This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Teacher Tony Green ’83 earns “street props” with his seventh-grade students not just because he listens to the same urban, hip-hop music that they do; he also happens to personally know the musicians as a freelance music critic and writer.
Educating at-risk students at Clearwater Intermediate School, Clearwater, Fla., Green is a teacher in transition, acquiring education credentials during his rookie year of teaching. The former English major specializes in social studies and language arts and has discovered that “teaching is much more preparation and organization than anything you can ever imagine. I never knew teaching was such a difficult job, yet a job that can be fun and rewarding.”
In addition to being a novice teacher, Green also faces the challenge of educating students in the drop-out prevention program.
“My background as a music critic gives me an edge with the kids,” says Green. “The kids are amazed to run into a teacher who actually knows the artists they listen to. I did a story on Ludacris for Vibe magazine and they were so excited. They wanted me to get them tickets, get his autograph, pass him notes. My knowing these famous hip-hop stars gives me an edge with the kids.”
Green is not above turning his hip-hop passion into a pedagogical tool. “When we do vocabulary and spelling drills, I’ll use songs by Eminem and talk about contractions and where to use punctuation in his lyrics. It’s a way to follow the curriculum but in a fashion that helps the kids to relate.”
Though his father was a teacher for 20 years, Green began his career as a journalist, working for small newspapers in New York and North Carolina before landing a job as a sports writer for the St. Petersburg Times, Florida. Covering sports came easily to Green who was a three-time All-America nose guard and power lifter at Lafayette. He earned first-team Kodak All-American honors and Associated Press All-American honorable mention for football his senior season as a Leopard.
“After 10 years writing about sports,” says Green, “the music critic job opened at the newspaper, I applied and got the position.”
Again, Green was able to make a passion a profession. “I play guitar, bass and keyboard with a jazz-funk band, so I have some sense of what it takes to perform.”
Green credits Bill Melin, professor of music, with introducing him to “a whole bunch of new and different music, giving me a leg up musically while I was at Lafayette. I always thought as a musician, not as a fan, but what I learned from Bill helped my writing about music. I began looking for a deeper meaning, a commonality. I try to hear what is going on in the music and why people like what they hear. It intrigues me how someone listening to Kiss can be uplifted by that music as much as someone who listens to Steve Earle or Debussy. As for practical help, Bill taught me a warm-up drill that I still use to this day, 10 years after he taught it to me.”
As a freelance writer and music critic for Playboy, Village Voice, Guitar Player, and Vibe, Green says his first love is hip-hop music, although he’s covered a wide range of artists from Johnny Cash to Snoop Dogg to Rod Stewart.
“I found newspapers limited me,” says Green. “There is such a classic rock-centric view in newspaper coverage of popular music. They really fail to explore the depth and the timbre of contemporary hip-hop and street music. Few people on their own are exposed to a wide range of music. I want people to see that there aren’t so many differences between 50 Cent and Willie Nelson … and I love them both. Snoop Dogg talks the same message as Robert Johnson or Hank Williams Sr. The beat may be different, but the pain is the same.”
The ability to see thematic connections between totally different genres was nurtured and developed by “my professors at Lafayette. Where else could I study John Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’ and be able to use it as the basis of a newspaper column on football players and their trash talk before a game?”
Green has special memories of James Woolley, Smith Professor of English, Provost June Schlueter, Dana Professor of English, and her husband, Paul Schlueter. “These were professors who gave me the ability to express my musical views … they helped me develop a critical language so that when I wrote about music, I could achieve my goal of seeing how the rhythms relate to all of us. They were never scared of my viewpoints, rather they encouraged me to differ from them.”
“What I learned at Lafayette was how to be a thinker, how to develop ideas and how to apply them to the real world,” says Green. “That is why the teaching is so great. I feel everything I learned is coming together somehow so that I can make the world a better place.”