How to Fix English Class

ASSIGNMENT

Imagine this.  You’re sitting in your dorm room, listening to the newly released Kendrick Lamar album and talking to your roommate about how much you don’t want to do your latest english assignment.  You’re supposed to analyze the rhetoric and rhetorical styles that authors use to make their essays good.  It’s a typical english class essay: everyone ends up researching an old, famous, white author and writes essentially the same 5 page analysis as everyone else.  Isn’t there anything else people can write about?

Suddenly, your roommate has a brilliant idea, what if instead of choosing an author, you choose a poet, or even a rapper?!

SPOKEN WORD

This is what happened to my friend Alex in his english class in his first quarter of college.  The class was told to write a biography of a Californian author who they thought the class should study next quarter.  While the rest of the class chose writers of the past, Alex chose to write about Compton-born rapper, Kendrick Lamar.  His argument was pretty straightforward:

“Too much of our curriculum is centered around literature written decades or centuries ago by white authors. Rather than learning about the recent history of California through authors of older generations, we should pick a modern, black poet like Kendrick. His music is a connection to the modern struggle of black Americans. Studying music allows you to still read the lyrics as well as experience the themes aurally.”

It was a great choice.  Not only do rappers use rhetoric in their songs, but because he’s a current artist, the issues his music responds to are the same issues we are trying to solve in society.  Isn’t that what education is all about?  Thinking outside of the box and bringing other cultures and thoughts together to reshape our opinions?  However, in order to study a current author, technology is needed.  In order to keep up with the issues that his music responds to, along with the music itself, those who study Kendrick rely on technology.

TECHNOLOGY SOLVES OUR PROBLEMS

Despite the ease in which technology made a boring assignment interesting and valuable, people still argue that technology is being overused in education.  They argue it’s making us dumber!  In reality, it’s just allowing us to use our brains for other things, like drawing connections between cultures.

My own view is that technological innovations are providing society with a method in which information is easily accessed and remembered, which allows education to be even more interesting and valuable.   To be clear though, there are still good and bad uses of technology.  I concede that by making information easy to access, people have become lazy and are in a position where they can gather new information without really learning it.  However, I still maintain that the benefits that technology provide outweigh the negatives.

THE WORLD IS FLAT

For example, technology brings cultures together and allows people to study the cultural issues other people face.  From other cities in the United States, (Kendrick’s hometown of Compton) to cities all across the world, different cultures and societies offer unique perspectives to today’s life.  Thanks to technology, we are able to gather all these different perspectives and become fully educated to the world around us. Some people may respond by arguing that technology will never be able to replace the methods in which people learned before technology was so easily accessible.  I would reply by clarifying what I’m saying; technology will never and should never totally replace prior methods of learning.  Its best use is in conjunction with traditional learning methods such as going to the library.  This ease of communication and shared knowledge can be extremely beneficial if it’s used in the correct amount.

ANTICIPATION TO LEARN

Technology allows people to find topics that they have never heard of before and easily become interested in learning more about them.  In her article, “I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight. On the App,” Jenna Wortham, a writer for the New York Times, suggests that smartphone apps actually bring people closer saying,

“If anything the pervasiveness of technology in my life has heightened my desire for actual one on one meetings” (396).

In other words, it is understood that interaction through a phone screen will never produce the same results as seeing your significant other in person, and in no way will social media ever be able to replace that.  However, it creates anticipation for the moment when that in-person meeting actually does happen.  I think this is a perfect correlation to education.  The online interactions serve as getting hooked by an new topic on the internet, but the real deal, where the real educating occurs, comes from the face-to-face discussions, which can be considered the hands on research that goes on at a library, in a classroom or through reading a book.

Similarly, had it not been for a multitude of different technological advances, Alex wouldn’t have ever thought to write about Kendrick.  It would’ve been an extremely challenging assignment.  From listening to his songs over and over and writing down the lyrics by hand, to then analyze them and then write a whole new paper.  Instead, all he had to do was search for Kendrick’s lyrics.  Genius music pops right up and he’s taken to a place where he can read and analyze the lyrics.  Also, on the side of the page he’s given someone else’s opinion of what Kendrick’s lyrics mean, yet another example of the shared knowledge that technology provides.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

When interviewed for Rolling Stone Magazine, Kendrick is vague about what the title of his third studio album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” means.

“That will be taught in college courses someday…. “You take a black kid out of Compton and put him in the limelight, and you find answers about yourself you never knew you were searching for.”

Kendrick’s dream of being studied in college courses is one that Alex shares.  They agree that by studying his music, new ways to look at society will develop.  However, in order for classes to study Kendrick, technology must be used in the classroom.  It wouldn’t be possible to study any artist’s music without the aid of machines that give millions of people access to the same information.  As long as technology is used we’ll be able to do exactly what I feel education should be all about, learning from everyone’s perspective in order to look at the many questions and challenges in society.

Here’s a link to an NPR youtube video that encapsulates the idea of analyzing Kendrick’s music in a classroom environment.

Works Cited

Wortham, Jenna. “I Had a Nice Time with You Tonight. On the App.” They Say I Say With Readings. Ed. Gerald Graff. By Cathy Birkenstein and Russel Durst. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. N. pag. Print.

Image Credit

http://www.avoiceformalestudents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-trials-of-kendrick-lamar-inside-the-new-issue-20150311

http://gifrific.com/ron-swanson-throws-out-computer/

http://theodysseyonline.com/unc/college-life-michael-scott-gif-edition/74750