Nearly every good school curriculum needs the greats of the English language. Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, Lil’ Wayne… hang on a minute.
Parents of students at a South Florida school are outraged after a teacher decided to bend the traditional high school canon to include the explicit rap lyrics of the tattooed Cash Money boss.
In a bid to get her 8th grade class to better understand the use of similes as a literary device, the anonymous middle school teacher used lines from a Lil’ Wayne track as homework, as reported by WPTV (via Consequence Of Sound).
The assignment saw the teacher handing out sheets of uncensored lyrics from Weezy’s punchline-dotted, expletive-heavy ‘Six Foot Seven Foot’ and instructed to “underline examples of figurative language,” according to upset parent Vanessa Guzman.
The tally of F-bombs, racial slurs, and sexual innuendo were clearly in breach of the Charter Schools of Boynton Beach’s policy of using only G-Rated material, and swiftly saw the teacher suspended for three school days after parents found their kids poring over lines like: “Two bitches at the same time, synchronized swimmers/ Got the girl twisted cause she open when you twist her/Never met the bitch, but I fuck her like I missed her.”
“They shouldn’t be teaching this stuff in school for language arts. I mean, who in their right mind would give kids something like this?” Guzman tells WPTV. “It’s telling the kids it’s okay to swear.” “Students were having difficulty grasping the concepts of literary devices such as: pun, simile, metaphor, so the teacher used colloquial material. This material did not meet the school’s standards…”
In a statement issued by the Florida school, headmaster Wayne Owens writes, “the lesson was for students to learn to identify literary devices. The teacher had already introduced Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare. Students were having difficulty grasping the concepts of literary devices such as: pun, simile, metaphor, so the teacher used colloquial material. This material did not meet the school’s standards and was not approved. The teacher recognizes that it was totally inappropriate for a school assignment.”
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To the 8th grade teacher’s credit, ‘Six Foot Seven Foot’ – taken from the 2011 Tha Carter IV album – is a prime example of Lil’ Wayne’s ‘punchline’ style of rhyming and playful use of the English language.
Such as the song’s famous couplet that reads: “Life is the bitch, and death is her sister/Sleep is the cousin, what a fuckin’ family picture/ You know Father Time, and we all know Mother Nature/It’s all in the family, but I am of no relation.”
We can’t help but chuckle at the though that some of the more net-savvy 8th graders would have jumped straight onto Rap Genius to cheat on their homework – and maybe becoming hip hop converts in the process.
As Consequence Of Sound points out, an older, more appropriate set of students are being given the opportunity to explore the lyrical and cultural merits of hip hop. Academics in Georgetown are offering a sociology course through the lens of Jay Z, the University of Missouri is offering a class on the relationship between Jigga and his Watch The Throne partner Kanye West, and Hova’s wife, Beyoncé, is the subject of a new gender studies course at Rutgers University.
