At the end of the year students ostensibly tell me one lesson has stuck with them more than others. It is an activity I do every year to start the year, and here at the end of the year I am always surprised how deeply urban kids take that lesson to heart. As a teacher, we often wonder what one sentence, one lesson, comment, or joke, will stay with a kid when they go into adulthood. For me, it always seems to be the same thing.

I’ve been having my students reflect on the year, and all the writing we have done. I am a huge believer in portfolios, so here in the last two weeks of school my students are finishing up these binders of word-processed essays in all writing genres. I find they are just as proud of their portfolios as I am. If it were up to me every class would do this every year, so at the end of each year, and then at the end of high school, kids would have a body of work instead of a full recycling bin.

This week I have been asking my high school students a few simple questions: What are you most proud of? Of all the genres of writing we’ve covered, what was your favorite type? What lesson is really going to stick with you? What was the most important thing you learned?

They answer this: “I am going to always remember how to balance my ghetto, and how to code-switch.”

It has taken me years to realize the importance of this perspective as an overall lens with which to teach English in an urban classroom. We are not here to take anything away from their language or culture, we are simply here to add more layers. Education is not deductive, it is additive, and with language it MUST be this way.

I have written about my lesson on urban identity, and this idea of balancing your ghetto and code-switching on my blog previously. The activity starts with student listing the five most successful people they know and the five least successful people (you should discuss Success briefly). Then I have students rate each person on this scale:

Ratchet

Super Ghetto

Ghetto

Kinda Ghetto

Not Ghetto At All

Inevitably most people on their list follow a predictable pattern of success and less ghetto tendencies, and a lack of success paired with ghetto tendencies. But important conclusions can and should be made. The successful people are not necessarily that much less ghetto than the unsuccessful people, they are simply better at hiding it. That’s where English class comes in.

This is what I tell my students: “When you are around your friends and you want to tell them you saw somebody yesterday at the mall, you have to say, ‘I SEEN ‘EM!’ You have to say that because they will not understand you if you use a different grammatical construction. But when you are in a job interview and they ask you where you heard about the job posting, you have to say, ‘I SAW the posting online.’ ‘I seen’ is not a phrase in the English language. Under no circumstances is the word ‘seen’ supposed to come after ‘I.’ But in reality you have to use it, or your friends will look at your funny.”

The lesson ingrained in students’ minds is then not that they are wrong and their family is wrong and their culture is deficient. Instead it is that the world is a game, and if you want to be good at it you need to learn how to play. Cue English class.

One of my favorite ways to reinforce this idea is with Professor Sparky Sweets of Thug Notes. If you haven’t checked him out stop reading this post and immediately click here. You can come back to this article later. Sparky Sweets is hood intellectual. He is ghetto smart. He is book fabulous. He takes great works of literature and explains them in black vernacular with an emphasis on being ghetto. It is funny as hell and the kind of thing that works well as a warmup or cooldown. I like to show his analysis of a book after we have just finished it. In fact, now that we’ve done it a few times, students can’t wait to finish a book so we can watch Thug Notes.

I also use Thug Notes at the beginning of the year to talk about the difference between Summary and Analysis. Sparky basically separates every episode into those two parts. He starts with a spot-on summary of the plot, using funny cartoons and cut-out animations. Then he gets into the scholarly analysis of themes and symbols, and even pulls evidence from the text to back up his claims. It is the kind of 5 minutes in a classroom where there won’t be a single kid sleeping or disconnected, and can serve you in a few different ways academically, whether to explain the plot, preview a book, reinforce themes, introduce analysis, talk about symbols, and it is all done by a dude who knows how to balance his ghetto.

Make no mistake, Sparky is ghetto, but he also drops crazy academic knowledge, which in the end just makes him more impressive in both worlds. He is a dual threat, and I try to tell my students they need to be a dual threat as well. I even bought one of his shirts.

But be careful, because Sparky comes correct, and by that I mean when he is analyzing a book like To Kill a Mockingbird, he says, “Only a jive-ass fool would pop a cap in a mockingbird, cuz all those bitches do is drop next-level beats for your enjoyment.” Or even better, when summarizing the plot he gives us this gem, “After seeing his daughter making advances on a brotha, Mr. Ewell smack that bitch up raw.”

To me, that’s funny. To an administrator, it might not be. Of course, what engages students and what the bland paste-pudding world of education finds appropriate rarely meet.

There is something of a “Eureka” moment for students when they first hear about balancing their ghetto. It is like it shows them in a very clear way the reason behind school and something mysterious about their own identity they had not yet considered. It shows them a road they can take.

Here at the end of the year, it also ties in with the third thing students seem to get the most out of my class: Rhetoric. The idea that every word that comes out of your mouth, every text, email, phone call, and conversation is a place where they need to use the art of persuasion. Being a good human has a lot to do with being convincing, being able to communicate, and being able to play the game, and when I approach my English class with these ideas, it seems to resonate with kids so much so that at the end of the year this seems to be what they remember most.

Students don’t remember essays. They remember some books. They forget most of the content we teach them, but they do get a feeling. They have a visceral memory of you and your class, and they sometimes only take away a couple of broad lessons. I think as a teacher we have to remember that, because inspiration is sometimes more important than content, and a positive environment is usually better than a strict one. What do kids take away from your class?

I guess I have to be okay with them saying, “I learned how to balance my ghetto.” I think I am.