Period Three Prophet

Our prophet was an unlikely fellow. A hip-hop artist, cleverly calling himself MC Language Artz, joined us for the morning in my difficult third period. He was only a little taller than I, and apparently my own age, but the weight of the serious hip-hop underground community lay heavy on his hoodie-clad shoulders and baggy-jeaned knees, so that I felt, as I do so often among the truly hip and urban, like a sheltered child, less experienced than even my own fourteen-year-old students, much less this guest.

He had come to talk to my students about the critical importance of expression as a doorway to freedom and adulthood. I sat in the corner on a tall stool, leaning against the wall and thankful just to have an hour to remain silent and listen. I had been losing my voice all week, fighting a cold and regretting the decision to read stories aloud to my students at the end of the semester. The three days of stories were not connected to any unit to come, and we had done almost no writing at all about them. "We're just going to enjoy some stories together this week," I'd told them.

"No homework?" they asked.

"None."

"No assignments?"

"I doubt it. Let's just relax into some stories together."

They didn't understand this, really, but I did. It was like those teachers who show movies to their students when they're tired of teaching. But I'd already done that this year, so like the conscientious parent I dredged out some stories to tell my children. This is peace for me, and even some kind of healing, that we hear the same stories and, despite these huge divisions, can share one little experience in the vastness of our collective memories. And we'd enjoyed it, but now I had no voice. So I listened to the hip-hop guest speaker talk to my students about literacy.

He was harsh. He told them things they didn't want to hear, that they were isolated and pretentious and too concerned with being cool. He told them that state governments used elementary reading tests to forecast the number of prison cells that would be needed two decades down the road. He told them that one in four inmates in high-security prisons was illiterate. And they shuddered in silence, my squirrely third period class, in the presence of this stone-faced young prophet.

The guest speaker shared a piece about racism and the achievement gap between rich and poor, issues that I see every day among my students but could never express with such grace or relevance. And as I listened and watched the faces of my students, feeling like a guest in a world to which I do not belong, I thought about the importance of language. That I could have told them the same things, but that he, hip-hop prophet, knew the words they would hear, the tones that would crash through ninth-grade indifference and hopelessness, enough to frighten and inspire.