Learner and Academic Setting
Learner
Over 90% of the students I teach are African American and many live with extended family members, in single parent homes, or in foster care. The reasons vary but generally include drug abuse, incarceration, or just indifference. A large number of students are living in conditions where financial resources are very limited and crime is rampant. School is an escape for obvious reasons: they will be served lunch, there is structure, and they have an opportunity to interact with peers who live parallel lives. The intent of this unit is to give these students another reason to want to come to school; to learn to freely express themselves while learning key educational objectives. The optimum results will be to create life long readers of poetry who can use critical analysis to understand what they have read.
Academic Setting
The school is located in an area of Houston that shows definite signs of how urban flight changes a neighborhood. It sits on the edge of downtown and within a few miles of the city's much adored Reliant and Astrodome stadiums, upscale apartment complexes, and chic shopping venues. Once a robust area with middle class residences, the neighborhood now has many of the attributes found in any city ghetto. Its fate can be attributed to the oil bust of the 1980's when much of Houston's economy relied on the oil industry. Before this time, many of the people of Houston were working for large companies like Cameron Iron, FMC, and Hughes Tools, making enough money to buy and maintain homes and live comfortable lives. As a result of the oil bust and the resulting loss of the employment base, many of the neighborhood's residents lost their jobs and in many case their homes. Thus began the downward spiral which is evident today. Broken cars line the streets, and stray dogs run freely in packs. People with obvious addictions roam the area asking for money, and there are those who encourage their addictive habits.
The school, which was previously a middle school campus with grades 6 – 8th is now a kindergarten – 8th grade campus. The change occurred when a local elementary school's attendance dropped and the school board decided that it was not feasible to keep it open. Therefore, elementary students were transferred to the middle school to cut cost.
I have taught 6th grade Language Arts at the school for the past three years, and I am always fascinated by the energy that students exude when we begin a unit on poetry. A typical lesson plan on poetry includes students reading and writing limericks and acrostics because the state adopted English text book has a chapter on these poetic styles. I usually modify the lesson to include free verse poetry writing. I am fascinated by how expressive students can be. Many of them write about a family member, the neighborhood, their fears, or their hopes for the future. They enjoy unstructured poetry writing. This allows them to express themselves using the vernacular common to some African American people usually referred to as "Ebonics" or "Black English." While I do have students who like writing poetry using a predictable formula, like the one found in limericks, they too tend to have the same themes and use the same vernacular. It seems that for both groups writing poetry is therapeutic.
I have mixed feelings about the use of Ebonics in writing, and I've asked myself many times, What qualifies dialect as language? According to Theresa Perry and Lisa Delpit in The Real Ebonics Debate Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children:
There used to be a method where you would look at how many words are shared between two languages. If it was 80 percent or more, you'd say they were dialects of the same language rather than different languages. By those criteria…African American vernacular English or Ebonics is more accurately described as a dialect than a totally separate language. But… it is the most distinctive dialect in the United States and the one that has gotten the attention of linguistics. (Perry, 59)
Therefore, for this unit, I will side with the Oakland school board which decided that "Ebonics/African-American Language should be used as a bridge to teaching Standard English." (Perry, 71)
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