What's Wrong With This Picture

I was walking for a cup of coffee this afternoon and sat for a minute to let my brew cool before drinking it. Two kids with backpacks, I guess leaving school, came walking by and paused on the sidewalk in front of me.

One had a little boom box, bumping a song I recognized as a rapid-fire tune by Busta Rhymes. If you know hip-hop then you know that Rhymes rhymes at a ridiculously fast pace. You have to have special ears or a stereo that can play in slow motion to understand what he's saying the first dozen or so times you hear one of his songs.

Don't get me wrong. I was a fan back in the day. Rhymes ticked me off recently though over a moral issue, but that's another blog entry on a different day.

So anyway, one of the kids stopped 'cause his shoe was untied. While he knelt to deal with it, his friend with the boom box stood by and waited patiently. A few seconds pass, the shoe's still undone. A few more pass, and a few more, and a few more, till about 30 seconds have ticked off. It hit me that the kid was taking so long, because he just couldn't tie his shoe.

Here's what tripped me up though. All the while as he struggled with that lace, he was rhyming along with the boom box, keeping up with Rhymes word for word! His little friend eventually grew impatient, called the shoe lace kid a dummy and started walking on.

I don't think the kid was a dummy. That's not cool. But that whole scene made me think of something else.

I hear about kids that get low grades in the classroom 'cause they can't remember lessons from day to day, and experts who say we should spend more money and use more state of the art equipment. And kids are still failing. And so the conclusion always seems to be that these kids have learning disabilities.

I don't want to hear any of that learning disability stuff until the experts have spent a day in any average middle of the road neighborhood, even a poor 'hood, and listened to the kids and their music. These kids are smart. They can memorize lengthy song upon lengthy song upon lengthy song and not miss a beat. So if properly motivated, they can memorize stuff in a classroom too. But that kind of motivation comes from parents, and guardians, and older siblings, and aunts, and uncles, and grandparents, and responsible neighbors - that whole village-raising-kids concept from the African proverb. And as long as kids have rappers and rock stars and sullen over-paid jocks to look up to, it's those guys whose words they'll continue to memorize, not the people contributing something useful to the planet.

Alright, I feel the soapbox buckling underneath me. I'm getting down now.