Just so this whole thing isn’t about comic books, lets talk about music. I used to hate country music. My cousins are red necks. This isn’t me being mean, they’ll own up to it. Back in high school, my cousin Hollie took me to school and we had to listen to 104.1 WTQR the whole way to school. I was versed in mid 90s country music because of this, but I wasn’t happy about it. It probably softened me up a bit, but what really made me like country music is the Meat Puppets. The Meat Puppets are a punk band that happens to have a little bit of country twang to their songs. This became the gateway that made it cool and okay for me to like country music.
I felt that it was my job to help my students find their Meat Puppets of books. They all liked reading these books called the Bluford series because it was about things they could identify with. It was about teen pregnancy or gangs, the things they see everyday. Like Ol’ Man Freire says it’s about words creating the world and all that good stuff. A few of the students would try Harry Potter or Twilight, but most of them wanted to read about “real” things. The thing I liked about the Puppets was that their songs were fast and really strange, but that little bit of twang served as a honky-tonk inoculation. They took something I understood, punk music, but added a layer of the unknown. It frustrated me that I couldn’t find my student’s Meat Puppets, so that they could go on to find the joys of Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, and Lyle Lovett or Hemingway, Monk Kidd, or whatever.
The multimodal component is The Meat Puppet's "Enchanted Porkfist," from their third album Up on the Sun, however, my favorite alumb of their's is Meat Puppet's II.
I've never heard of the Bluford series, but that sounds like something I should familiarize myself with.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of it either, but they're short books about urban-teen life, but they're written on a 6th grade level.
ReplyDeleteI understand completely with the need to find those bridging books. I find the same problem true in music, where students will completely discount classical music. What many of the students do not realize is that the underlying progressions of many of their favorite songs, take root in classical music.
ReplyDeleteI love what you say about being exposed to what you know, but with a layer of the unknown attached to it. This seems like a very strong means of teaching literacy to contemporary students. Almost like a bait-and-switch. Here's something you know; here's something you have absolutely no idea about, buried in what you know.
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