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Kyla WardPLWP SI 2010In the Trenches Memoir30 June 2010

 The Art of Persuasion, or Hustling is Everything

A dark, muscular arm raised in the back of the classroom. I finished speaking

to another student and walked toward the next student with a question. Hepulled the earbud from his left ear. “Mizz Ward, I don’t know how to write apersuasive essay,” Luther said, for the fourth time in as many class periods,in as many mini-lessons on the “formula” for said essay. “I’m can’t do thissh*t. I don’t write; I’m a hustla.” He folded his arms across his chest: positionone of the obstinacy dance.

I stood near his table, hands on hips in my authority figure pose: position oneof the you’ll do this or you’ll fail dance. “You’re a hustla? What does thatmean? And what does that have to do with persuasive essays?” Mind you, asa biracial (half African-American, half German-American with some Native

American thrown in there somewhere) woman who grew up in a middle classhome, I was familiar with the term but wholly unsure of where my dearLuther was going with this. We could be delving into territories inappropriatefor the classroom.

He smirked at me, nodding his head to the rap song ringing into his right ear.“I sell CD players.” He scratched at the sparse black goatee on hisseventeen-year-old chin with one hand and clicked the next song on his YouTube playlist on the laptop in front of him with the other.

Luther had been one of my most difficult students to get to. I had come in atsemester as the student teacher in his Language Arts class, a positionfraught with authority issues, and he had taken a while to warm up to me. Hehad grown up all over the Midwest, jumping from relatives’ home torelatives’ home. Held back, he was more physically mature than most otherstudents in the junior class. His maturity didn’t stop there, however. As ayoung, African-American man with a questionable childhood, Luther hadmore street smarts in his little finger than I did at nearly double his age. Hedidn’t exactly love my sense of humor (play number one in my “get the kidto do the work” playbook), and he didn’t see any future for himself except forwith what he was good at, which, apparently, was selling CD players on thestreet. Language Arts 11 was not where he felt he would learn the skillsnecessary to survive after high school—if he made it through high school.

Serendipitously, I had my own “ah-ha” moment, even as my mind raced withthe legal implications of his statement. “Luther, don’t you have to persuadepeople to buy the CD players?” I waited with baited breath to hear himconfirm what I already knew.

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“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you have to convince the people who come to you to actually buy theCD players?”

“Well, yeah, Mizz Ward, but that don’t mean I know how I’m doin’ it.”I knew that his insecurity about writing, about being considered anacademic, were going to stand in the way. I could also see that the priorknowledge he possessed, that which we as teachers prize so much, wasn’tsomething he had access to. Luther didn’t realize he was already persuadingpeople when he “hustled” them into buying products from him. I sat down inthe empty chair at his table. “Flip your paper over and grab a pen.” He didso. “Now, give me three reasons why I should buy a CD player from you.”

“Uh…I don’t know. Depends on what kind it is.”

“Okay, since I don’t know what kind you sell, you just pick the best kind. Youwant to make the most money, right?”

His eyes lit up. “Well hell yeah, Mizz Ward. I don’t sell ‘em to make nothin’.”He scratched at his goatee again. “I guess you should buy it because it’s gotgood features. It’s a Pioneer.”

“Write that down.” He did. “I know that brand, but how do I know that thisPioneer CD player has good features? What does it do that others don’t?”

“Well, it has skip reduction, you know, so it won’t skip if you go over train

tracks or hit a curb or somethin’.”

“Okay, make a bullet point under ‘good features and write ‘skip reduction’.” Iwatched as he first drew a small black circle and then wrote next to it. “Giveme two more reasons.”

“It lets you program what songs you wanna hear and it has a remote.” Hedrew two more bullet points and wrote down “programs songs” and “hasremote.”

“Good. Think of each of those bullet points as a topic sentence for a body

paragraph. You have three, so how many paragraphs do you have?” Fromthere, I talked to Luther about how to expand his outline, giving more detailsand explanations as to why those “features” should convince someone tobuy the CD player, and how to make those reasons into a thesis statement. The light bulb came on. Hustling = persuasion.

Although the persuasive essay he had been assigned to write had nothing todo with CD players, the individualized lesson on persuasion I gave Luther

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Kyla WardPLWP SI 2010In the Trenches Memoir30 June 2010helped him to write a well-developed essay on why high school studentsshouldn’t be forced to do community service in order to graduate. The lessonalso helped Luther teach the classmates at his table. I watched and listenedas Luther scooted his chair up to each of his tablemates, saying things like

“Why should I listen to Plies (a popular rapper)? Give me three reasons.”

It is an established point that all teachers should do what they can to relatelessons back to their students’ prior experience and backgrounds. We allknow that one of the first steps of getting a student to get it is to activatewhat they already know about the whatever it is we want them to learn moreabout. Yes, I was thrilled that my education classes had paid off in gettingLuther (and a couple others) to write the persuasive essay assigned to him,but I was more thrilled that I had given Luther the opportunity to connectprior knowledge he didn’t realize he’d had to the assignment so he would besuccessful. In effect, I had hustled him away from hustling himself into

thinking he didn’t know how to do it.

It is important for us as teachers to recognize when a student has priorknowledge he or she is having a hard time accessing. It is up to us to realizethat students like Luther couch the terms of their prior knowledge in otherterms, terms familiar only to their individual backgrounds. My students often joke about how I can stand in front of them and give them a lesson onanything by using the slang and terms that are most recognizable to them.End of year evaluations I give my students on the class often includecomments like “you could always make me understand something byrelating it directly to me.”

Now, if that isn’t differentiated instruction, I don’t know what is.

Cut to a year and a few months after student teaching. I was offered aposition in the school I had student taught at, and was happily ending myfirst year with my freshmen and sophomores. Luther approached me on thelast day of his senior year to tell me he had been accepted to and planned toattend Penn Valley Community College for a couple of years before hemoved to Texas to run an urban accessories store in Houston with his uncle. Icongratulated him and asked why he had changed his mind—he’d told me inthe prior year that he wasn’t planning to go to college. He looked at me withthat same smirk, scratched his goatee, grown a bit thicker now that he’dturned eighteen, and said, “‘Cuz you are a straight hustla, Mizz Ward.” And Iam.