A Day in the Life of a First-Year Teacher

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Gotta Learn to Love Urban Dictionary

One thing your professors (and Teach for America too, most likely) is never going to teach you is that Urban Dictionary is a LIFESAVER if you're ever teaching at any school in the inner city.

Life saver.

L-I-F-E. S-A-V-E-R.

My 8th graders say sentences that literally have 5 or 6 "words" of which I have NO CLUE as to what they mean. They may be telling me about their weekend or what they did last night with their friends, and I would stare blankly at them for most of the time. It's seriously like Calc 3 or high school Physics all over again. This time with words so deeply ingrained in their vocabulary that can't be defined by kids who didn't grow up in the areas they're growing up in. Which would be most of the teachers at my school.

And I'm only 21 years old. So I know EXPONENTIALLY more than what most of my colleagues know. In my team, the Science teacher and ELA teacher, both in their late 20's (yeah, they're still so young!), are having lots of difficulty understanding the kids. They both grew up in the suburbs around Chicago, and I grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Queens. Miss Gonzalez, who's from Tremont, and Mrs. Guzman (our team's History teacher), who's from Longwood, can fluently comprehend and speak their "mini-language".

Oh, how I wish I had their skills.

Recently, I discovered the site "Urban Dictionary" with lists definitions for almost all of these words and phrases that my kids say. Apparently, I looked really dumb when I bragged to my 1,140 Facebook friends (what can I say... most popular in high school and going to NYU gets you a lot of friends... hahahaha) that I discovered Urban Dictionary, many of them laughed at me/expressed shock/"expressed eye rolling" in the comments. Obviously, they had known about this for a LONG time. As my friend Aishwaraya would say, "ope". Awkward...

So that was my embarrassing moment of the day. But on the bright side, Urban Dictionary is one of "my favorites" on my laptop and is tabbed on my awesome phone for my convenience. I will FINALLY know what my kids are saying!

And just watch... in about a month or so, without even knowing it, I will talk just like them!

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