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Diary of a teacher

Pop Culture

Never thought I’d pen this down until I had a friend of mine bring me up to speed on what the trend is called. POP CULTURE is upon us! Here’s an encounter with some lads.

I went to a business centre to make some photocopies. It was work hours and schools have just resumed the new term. I saw some teenagers hanging out and I decided to engage them in a short conversation. Well, it became an interesting one much to my surprise. Apart from the absence of any obvious reason why they were not in school, I noticed a serious trend among our youngsters. Now, I have tried to replicate same discussion among this age group but with different set of boys at different locations just to avoid hasty conclusions.

Apparently, many young boys are talented in one of football or hip hop (rap, singing, or both), so firm is the belief in their ‘talent’ that they feel there’s nothing more needed.

I like football...I want to be a football player

Mention three players in your National Team (The Super Eagles)

At this point I could sense that I had asked for a little too much. But as my friend would later make me understand, even the Super Eagles have not been playing much so let’s cut them some slack.  True that, so we moved to the next question.

Now, the next question, “Why do you want to play football?” was met with outburst of laughter, so we put the question aside too. At least I know they have a reason known to them all.

Okay, what position do you play?

“Defence! I’m a defender oo. Number 3”

Good. What opposing number would you play against as a number 3?

This is where we got stuck.  I would think that for a child aged between 13 and 15 who  wants to be a professional footballer and has been playing the sport for a while, this would be an easy pie but No!  So now I ask, “what’s responsible for the dearth of excellence and basic knowledge in our society?” Determined to get the boys talking, I looked for another way to find out what the motivation is and how much they know about their choice of profession. Also to know how much preparation goes into honing their talent.

Who is the highest paid player in EPL?

General laughter again, again and yet again. At this time my thinking was that I must have said something wrong....like a slang with a meaning different from the normal meaning. Much to my surprise, I just hit the joker!

Boys are here giving me facts and figures. If I pressed more, I could have gotten the account numbers of these players. I kid you not, the depth of ‘knowledge’ they possessed in this regard kept me speechless for a long time.

I draw your attention to something else....well not really something else, it’s quite similar.

My friend and colleague mentioned Uber at a seminar for youngsters in schools. He merely asked the question “who has heard of Uber?” and hands flew up. Good. Tell me, what do you now about them?

Some of the boys had made up their minds already to drive for Uber. Why? There is money!

Next question, “Who wants to compete with Uber?” to do this you need to do a lot of thinking to produce something similar and then beat them. Not a single individual raised up their hands… Why kill the cow who produces the milk?
Back to me and my boys.

Pointing at one of them with a funny hair do, why have you chosen singing as a career of  choice?  All I got was names of Hip Hop artistes, what they owned, how much they are worth, what gifts they gave their girlfriends (sorry, baby mamas) and all sorts of information. Message is beginning to sink in. MONEY IS THE MOTIVATION! Or am I wrong?

Even though I initiated the whole discussion, an argument had ensued on which artiste made what popular. This got me thinking...Why is tattooing popular? Why are some hairstyles popular (by the way, have you noticed that boys have more hair styles than women?), who’s on TV? Yeah... The corporate world is seldom mentioned on the news and when they do, it’s usually the boring part of it.  Who buys up all the drinks and makes sure it’s on twitter or even takes up a line in their next single?

We are plagued by popular culture. The real value of life is being reduced to shreds. We are now threadbare on many fronts of our society, with no one in particular to be held accountable. It’s now all about the PRICE and less about the VALUE.

Don’t get me wrong. There are children who are receiving good education and do know their onions. However, these are being sandwiched among the many who do not know better. We better admit that we must, as a matter of urgency begin to properly EDUCATE and MENTOR our youngsters, if we want them to become the kind of people we crave. In a society where EXCELLENCE and CRITICAL THINKING has become a scarce commodity, we need to salvage excellence by making it our culture.

YES! You can be whatever you want to be, but always remember that “what is worth doing is worth doing well”. We should mentor these young ones to imbibe the culture of excellence, which is simply ‘doing ordinary things extraordinarily well’.

VALUE OVER PRICE!!!

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Maureen Awulonuh

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