Jon’s 8th Blog Post

Primarily I found the article group project useful because I was given a chance to take a look at the Common Core standards, which is especially important for an English Education major such as myself. The implications for critical literacy were especially encouraging for me! But back to the article groups – it certainly fortified this ongoing notion that there exists a plurality of literacies (hip-hop being one such literacy, as that was my article group subject). I also found a lot of value in experimenting with the various ways in which a teacher can use something common or immediately engaging to the students (such as a rap song, but I suppose it could be anything) and using it to bridge the gap to the world of academia. It’s particularly encouraging that we, as teachers, can make learning something fun, engaging and relevant to students. While reading the literature concerning the pedagogical value of hip-hop, it often became a matter of re-framing skills that students may already have in a kind of embryonic form. I can imagine that it would break down the intimidation factor and boost their efficacy.

A neat website to check out is rapgenius.com (as well as it’s sister sites rockgenius and poetrygenius which work in the same way) – a website that annotates song lyrics line-by-line. It’s user generated (meaning that some of the interpretations can be iffy, and certainly makes it anything but a scholarly source), but the basic principle is eye-popping and something similar could be fun for use in the classroom. It certainly serves to exemplify the dense, connotative, and richly meaningful nature of a particular lyric or poem. Below is a link to one of the better annotations.

http://rapgenius.com/Nas-ny-state-of-mind-lyrics