In this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer: "Reading, Writing, Rapping: Hip-hop's going from the top of the charts to the head of the class, even into Scholastic children's books. Teachers are using it as a learning tool - sometimes on the sly." And I thought, oh, no, not the dreaded "Cool Teacher" syndrome.
This wasn't a problem in the 1950's. Teachers weren't cool. They were square-jawed Butch Waxed guys with horn-rims or cat-glassed beehived women in sensible shoes. Anyone who was "hot for teacher" back then needed corrective lenses. But you knew who was boss- Mr. Square Jaw wasn't going to take any nonsense from punks like you. You shut up, shrank back in your desk-chair combo, and behaved until recess.
It began to go bad in the 1960's, the mid-1960's, when some of the female teachers started to let students know- subtly, obliquely- that they really, really liked the Beatles. The beehives dropped into flips and then straightened out, the cat glasses disappeared. The male teachers were still dorks.
Everything went to hell in the 1970's. Suddenly, without warning, it was acceptable for teachers to show up for work in- gasp!- jeans and long hair and massive Mike Nesmith/Neil Young sideburns and sit on, not behind, the desk crosslegged and "rap with," not instruct, the students. They'd show "relevant" movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey" in class and slip rock lyrics into the discussion. This is also when male teachers started to hit on female students and go off with the class stoners to partake in the weed and generally behave like students. At my school, you knew that one of the English teachers was sleeping with a student instead of his wife- they did a poor job of hiding it, and, eventually, when the student became legal and the divorce final, they married. You knew which teachers were hardcore stoners- they showed up glassy-eyed and mumbling. But unless you were a stoner who partied with them, you had no respect for them. The only Butch Waxed square jaws left coached the football team and taught Social Studies; the only beehives and cat-glasses were on the lunchladies.
And so it went until you ended up with "Boston Public." Monday's episode featured a storyline right out of "Room 222" or "The White Shadow"- hardened, uncool teacher and streetwise rapper kid clash, then eventually meet halfway and help each other grow and respect each other and even exchange the kind of rhymes only Hollywood would think passes for hip-hop, whereupon the rapper kid gets killed in an offscreen run-in with police and the teacher is devastated. Needless to say, this is not how it works in real life. What you get in real life is what's in that Inquirer article, where teachers are using Jay-Z songs to teach English instead of Shakespeare and teachers create raps to teach history. I haven't heard that one, but I am willing to go out on a limb here and say that a teacher-created rap song about American history has to be embarrassing. Any time teachers try to reach the kids by trying to BE like the kids, it's embarrassing. That was true when Mr. Campbell wore a tie-dyed t-shirt and referred to Jerry Garcia in his lessons back in 1976, and it's true now when the teacher stands in front of the class and does a rap straight outta Scarsdale.
Kids don't need their teachers to be hip or cool or fab or gear or boss or phat or ginchy or groovy. Teachers aren't any of those. They never were. Kids need someone to respect, someone who's the boss and lets you know it, someone who you want to please because you fear the alternative. They need the Butch Waxed square-jaw and the cat-glassed beehive, now more than ever.
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