Katherine Streeter for The Chronicle Review
The problem was, I didn’t have enough guys in my elective English classes.
I teach at a small Lutheran college in central Kansas, and 75 percent of the male students are athletes (many of them attending on scholarship from other parts of the country), majoring in business, criminal justice, athletics training, or pre-med. With a few exceptions, these young men never voluntarily enroll in writing or reading courses.
One of the exceptions, a student-athlete named James, suggested a solution. “If you want guys in your class,” he said, “offer a class about rap.”
I am a middle-aged white woman who lives on a 40-acre farm. I don’t have a television. My college is in Lindsborg, population 3,500, a town founded by Swedish immigrants. On holidays the townspeople don clogs and ruffled shirts and do Swedish folk dances. Imagine the least-qualified candidate in the least-suitable place offering a rap class, and you will see me clutching a loaf of homemade rye bread and a well-worn copy of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!
But James was unwavering. “You can analyze anything,” he said, handing over his iPod full of Nas, 50 Cent, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. “I guarantee guys will take the class.”
So, despite my misgivings, I cooked up a January course called “The Poetics and Politics of Rap: From Run DMC to Lil Wayne.”
I tackled course preparations in my usual way: I started reading. By the last week of December, however, I could see that I had wandered into deeply unfamiliar territory. I was in the wrong neighborhood with nothing but a pile of library books and thousands of unwatched YouTube videos. After several days of dull panic, I seized on the only way out of my predicament: The students would have to teach the course.
Q’s brother had his own hip-hop recording studio in Florida. Charlie, a 300-pound offensive lineman—a white kid from LA—fiercely admired the late Biggie Smalls. Emmanuel kept talking about Drake like I was supposed to know who he was.
I required students to buy one text, Adam Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, which argues that hip-hop’s rhyming, metered lyrics resonate with us in ways that contemporary poetry does not. The students were expected to provide all of the songs we would listen to and analyze.
Any illusions that I was in charge of the class ended on the day Trey announced that it was time to practice freestyling, a concept I did not fully comprehend at the time. The notion of just winging it, making rhymes the instant they occurred to you, was several city boroughs away from my understanding of how careful language production works. But Trey insisted that freestyling would help us understand the way flow works in rapping. Scanning the classroom computer for samples, he cued a beat loop and started rhyming, his words rolling over and over into the “pocket” of the beat, smooth and consistent.
Q went next, and then, as I looked at the students sitting between him and me, terror leapt under my rib cage. We were all expected to join in the freestyling. Wait: What about the brainstorming? The peer-review workshops? Delicia was freestyling now. I looked at the door. How could I leave gracefully? What would I say? That I was about to throw up? That I’d just remembered an urgent meeting with the academic dean regarding the cancellation of this class?
Darren freestyled his rhymes, and the class turned to me. Two, four, six pockets of the beat came and went. “I have two boys,” I faltered. The words missed each pocket, skidding down the slope of the beat like loose scree. “They no longer play with toys.” I blushed, humiliated, but the students didn’t seem to care. Trey smiled encouragingly; Ashley jumped in on the next downbeat.
Later that week, Darren, Jordan, and Sarah walked into class and announced that their group—LBK Swag (LBK as in Lindsborg, Kansas)—had mixed some beats and written a rap. They gave an informal rehearsal, and by the time they’d finished, the class agreed that we needed a more ambitious goal for our final exam than the in-class performance described in the syllabus. Within minutes, the class had approved a new plan: All of us—including me—would perform in the college’s main auditorium; the entire campus would be invited. By the following week, the students had secured an evening slot, reserved a sound system, and distributed announcements via campus mail and social media.
I was scared. I possessed neither the competence nor the confidence to write and perform a rap. But it was my assignment. Encouraged by how much every rapper seems to love his mama, I decided to write about how we recognize the rhythm of rap in utero, from our mothers’ heartbeats; how even our first word, “mama,” is a rhyme. “We reach across the breach, we climb into speech / On the fly, all the while, there’s a beat, life beats, it beats, like a heartbeat.” I practiced it at home, to the horror of my sons, ages 9 and 11, who implored me never to perform it, ever.
In this moment of crisis, I turned to my students. I admitted that what I’d written didn’t feel like a rap.
“This is you,” Jordan told me. “You have to be true to yourself and perform it because that’s what rap is about. Keeping it real.” The others nodded their heads.
During the hour before the performance, my students were as nervous as I was. Charlie paced up and down the auditorium aisle, running his lines. Emmanuel kept swinging his arms and rolling his head from side to side, like he was warming up for the discus. Delicia, who’d nailed her rap beautifully in practice, was close to tears.
The show began, and we went onstage. More than 200 students and faculty—a third of the campus population—had shown up. Between each song, even during pauses within the songs, the audience hooted and cheered. Charlie’s football teammates were so loud that by the last stanza we couldn’t hear him. “Big Chucky P!” they chanted. My performance was easily the worst of the night, but the audience yelled and whistled at my shout-out to mamas. LBK Swag closed the set. Darren, Jordan, and Sarah had rehearsed their steps and moved together as they rapped their verses and sang their chorus. The crowd gave them a standing ovation.
Later in the week, I sat in my office and read the students’ rhetorical analyses. It was clear that they’d been thinking about who would be listening—roommates, teammates, coaches, teachers. The songs were about friends, competitors, home, place, love lost and found. My students were thinking about the form of their poetry, too. The chain rhymes, slant rhymes, perfect rhymes, rhyme leashes, forced rhymes—the play with sound, repetition, speed.
This final writing task revealed, in ways the performances could not, the students’ planning and worries—the thoughtfulness required for writing and performing poems they were deeply invested in, the challenges of participating in a community of artists they cared about.
Rap did bring male students to my classroom, but more important, it delivered a freestyle remix of the classroom dynamic in which students choreograph their own learning. It also reminded me what learning feels like. I wonder if sometimes teaching what we don’t know carries value for us, the professors. Maybe genuine discovery helps us keep things real.
