I’ll Give You Descriptive Language!

I am feeling a little bit overwhelmed, under the gun, and out of sorts.  Summer classes ended last week but I haven’t finished grading for my summer students because I’ve been working on syllabi, lesson plans, and reading for Fall classes that begin this week.  I didn’t intend to leave everything until the last stressful minute and the whys and wherefores of how I came to be sitting at my desk at 10:30 this evening with Mr. Dingo looking for dinner and Dingo Girl doing the pee dance and tugging on her leash by the door are irrelevant.  What is relevant is that I am trying to figure out how I’ve been to meeting after meeting after meeting at the school this last week and not-a-one of them has been informative in any way.  Sure, I’ve learned how to use technology in the classroom and can now include the new grading rubric that that the school is so gung-ho about, but will someone — ANYONE! — tell me why I have a sixty-page handbook for English Composition that includes nothing about what they actually want us to teach these kids?

In this desperate hour, I say “fuck ‘em.” I’m going to teach what I want.  What is English Composition about if not how to communicate with someone else?  So, this semester I’m going to teach my students important things.  Things that are applicable to their everyday lives.  For instance, in the analysis portion of the class, the kids are going to learn how to give directions like a true New Yorker.  This skill is particularly important when sending out invitations to a rave or a top secret sample sale that you want all your homeys to know about.  It’s also important that you can communicate this information in less than fifty characters because your Sidekick or cell phone screen will only display messages the length of the fortune in your cookie from Happy Fun Szechuan. 

I think teaching them to use language that describes or explains how to perform a task is going to be the easiest lesson.  Just this week I heard a young ‘un go into great detail about how to perform a seemingly complex task.  The first student was telling her friend how to stop his two-year old sister from dropping his cell phone down the toilet.  What follows is — no kidding — a near-perfect transcription of their conversation.

Young ‘un #1:  You just beat ha’!

Young ‘un #2:  Beat ha’?

Young ‘un #1:  Yeah!  Dat bitch mess wit my shit, I’d just beat ha!  Bam! Bam! (slamming fist into palm).  You have to teach them ‘spect and discipline.

Young ‘un #2:  No shit, mothafucka!  I’m gonna beat ha’ when I get home!  Hey, when you gonna see you kid?

Young ‘un#1:  Tomorrow.  I gots to wait until my moms gets off work so she can take me to her daddy.  She live wit ha’ daddy.  Man, these supavised visits suck. 

Young ‘un#2:  Yeah.  Dat suck.  So, anyway, when I gets home, I’m gonna beat ha’.

Young ‘un#1:  Yeah, beat ha!

Now, see?  That was descriptive language to describe a process.  If they had written that conversation in my class I think the grading rubric would give them an A.  An A+ if they gave a presentation complete with Michael Jackson impersonations and demonstrative visual aids such as “Bam! Bam!” (slamming fist into palm).

No Fs this semester.  If one of my students doesn’t get it, I will just beat ha’.  This system is so versatile.

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