How Hip I Am

It was one of those days of hysterical laughter. After the fire alarm went off and they couldn't stop it but made us go back into our classrooms...can we say pointless? the day wanted to be a wash, but I kept trying to bring it back to the literature. I love book clubs because the kids can really teach each other and themselves most of the time. And I get a chance to watch them do it and laugh hysterically a lot.

So today a student raised her hand and asked me how to spell "soldier" to which I replied, "How do you think you spell it?" She tentatively started out, "S-O-L..." "Good," I replied, "keep going." "J-E-R?" "Hmmm. Not exactly. Unless you want to spell Soulja' Boy!" She looked at me funny, mostly because I overemphasized the two parts of "Soulja'" in a way that kids don't. They say it as if it were spelled "Soldier." I like to call out their funny morphed words for how they are really spelled.

I went up to the board and wrote "Soulja' Boy" and repeated it again emphatically a couple of times. This got the class laughing. "I think that the word you are looking for is 'soldier'" I said. And I wrote that one up on the board, too. "I know, it looks like it should be pronounced "sold-ier" but the "die" blend together." I realized then that I had underlined the word "die" in soldier. "Whoops! Sorry about that one! No one is taping me on his iPod right now, are you? That was not a political statement about how I feel about the men and women who are serving our country."

More laughter.

It's even better when I use teen slang in a really awful, older person way and then dance a little, too. Or when I tell my class that I was there with Tupac when he died and I held his hand in the hospital.

Actually, I did live in Las Vegas when he was killed, but I can't believe how many kids want to believe me for a second or two. Or how being uncool can be cool. But only if you do it in the right way and are appropriately ironic about it.

Amazing how kids understand irony.