“Taking a Hip-Hop Route to Teaching a Love of Language”

By Nina Siegal
The New York Times, September 27, 2000
A green and white circus tent at the edge of a country pond was pulsing with a bass
beat last week, as Toni Blackman and FreeStyle Union, a group of rap artists, weaved
back and forth on stage, microphones pressed to their lips.

Ms. Blackman asked the audience of high school students and teachers to provide
her with themes for the group's next impromptu rap.

''Bowling,'' yelled one teenager.

''Spirituality,'' shouted another.

The D.J. cranked an insistent funk beat, and the rappers began rhyming, telling a
story of a young woman searching for her soul in all the wrong places.

''I remember Sally from the Valley at the bowling alley,'' began Ghost, another rapper
in FreeStyle Union, waving a hand along with the beat.

Ms. Blackman continued, ''She got baptized, got lost, got water in her eyes.''

The performance was not part of a rap show, but was the highlight of a conference
promoting the use of hip-hop culture in the classroom that took place at the
Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival last week at Waterloo Village in Stanhope, N.J.

Ms. Blackman's group demonstrated several ways to improvise rhymes, or freestyle --

by telling a story, solving a riddle or arguing opposing points -- to music. But the
underlying goal is to get students in touch with impromptu expression and thereby
encourage them to read, write and think more deeply about language. Judging from
the audience response under the tent, that approach is wildly popular among
teenagers.

In much the same way that some teachers in the 1960's used the lyrics of popular
folk musicians like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan to interest students in lyricism and
rhyme schemes, many English teachers today are embracing rap lyrics as a means of
drawing students into poetry and literature and connecting to them in a way that
traditional poetry might not at first.

A few years ago, teachers at the conference said, many schools shunned rap,
because of its reputation for crude language, its derogatory messages about women
and its association with violence. But as hip-hop has become more ingrained in
popular culture, and as educators have put a greater emphasis on the positive
aspects of rap -- like its wordplay, rhyme schemes and focus on contemporary social
issues -- using rap music to teach classical poetry has become an increasingly
familiar strategy in the classroom, poets and teachers at the conference said. (There
are no statistics that track the prevalence of such programs in schools.)

Stanley Kunitz, 95, the nation's newly appointed poet laureate and a featured
speaker at the Dodge Festival, which drew 15,000 people, said he embraced the use
of rap in the classroom because it helped excite young people about language and
the creative act.

''Rap is part of that spoken tradition,'' he said, ''and representative of the spontaneity
of invention, and is associated with the broad base of our democracy.''

But, he said, rap is not an end in itself. ''I think the important aspect of introducing
any populist speech pattern is to link it with other manifestations,'' he said, ''such as
nursery rhymes and even popular songs and other forms of speech that have a
different kind of energy from utilitarian speech.''

And he cautioned that using rap in the classroom could be ''dangerous territory,''
because of the crude or violent nature of some of its lyrics.

Ms. Blackman, 30, a bright-eyed singer with a smoky voice, and other members of
FreeStyle Union, based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, regularly travel to schools across
New York, Washington and South Africa, conducting workshops for teachers and
students.

She said they were often invited by teachers, particularly older teachers, who believe
they have lost touch with their students and are eager to find a way to excite them
about the material.

''It's giving the kids another way of thinking about writing and literacy,'' Ms. Blackman
said. ''In order to improvise well and freestyle well, you have to have vocabulary, you
have to have a knowledge base to draw upon. So, it's a back-door way of getting kids
excited about language.''

Tony Medina, a professor of English at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus, and
the author of the book of poetry ''Sermons From the Smell of a Carcass Condemned
to Begging'' (Long Shot Productions, 1998), said he recently used lyrics from a song
by Nas, a popular rap artist, during a poetry workshop in a high school classroom in
New York. The song is written from the perspective of a gun being used to commit a
violent crime.

After reading Nas's lyrics, Mr. Medina asked his students to write their own poems,
drawing on their experiences, but looking at them from an atypical perspective. For
example, if a student wanted to write about police brutality, Mr. Medina might
suggest writing it from the officer's vantage point. He said that after students were
able to look at their own lives through the prism of the poetic craft, they would
consider poetry from different time periods, or different countries, more
sympathetically.
''You can introduce rap to them and then go to poets who come from their
background, like poets who come from the 'hood,'' Mr. Medina said. ''Then they say,
'Wow, the stuff that comes from our background really matters,' and that appeals to
them. From there, you will open the kids up to Robert Frost or Shakespeare or Emily
Dickinson.''

But many educators and school administrators are still wary of rap in the classroom.
Mr. Medina and Ms. Blackman said they were sometimes criticized for allowing
students to read crude language or use it, or for studying politically controversial
material. Mr. Medina said he was not afraid of allowing students to read crass words,
though he pushes them to explore more sophisticated language in their own work.
Ms. Blackman does not allow cursing or derogatory terms in her freestyling
workshops.

Others are skeptical about rap's value as a teaching tool. Robert Pinsky, whom Mr.
Kunitz is succeeding as poet laureate, said using rap to get students interested in
poetry might be ''a valid way to start.''

But, he added, it may lead students off on the wrong tangent.

''The truth is, it's starting from show biz and mass culture,'' he said. ''The most
important thing about poetry is that it is not mass culture, and the medium of poetry
is the opposite of a mass medium. It is anyone who says the poem aloud. The idea is
that words sound excellent no matter who speaks them, even if it's not Sir John
Gielgud, not a rapper, not a performer by nature.''

He is also concerned that using popular culture to draw students to poetry may be a
form of pandering to the lowest common denominator.

''It would be too bad to underestimate students, or to assume that they are only
capable of understanding things that mass culture has already trained them to
appreciate,'' Mr. Pinsky said. ''Kids like lots of different things, and you can't predict
what kids are going to like based on their age or ethnicity or anything else.''

After her performance, Ms. Blackman asked audience members to give free styling a
shot. Four young men, two black and two white, took the microphones and wowed
the crowd with off-the-cuff rapping.

One of them, Joe Freeman, an 18-year-old senior at the Germantown Friends School
in Philadelphia, elicited rousing applause from the audience with an impromptu
rhyme about homework. Although he said he appreciated contemporary poets like
Mark Doty and Saul Williams, and writes verse on paper, he said he also valued what
rapping teaches him about self-expression.

''There's an obvious difference between classical poetry and hip-hop, because rap is
about the streets and about yourself, whereas classical poetry is about being
beautiful, and looking at things from a different angle,'' Mr. Freeman said. ''I don't feel
like it's about the person's life, but hip-hop and rap is. It's a message right in your
face; you can't miss it.''

Other students who attended Ms. Blackman's workshop said they were disappointed
that their schools had not embraced contemporary musical styles to help them think
about self-expression.

''They don't let us express our feelings or introduce it in a way that would make it
more fun for us,'' said Tashawyna Richardson, 15, a junior at Binghamton High
School in upstate New York.

Her classmate D'Asia Grace said she started writing rap-influenced poetry on her own
and found that reading the work of other poets, like Langston Hughes, Robert Frost
and Shakespeare, in school added to her appreciation.

''Whatever poetry you read, you have to have an open mind,'' said Ms. Grace, 16,
''and not put blockades on it, like saying what you have to learn. That helps you like
it.''