by Lil Wayne
My Long Division song will be written to the tune of 6 foot 7 by Weezy. I’m going to force my nieces and nephews to be in the video, so it should be a lovely family affair. As I was working on the lyrics I was thinking about teaching and gimmick-ness and Teach Like a Champion. There’s a part of the intro to TLAC that I stumbled and struggled over for a few days, and in fact am still sort of dealing with:
“Making material accessible is acceptable – preferable, even – when it means finding a way in, that is, finding a way to connect kids to rigorous college prep content; it’s not so great when it dilutes the content or standards”
I agree, but I think I really need to hear more about what Lemov means (notice how I didn’t call him Dougie – that was only because I have MAD respect for him!). He goes on in this section to talk about not tailoring literature to brown students that’s written by brown authors. He kind of takes the position that the best literature is written by white folks (FALSE, no group has a lock on “the best”) and is thus the most important for kids of all races to have access to. I mean, sociologically speaking, the cultural capital part of the argument is true. Students need to be able to reference Hamlet, solve for x and will be asked to do so in and outside of the classroom when they’re in college. It pains me to know they’ll likely not be asked to recall Morrison or Achebe. I doubt they’ll be asked to recall the details of the Mexican Revolution. That’s the reality, brown kids probably need to know Shakes better than anyone.
So whytf am I writing a song about Long Division (other than the fact that it’s awesome and most adults can’t do it – but don’t get me started on that)? It’s fun, it’s a good hook, but if I can’t measure it’s contribution to student learning than is it worth it? It might be an effective hook for some students and totally ineffective for others. It might be a fun way to get my niece to love math, but maybe I shouldn’t use it in my classroom. Am I underestimating my students already? Do they need a hook? If kids in wealthy districts are expected to sit still and divide 226 by 17 than why am I not asking my students to do just that and to do it 3 times faster and with 100% more accuracy?
Still I want my students to feel like math is awesome. Maybe we should build something so they can SEE math in action. I’m feeling like a failure because I can’t figure this out. I will – I get that, and I’ll mess up a million times, but, in times like these I sort of doubt the TFA approach. I don’t know wtf I’m doing and the stakes are too high for the education of young children to be in such obviously incapable hands.