Smart Shorties

When Christine Smiths students had trouble last year grasping the multiplication table, she did what any creative mathematics teacher would do.

She hip-hopped the kids into a recording studio.

Today not only the students at Dunbar Academy getting their math, the popularity on the numerical raps is multiplying across the country.

“We’re getting calls asking us how they can get the full CD,” Ms. Smith said.

There are 10 more digits to go before that would become a reality. So far students at the downtown Toledo charter school have written and recorded songs for 12x (“Tell Me What You Know”) and 8x (“I Know You Know It”), as well as an alphabet song for the younger students at Dunbar (Hypnotize-ABCs”)

Ms. Smith and her colleagues are already thinking of ways to incorporate rap into other studies at Dunbar Academy, such as in social studies where kids could put to rhyme the names of states and their capitals. A song for a science lesson on the properties of water also would be fun, since students could use words such as “precipitation,” “condensation” and “evaporation” in their rap.

“All the teachers are coming to me because they see the effectiveness of using music,” Ms. Smith said. “We’re a performing school so that’s what we love to do.”

Dunbar Administrator Thomas Williams, after dancing and rapping with students last week, said he loves all of it. “If they’re having fun, they learn more. The kids are more on task,” the school leader said. “I wasn’t our teachers to adapt to be more creative.”

Both he and Ms Smith have marveled at how K-6 Dunbar’s students seemingly easily memorized the complicated lyrics of the rap songs. And they wondered why the kids had problem memorizing the multiplication table, particularly the 12x.

“Their ability to memorize rap songs showed the capacity was there, “Mr. Williams said. “But the question was how could we make the connection? Ms. Smith made that connection.”

Traditionalist might scoff at the use of rap in math, but test scores show it’s working at Dunbar. Two years ago, not a single sixth grader passed the math proficiency test. Last year, 48 percent of the sixth graders passed, not enough to meet the state’s 75-percent indicator but still an astounding leap in proficiency.

The rise in math scores helped Dunbar jump from “academic emergency” to “continuous improvement” in the latest state report cards on schools. “We want to be the top school in the country; that’s our goal,” Ms. Smith said.

Helping Dunbar toward that goal is Alex Nesmith, an Atlanta, Ga., music producer who works with several big names in the rap industry. He had come to Toledo to help a local rap group, met Ms. Smith and learned she was a school teacher.

She, in turn, learned that Mr. Nesmith, who goes by Al E. Cat kids as much as he loves music. The rap math endeavor was born, with Mr. Nesmith frequently flying up form Atlanta to work with the students in a local recording studio.

“He says this is much better than working with superstars,” Ms. Smith said.

While Mr. Nesmith electronically finesses the music, the students themselves wrote and rapped the lyrics to the 12x, 8x and ABCs songs.

"It’s so much more relevant to them when they’re creating it themselves,” said Ms. Smith, who teaches math to fourth, fifth, and sixth graders.

Deondre Gott, a fifth grader, has emerged as on of Dunbar’s most prolific rap writers, He wrote two verses for the 8x song, “ I Know You Know It,” including the following verse:
“ 8 x 0 don’t make none, you gonna have the skip to the next number 1, 8x1 equal up to 8, 8 x 2 16 in your face! 8 x 3 equal 24, I’m gonna break it down you already know! If you take 8 and multiply by 4 that 32 kids bouncing to the floor! 8 x 5 the big 4-0, everybody that’s 36 plus 4! 8 x 6 equals 48, down with Ms. Smith, she’s got us learning our 8s!"

Marquisha Modisett, a sixth grader, has disliked math and had not done well in the class. Things changed for the better and she’s gotten her multiplication table down pat after she was invited to use her creativity to contribute to the 8x song.

“I like music,” Marquisha explained the connection.

“She came out and threw those 8s at me and it was incredible!” Ms. Smith said, using terms not typically associated with a math teacher. “And Deondre’s lyrics are all tight.”

A 40- year-old white woman, Ms. Smith doesn’t fit the image of a rap fan. But she likes “all types of music” and says “there’s some really good rap music out thee” that people of all ages and backgrounds should appreciate.

But it’s not as if she had to seek out the hip-hop sound. She has three school-age children at home. “It’s hard not to be exposed to the music when it’s blasting from the bedrooms,” she said with a smile.

Ms Smith created a website, www.sparkthemind.com, where teachers and others can download the 12x, 8x and ABC songs for a fee. An explosion in popularity occurred Sept. 19, after ABC-TV’s Toledo station aired a feature report on the rap-math phenomenon. Viewers called in to the station asking it to repeat the segment on other newscasts, and WTVG followed up by offering the video to other ABC affiliates across the country.

Ms. Smith said her website got 17,000 hits on one day alone after other affiliates aired the tape. Teachers in many other states are downloading the raps and incorporating them into their own math lessons, she said.

That’s just what she wanted.

“We want to help all kids” the teacher said. “There are schools everywhere that need this kind of thing, especially inner-city schools.

Ms. Smith said recording a downloadable CD with music for all 12 numbers in the multiplication table is a goal of hers, but that she would need financial sponsors to offset the costs of Mr. Nesmith continuing to fly up to Toledo to work with Dunbar’s students.

Financial assistance would enable her school to make the music free for any teacher or student anywhere throughout the internet, she said “We’d rather not have any cost (for users) involved,” she said.

“We’d want to make it available to everyone.”

One school at least, Dunbar Academy, already is reaping academic rewards from the innovative use of rap. And to a traditionalist math teacher, the charter schools might say: “Mixing music and math, it ain’t no myth. We’re learning our multiples, just ask Ms. Smith.” Or as Deondre raps in another verse: “8 x 7 equals 56, the more I learn, I’m gonna get all this! 8 x 8 rolling 64s, everybody put your hands to the floor. 8 x 9 equal 72, everybody get down with the Dunbar crew. 8 x 10 here we go again, it equal 80, I’m gonna tell all my friends. 8 x 11 equals 88, we did a good job multiplying our 8s. 8 x 12 equals 96, when I’m done I’m gonna get real rich!

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."