And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

I've had a rather difficult week or so. My shower leaks into my room, the washing machine leaks into the shower, and my roommate's cat insists on sleeping with me in rather uncomfortable positions (on my chest! on my knees! on my hips!). We can't reach the landlord, a plumber would probably charge up the wazoo to show up over the holiday weekend, and I am broke. So fuck.

But something unprecedented happened to me this week. I had a good moment at work. Not even a moment, a good forty-five minutes. And it was with fifth graders, who are really just young middle schoolers.

Anyway.

So I recently got this book, Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat, edited by Nikki Giovanni, and I was super excited about it. It's got all sorts of poetry, from

Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

and Langston Hughes

Playboy of the dawn
Solid gone!
Out all night
Until 12 - 1 - 2 a.m. Next day
When he should be gone
To work -
Dog-gone!
He ain't gone.

to Maya Angelou

There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues

and Queen Latifah

There's a dream in the future
There's a struggle that we have yet to win
And there's pride in my heart
'cause I know where I'm going, yes I do
And I know where I've been, yeah

and loads of other fun stuff. So I had some free time at the end of the lesson plan, and these kids had been bugging me all day to put on 94.9 (one of the local rap stations that plays the same crap over and over), and kept accusing me of not liking rap or Li'l Wayne (I know, right?) and so several of them got real excited (and surprised) when I mentioned I'd studies some hip hop in college. I mean, not doing it, but using it to look at history and contemporary landscapes and whatnot. I cannot beat or box but I do know a little something about hippity hopping. At least enough to teach a fifth grade class on it. And so, while some of the younger students did their homework, my very resistant, noisiest, and most distractable students were talking about hip hop.

And so i played them some Sugarhill Gang, and some Queen Latifah (they'd forgotten she was a rapper), and some Langston Hughes, and a few other things, and we talked a little bit about where the music came from, and then I let them mess around with the CD player and the book.

And those were all good moments; it was super fun to teach these kids something they could relate to and got excited about. But then came the best good moment.

They'd been looking through the list of selections on the CD, listening to all the music and skipping over the spoken word, but finally they'd found something to really get excited about. They asked the entire class to be quiet, and then started playing one of the final tracks on the disk.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech.

For real.

These 9 and 10 year old elementary school students, and primarily the ones that'd been fighting the work all day and talking too much and asking me to turn the radio on were mad crazy about Dr. King.

A good moment.