Work It Out

There are some days I'm completely boring as an educator, however today wasn't one of them. Today I took the liberty of aligning myself with the great rap artists of our time and tried my hand at "flowing". I did so to the best of my ability, but without a gold grill, iced out chains or any other paraphernalia that might make me seem more legit. Yes, be impressed/horrified. 

This masochism  was my somewhat manipulative attempt at engaging my students and forcing them to commit to memory the steps for solving 1 and 2 step variable equations. The human brain stores lyrics and music in long term memory differently than other learning. I'm no brain surgeon [little known fact], but I do know that I personally remember thousands of song lyrics from the age of 3 to now, yet if you asked me about all that high school AP History/Bio/English stuff I read/studied so much or [let's be honest] even the plot of a movie I watched a couple weeks years ago, I would come up close to blank. So, the goal of this activity was for them to have fun while learning and retaining an important concept they'll need to be successful in Algebra 1.

Luckily, they were into it.

STEP 1: Cue "Walk It Out"-Instrumental Version a la YouTube.If you are familiar with this rap's beat and chorus, you will know that this is literally an ingenious remix of the original. Well, maybe not ingenious, but "Walk it Out" does lend itself beautifully to my new chorus "Work it Out" (as in solve an equation). Thanks Unk!

STEP 2: Distribute "Work It Out" lyric sheets to students. This  was later filled in with lots of explanation and examples. Note-taking trickery at it's finest.

STEP 3: Show Powerpoint slides and rap my little heart out [read: embarrass the crap out of myself]. The PPT features the following slide shown during each repetition of the chorus:

STEP 4: Repeat, repeat, repeat with students. In case it was even a question, my students definitely did a MUCH better job than I did. 

The plan is to perform in class on Friday with individuals doing the verses, and then the whole class jumping in to repeat the "work it out, work it out, work it out, work it out" chorus and of course, get crazy dancing. I told them that if their performance is good enough,and if everyone gets at least 85% on the test Friday, then I'll put up these rappin' mathematicians' video on You Tube. If they can work out how to "Work it Out" well enough between today and friday,I've got some work to do. 

Oh and also, please refer to my from this point forward as "A-Latz". I think that'll build up my street cred before my 2013 performance.