dress and hair were outside of our usual norms (think punk rock), probably is typically first seen as a hoodlum and only secondly as a scholar. It feels important to me to flip that: first hear her arguments about World War I, and then deal with the unfortunate phrasing. If I talk to the kid like she’s a student, she’ll be far more likely to act like a student. It’s more important to me that she understand the material than I teach her to act nice and proper.
But I couldn’t let the f-bomb go unnoticed. So I decided to give a little reminder that this is still school and there are still some expectations for language here. If I were the regular teacher and this became habitual, there would be more, including a referral to admin as a last resort. But in the moment, as a guest teacher without a relationship with the student, I decided to make her rude language the secondary concern, and her thinking about World War I the primary concern.
I think Emdin would be on my side.
Yes, decorum matters. We need to teach our students that we act, speak, and dress differently in different situations. Any situation where a kid is actively preventing their classmates from feeling safe or comfortable needs to be dealt with. One of my pet peeves as a coach is going to classrooms where kids chatter along while their classmates are speaking in full-class discussions. I don’t like the message that sends: that the kid speaking has no value. That has to be dealt with. A kid acting like a jerk can’t use “this is a critical part of my personality” as a defense. As my favorite singer and poet puts it, “it’s not like you would lose some critical piece/if somehow you moved point A to point B.” The kid concerned about German attacks of the 1910s will still be a quirky, smart, badass punk rocker if she learns how to avoid bad language at school.
But if we value decorum over thought—over learning—things become problematic in a hurry. Do we want a quiet, calm atmosphere so much that we squash a certain kind of kid away from learning?
There’s a line between a loud, rowdy, learning kid and a disruption. There’s a line between organized chaos where kids can learn and disorganized chaos where they cannot. I can’t draw that line on a map, but I know it’s there, and I think a lot of effective teaching is knowing how to stay on the good side of it.
Does this make any sense to you? What is the difference between a loud learner and a disruptive one? How do we see it, and how do we handle classrooms with each?