Why I love Nicki Minaj

I admit it. I listen to hip-hop. I love hip-hop. It is my favorite thing to listen to, especially when driving to school in the morning. My latest obsession is with Nicki Minaj, but I have all sorts of other embarassing hip-hop CDs tucked into a compartment of my car.

Put simply, I need to get pumped up to be in front of people all day. I liken it to when my mild-mannered suburban high school boys would tell me they listened to rap on the way to compete in a sporting event.

I try to ignore the derisive lyrics, but some of the lyrics are really good. Most contemporary poets are too cool to worry about rhyme and meter anymore, but rappers aren't.

While sometimes hip-hop stars seem to have an unearned braggodoccio, that is, they come from a world where style sometimes rules over substance, I think the agressive self-affirmation of hip-hop artists is just what I need if I'm preparing to discuss Wuthering Heights at 8:00 in the morning. (And a lot of coffee helps, too.)

I know I have earned my authority and credibility, but that doesn't fully explain how I can have the guts to face sleepy and angry teenagers every morning. I need to hear the beats that inspire you in your gut. There is something visceral about teaching. You really need to be fully there, fully present, fully passionate, fully yourself. Charisma is key. I bet many of you can relate to the experience of having taught the same lesson but one day you were "feeling it" or "in the zone" and the next time you weren't, and you can really tell the difference. If I don't give it all of my enthusiasm, class just doesn't "go." I need to be properly pumped up before my performances.

What do you do to get "in the zone" for teaching? Isabel Gillies writes some funny stuff about this in Happens Every Day, a memoir she wrote after she temporarily gave up her acting career in New York to become an adjunct drama teacher at Oberlin College in Ohio, where her husband and the father of her two children got a full-time job there (he would then proceed to cheat on her with a colleague). The book was popular when Starbucks was featuring books in their stores a couple of years back.

Yep, for those early-morning classes, bring on the Starbucks. And while my more respectable colleagues are doing tai chi, I prefer to blast the hip-hop. I get a surge of courage from  the pink-haired "little black girl" (as she referred to herself on the recent E! Special that I did watch--another admission--) from the streets of New York who bosses around the tough guys.