THANK YOU M’AM

Thank You M’am: a handbook for teaching the touching story of Roger, a teenager from Harlem, and the journey he goes through.

What higher-order thinking skill could you teach explicitly using this commercial? Show your class this commercial. It can be used to teach the higher-order thinking skill of Prediction (stop it after seeing the girl move back and forth on the ceiling and ask them to predict what will happen next) or Cause and Effect (ask students what they think caused the girl to be in this predicament), then continue the commercial.

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.

He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that “the negro was in vogue”, which was later paraphrased as “when Harlem was in vogue”.^[1]

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934).^[8] Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Hughes’s father left his family and later divorced Carrie, going to Cuba and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.^[9]

After the separation of his parents, while his mother traveled seeking employment, young Langston Hughes was raised mainly by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Through the black Americanoral tradition and drawing from the activist experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride.^[10][11][12] He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence. In his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea he wrote: “I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”^[13]

After the death of his grandmother, he went to live with family friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. Later, Hughes lived again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois. She had remarried when he was still an adolescent, and eventually they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school.

His writing experiments began young. While in grammar school in Lincoln, Hughes was elected class poet. He stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype about African Americans having rhythm.^[14]

I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet.^[15]