Like many teens, music was a big part of my life growing up. I spent countless hours listening to the radio and talking about new hit songs with friends. I even saved my allowance to buy cassette singles (yeah, remember those?) of my favorite songs whenever I could.
As a child of the 90s, hip hop was – and still is – the love of my life. I got into it late, but A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and The Roots quickly won me over. Hip hop (like most music genres) was more than just a genre – it was a cultural phenomenon. Yet, despite its ubiquity, it never had a place in the classroom; at least not while I was growing up.
But in the last decade or so that's changed. According to The New York Times, a new program in New York City is using that urban culture to get high school students excited and ready for their Regents Exam in American history. The program, called Fresh Prep, is run by the Urban Arts Partnership and uses beats and rhymes to help students memorize history facts in preparation for the New York Regents Exams, which students must pass in order to graduate from high school.
Sam Sellers (a.k.a. Rabbi Darkside) is a Fresh Prep instructor who has come up with 24 rap songs on global history and American history. His students can download these songs and, along with a 250-page workbook, review important history dates, events and concepts.
When I read the article, I couldn't help but wonder, how did this not catch on earlier? As a teen, my brain soaked up musical lyrics like a sponge, (in fact, I still remember most of the lyrics from the songs I grew up with) so something like this would have had a big impact on me. In high school, and even in college, history courses were challenging. And I don't mean challenging the same way calculus was, but challenging because the material was so dry and boring; it was hard to stay engaged. There was so much to remember and material was always presented in the worst way – reading old school textbooks that could never put things into context and then regurgitating what I read in the form of a report. I can't even imagine how much more boring that kind of learning must be for today's media obsessed generation.
To be clear, hip hop as a teaching tool has been around for a few years now, particularly in underserved urban areas. But the take away message here is that learning, at any age, should be fun and interactive.
Thanks to technology, the world and the way we interact with and exchange information is rapidly changing, which makes keeping things fresh and relevant a challenge within education. But programs like Fresh Prep have the right idea. If we want students to really get it, educators need to be in tune with their students and continually come up with new ways to keep old concepts interesting and relevant.
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