MCs Do the SATs

Vocab lessons get a boost from hip-hop

by L. Jordon Frauen, from Flux

Remember the days in high school English class when, fretfully twiddling your pencil, you avoided your teacher's gaze in an attempt to circumvent the humiliation of defining vocabulary words in front of the entire class?

Alex Rappaport and Blake Harrison have joined forces to help today's generation avoid such shirking and rise to the task by using hip-hop music in the classroom. As the Manhattan-based group Flocabulary, the twentysomething entrepreneurs create raps that accompany a series of study aids and SAT prep workbooks designed to improve vocabulary comprehension for high school students.

Flocabulary's educational materials can now be found at bookstores shelved right alongside the Princeton Review guides. 'When you put music in a voice that kids can relate to, they can internalize it,' says Harrison. 'Our goal is to get students to feel like they own the info.'

Rappaport combines catchy beats and funky bass undertones with melodic instrumental phrasing. While steering clear of vulgarities, Harrison, a.k.a. Emcee Escher, keeps communication limpid / not too complex / and clearer than a window that just got Windexed. His lyrics are cool and clean, easy for kids to relate to, and user-friendly for teachers.

Students and teachers like Flocabulary so much, they're inviting the duo to perform in classrooms and assembly halls across the country. In April, Flocabulary embarked on its nationwide 'Shakespeare Is Hip-Hop' school tour. The group is planning another tour for this winter that focuses on history.

The guys in Flocabulary are achieving success, and so is their audience. Betty Williams, an eighth-grade teacher at Martin De Porres School in Springfield Gardens, New York, tried Flocabulary's materials on her class. Shortly afterward, her students received the highest grades on their report cards all year, and the kids began using words like loquacious in their everyday speech. In one instance, she reprimanded a student for making a wisecrack in class. The student quipped, 'I was just being cogent.'

Reprinted from Flux (Spring 2006), the student-produced magazine of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication; http://influx.uoregon.edu.

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Setting the Record Straight

The very political debate over diversity in textbooks has taken a new twist in California. In These Times (July 2006) reports that legislation proposed by openly gay state senator Sheila Kuehl caused a stir because it would mandate that the social science curriculum include the contributions of prominent gays and lesbians. A gubernatorial veto threat led to passage of a watered-down revision of the bill-with additional chapters in this textbook debate still to be written.