Colleen O’Connor, Denver Post, May 11, 2009
Math is not Koran Ray’s best subject, but the 13-year-old student at Wyatt-Edison has figured out a trick to help him master his multiplication tables: He raps them.
“I can rap about social studies, language, even Shakespeare,” he said, launching into a quick one that he learned from a video about Shakespeare being a mellow fellow who wrote “Othello.”
He’s part of a pilot program called Rap to Roots that debuted this month in Colorado after success in cities such as Chicago and Cleveland.
The after-school series—sponsored by Swallow Hill Music Association and Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives—teaches kids to use rap’s rhythm, rhymes and even its history to boost their academics.
When Koran learns from a music producer how to change rapper’s voices, he thinks of his science lessons involving variables: “when you change the variables of things like speed, voice and tone.”
Rap to Roots is the brainchild of Swallow Hill’s music school director, Michael Schenkelberg, who created it because public schools, particularly in the inner city, were losing their arts programs.
{snip}
Jontrail Taylor’s rhymes include a message about school: “I got to go to college to get my education/So I can be in a situation/That’s better than the federation.”
In Chicago and Cleveland, teachers helped design the rap classes to meet their curriculum needs, so kids tackled subjects such as the migrations of African-Americans from the South. They also learned that rap’s roots go back about 3,000 years—to Afro-Cuban and West African rhythms—which connected to geography lessons.
They increased their technological know-how by using laptops to record their own CDs and worked on English skills.
{snip}
Original article
Email
Colleen O’Connor
at coconnor@denverpost.com .
(Posted on May 12, 2009)
Comments
Except they won’t tell you about the rap education schemes that have failed. For instance, St. Louis tried something called “Math Rap” a number of years ago, big flop.
With names like Koran and Jontrail it seems like their parents need English lessons. I am surprised that “Koran” is not getting beat up for having the same name as the Muslim holy book.
It is extremely difficult to say anything about this posting which doesnt simply mirror the absurdity of it, and since I would like to write something other than black-sorry!dark-sorry! BLEAK humor, I am affraid I am left with nothing to say.
Ehhh…
Reminds me of the great messages rap has to offer in the real world. I’m 17 and my friends just love this song called I love College.
Look at it, it’s really awful. http://tinyurl.com/cjnaab
And that’s definitely not the worst “song” out there, it just popped in my head after reading this article.
>>>They also learned that rap’s roots go back about 3,000 years—
This is true. A little known fact; It was rappers and they dawgs kickin’ it in Egypt that built Da Piramidz.
WARNING: Obscene and profane language alert:
http://tinyurl.com/2lwbrp
This is a subject I must admit I’ve been curious about.
I’m sure that there’s no way the average high school student would prefer mainstream rap over this alternative.
It is more than absurd, it is pathetic.
Verses are needed to learn the multiplication table???
J4ni
In the February 2009 issue of American Renaissance, there’s a piece written by Gedaliah Braum titled, “Morality and Abstract Thinking” which deals with the issues you raise.
Here’s the sample page:
http://www.amren.com/promos/2009/02/index.html
BTW: I did a web search of the title and I came across this foreign language reference which seems to be on the same mission as American Renaissance.
http://deliandiver.org/tag/jared-taylor
Jontrail’s “rhymes” gave me an instant headache. So, Shakespeare is a mellow fellow who wrote “Othello”? Now, how about telling us the story of Othello. Or does the education rap not go so far as to actually teach the subject they rap about?
Why does this kid think he needs to learn to multiply in the first place? After all, he’s simply going to get a cushy government affirmative action job with a white staff that does all the work for him.
Perhaps the ‘students of color’ should take a class on what ‘self stereotyping’ is - this is so ridiculous it’s laughable.
Are blacks incapable of learning anything unless they are ‘being black’, i.e. presumably constantly ‘rapping’, wearing ‘bling’, saggy pants, having a bad attitude, and regarding intelligence as a bad thing?
We need to start demanding weekly voting on POLICIES, not PARTIES, using the Robinson Method, NOW.
“They increased their technological know-how by using laptops to record their own CDs and worked on English skills.”
Of course, if the entire population of Earth was BLACK, there would BE no laptops or CDs…
The next time some liberal fool tries to tell you about the ‘benefits of diversity’, ask them what the planet would be like if the entire human population were black, and had always been black, and watch them…
If he’s 13 and still doesn’t know basic multiplication, I don’t think rap is going to help him.
“They also learned that rap’s roots go back about 3,000 years—to Afro-Cuban and West African rhythms—which connected to geography lessons.”
If they think that Afro-Cuban anything dates back 3,000 years then they need some new geography lessons.
“Jontrail’s “rhymes” gave me an instant headache. So, Shakespeare is a mellow fellow who wrote “Othello”? Now, how about telling us the story of Othello. Or does the education rap not go so far as to actually teach the subject they rap about?
Posted by me_leelee at 11:06 AM on May 13”
O-tello,
Okay, I give up. Obviously Rap is not my metier. Say, who is the muse of Rap, anyway? What would she be called? Ghetto?
“I just think it’s interesting that African Americans are certainly known to be ‘gifted orators’, looking at pop culture references like evangelical preachers, free style rappers and the President etc.”
A basic discussion below by Sailer. Also, see this paper ‘in our genes’ for discussion of a ‘model system for understanding the relationship between genetic variation and human cultural diversity.”
The 7R allele may facilitate risky “show-off” behaviors that exhibit good genes: cad societies are characterized by male posturing and machismo, “protest masculinity” in an older terminology. Most obviously, energetic unpredictable adult males may enjoy a competitive advantage in the face-to-face male competition and violence that characterize these groups. Chagnon (19) has shown that there is a fitness payoff to warriors and those with such a reputation among the Yanomamo of Amazonia.
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/1/10.full
“I suspect that one thing holding back the economic progress of some ethnic groups that weren’t favored by nature with easily domesticatable plants and animals is a lack of nerds. If you live in a physical environment where almost every man must be a hunter or warrior, well that’s not conducive to the development of nerd-encouraging cultural institutions or to nerdish genes getting passed along.
These trade-offs between nerdishness vs. charismatic masculine leadership are readily apparent among different ethnic groups in industrial world, too.”
http://www.isteve.com/nerds.htm
To Gen X in Oz: There are about six phonemic clicks and probably no language uses all six. The existence of 120 or 140 phonetic differences may be less remarkable than it looks. The English words “man” and “ask” have different vowels, for instance; if you multiply slight differences like this by the large number of vowel sounds in English, you’d get an impressively large number too: English may have scores of vowels and diphthongs.
Yet every baby learns whatever language it is exposed to. If you pur a French baby among clicking Bantus that baby would learn all the clicks, and likewise a rainforest indian baby reared in Minnesota would sound like a Minnesotan.
That’s on the level of producing sounds. Differences in intelligence could be related to vocabulary size and writing skill.
I have experience with minority students in the middle school grades. While there is small percentage of minority students performing at or above grade level, most are years behind their white peers in all academic areas.
It is no wonder minority students are behind, as they generally do no work and they laugh/talk/sing/dance/disrupt/hiphop from the minute they arrive at school until they leave, and they simply have no interest in any type of learning.
Therefore, if rapping their lessons is the only way these black students will put any effort into learning, it is a good thing. It is also a good argument for the re-introduction of school segregation to keep these rapper-scholars seperated from students who can and want to learn in traditional and time tested methods which have been used in western civilization since the time of the ancient Greeks.
Could you see your doctor rapping out your prescription?
