First of all, thank you very much for reading my blog! I hella appreciate it. I just graduated from Oakland Tech in 2004 and suspect that not too much has changed since then. I can write, thanks to reading, Youth Speaks writing workshops and UCLA, but I can’t count OUSD as one of those positive writing influences. Furthermore, despite my ability, I still struggle with grammar. It has been a self-taught crash course and is one of the things that will really hamper my foray into the journalistic world. I was taught to put a comma when I have to take a breath, just so you get an idea of my grammatical training.

I agree with everything you are saying. I am not advocating that you throw writing standards out the window in favor of ebonics education. I’m just saying that 1. We can’t blame the students for not knowing how to write and 2. That I have found it valuable to utilize alternative literature to boost student interest in reading and writing. It’s not that you throw out the classics, but that sometimes you supplement those with literature that meets them half way.

From working with Youth Speaks, a youth poetry org in the Bay Area, and running after school programs in South Central LA, I have found this tactic to be invaluable. Promoting under-appreciated authors from a variety of backgrounds can show students sides to reading and writing that they were not aware of. That’s why I bring up Junot Diaz. Yes Diaz knows the basics, but he utilizes a multi-lingual vernacular voice that can draw readers in in a different way. I have found it more successful to harness these types of books to promote the basics, than it is to keep pushing the same stuff over and over again.

I even would have students analyze song lyrics and draw parallels between them and poetry. Yes the basics are important, but in such a multi-cultural and multi-lingual country and city, I feel that we are setting ourselves up for failure if we ignore the mediums and stories most relevant to our students.

I believe that content is king, and that if material is interesting students will embrace it. In that vein, there was one program at Tech that proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt. TryUMF (Trying to Uplift My Folks) focused on character development, social theory, gender studies and a bunch of other great topics. It wasn’t too big on writing, but we were challenged to read and understand college level texts by Paulo Friere, Franz Fanon, bell hooks, Ché Guevara, etc from 9th grade on.

The key though was interpreting these works through a present day subjective lens that incorporated music, film, etc. For example, one assignment was a comparative essay between Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the film The Matrix. The writing needed work, but that first bridge of relevance was crossed.

Just a few thoughts. Yes the foundation is key, but I think we can get there from different angles, and promote our student’s creativity in the process.

Also, my argument is not give us money or we’ll rape you. My argument is that when money is taken from programs that keep kids safe and I mean ALL kids, you risk the chance of kids turning to something else like the streets WHERE they can easily be influenced to join gangs and commmit crimes, there needs to be some medium where everyone can agree.

I am reading the book No Excuses Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. I will spare you the detail of the content, but will relay one sentence. No one has invented a method to teach algebra to students who don’t know their times tables. I suspect that English teachers face a similar problem. There are some basic skills that one should learn at an early age; they lack the time to go back and teach those skills because they have body of work they must teach to prepare you for the next level. (That being said, I do recall that my school used part of the 9th grade year to ground the students in the fundamentals.) And unlike private schools, public schools probably lack the resources to have a basic writing class after the 9th grade.

The key in all cases is to enforce the proper skills at an early age. Show me a student who gets past 4th grade unable either to write a sentence or to multiply fraction, I will show a student who is in for a bumpy ride.