Jay-Z is the greatest rapper alive.
Alright now that that is out of the way…
Kids are out of control. Right now myself and the homeboy Jonny D are getting our student teaching on (ha, can you believe that!) Anywho the following occurred in my classroom the other day.
Scene: Well we both teach in the suburbs where the ratio of minority students is probably 200:1.Eextremely affluent. The following is in an 8th Grade U.S. History class.
Royal: Alright class, how many of you have a cell phone? Let’s see a show of hands.
All students raise hands.
Royal: Hmmm, alright hands down. Show of hands….How many of you all are avid text messagers?
All students raise hands.
Royal: Alright hands down. Well I guess when I was your age, the thing everyone had was pagers. I remember having a pager and rather then having to go all the way home to see when I had to come in, my folks would just hit me up (yes I used the phrase “hit me up” while teaching) and let me know when to come home. How many of you know what a pager is?
…Silence falls over the room… I glance over to my training teacher and she simply says, “Makes you feel old right?” Hell yeah it does.
So I explain to students that the way they work is that when someone needs to reach you, they call a specific number that displays on the pager. The following questions were immediately asked:
1)How do you text them back?
2)So your supposed to make a call right from the pager right?
Stunning.
So I explain to them that what needed to happen if you were paged, was that you would have to find a payphone and make a call.
After saying that, puzzled looks swept over the classroom. I then told them that a payphone was exactly what it sounded like… a phone that you pay to use.
Student: Does that mean you can just swipe your card into it? Like at the gas station?
I just hung my head, looked at the ground and shook my head.
Royal: No. You actually had to put change into it for it to work.
Puzzled looks again. At this point I was starting to lose faith in this group of kids. My 2nd hour history class was just not getting it…until the only black kid in the class could no longer hold his frustrations back…Now keep in mind, his family just recently moved to the burbs so the kids could get a better education. Nothing wrong with that.
So young De’Marius jumps up and shouts:
MAAAAAAAN. Yall white kids aint never used a payphone before? Yall fools is spoiled. I remember we used to have to get change from the a-rab man for so we could call home when he used to get us in trouble.
Of course this was completely and totally unexpected. It was also hilarious. This was so funny I literally had to turn my back on the class to compose myself from laughter. Even my training teacher, who fled teaching in the hood right after college after having her windows smashed out, thought it was tooooo funny.
Outbursts from kids are the funniest things EVER.
Expect more of these tails from here on out.
-Royal
aside: Now my training teacher is this 36year old white women who lives in the suburbs-suburbs and has the husband and 3 kids and knows everyone in the church, community, hallways, etc…
Guess how she started class today:
What was funny was the fact that she thought that this was “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and played this video because she called some kid Jazzy Jeff. Wild in the burbs.
-Mr. Royal (Cooper)
