Teacher uses hip-hop to help students jump into math' - "Christine Smith, a teacher at Paul Lawrence Dunbar Academy in Toledo, had a problem. The Temperance resident teaches math to fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at the school, but she kept hitting a roadblock when she tried to teach her students advanced concepts — they didn’t know their multiplication tables. She mentioned
the problem to her friend, Alex Nesmith, who noticed it was odd that the kids could learn complicated lyrics to hip-hop songs but not basic math facts."
"Ms. Smith had her key — and her muse. Mr. Nesmith is an Atlanta-based music producer and engineer who has worked with major artists such as Keith Sweat, Busta Rhymes, Dru Hill, Akon, OutKast and others. After getting Mr. Nesmith to agree to her idea, she went back to her 150 students at the academy and polled them for their top two or three favorite hip-hop songs. When they came back with
E-40’s “Tell Me When To Go,” Mr. Nesmith located the instrumental tracks."
"Then Ms. Smith gave her students the assignment: Go write your own lyrics to this music, but here’s the twist — they have to involve your multiplication tables."
"But they didn’t stop there. Once the students were done, Mr. Nesmith came back to Toledo, paid for studio time and wove together lyrics written by seven different students to produce “Tell Me What You Know,” a song that outlines the answers to the 12s multiplication tables."
"The kids, working with Ms. Smith and Mr. Nesmith, even put together a dance routine to go with the song. At the end, just 20 kids were involved in the actual production — seven in the lyrics and singing and 13 in the dance routine — but all 150 learned their math facts."
Learning math can be fun.
"[Ms. Smith] said the music helped the math facts click, one by one. Ms. Smith works with high-risk children, and some are in danger of slipping through the cracks of the educational system."
"One boy was a constant problem, according to Ms. Smith. Sullen and unmotivated, he’d switched schools several times and had been in trouble time and again. But work on this project changed him, she said. The reason it worked was the music itself — it’s something familiar to the kids, and something that is exciting to them."
"The program is paying off, according to Ms. Smith. The children’s proficiency tests improved greatly within in a year — remarkable in an inner city district, she said.
At the end of the school year, the students held a performance for their parents, and all the students — first and second graders included — performed the song and the dance moves."
"Ms. Smith and Mr. Nesmith started getting calls from all over the country, including Washington D.C. and New Jersey. One children’s author from Dallas has contacted them about developing a song encouraging literacy to go with his new book."
"So they launched Spark The Mind — an organization that hopes to get the hip-hop method of learning to other teachers in inner cities. They hope they can get corporate sponsors to help foot the bill for other school districts to create and record their own educational tracks. They also plan to ask their Paul Lawrence Dunbar Academy authors to help them write lyrics to other songs, on topics ranging from area, perimeter, ter, science, social studies and more, that would be available to those districts that couldn’t go through the recording process."
About educating high-risk children, Ms. Smith said:
"The difference we’ve made in their lives is incredible. We’re talking about kids that were hanging by a string, and their self-esteem has gone through the roof. I just love working with the kids that everyone wants to give up on. That’s better than any kind of payment you’ll ever get."
