Educators That Rock!: Blake Harrison
Blake Harrison, left, and Alex Rappaport of Flocabulary.
This week findingEducation caught up with Blake Harrison, a.k.a. Emcee Escher, rapper, educator and creative director of Flocabulary, to hear how he and Alex Rappaport, cofounder and executive producer, are bringing their energy and passion for hip-hop to the classroom.
By weaving words into rhymes with infectious beats, Harrison and Rappaport knew they could engage students and ultimately teach them something. Their first CD, released in 2004, put vocabulary words in context, helping prepare students for the SATs. Since then, they’ve developed programs for teaching world and U.S. history, math, science and even Shakespeare. They’ve taken their music on tour, held teaching workshops and created a current events series called The Week in Rap, now being broadcast on Channel One, a national TV news network for teens.
fE: When did you get the idea for Flocabulary?
BH: In high school, I had one teacher in particular who used to say “’Sesame Street’ has spoiled you guys. You guys don’t know how to learn. You think education has to be fun, but it doesn’t. It shouldn’t be.” And I couldn’t disagree with him more. I just thought he was being lazy.
Education can be fun and we make it really fun for youngsters. But right around middle school and high school, there isn’t as much emphasis on that. And I just didn’t think that was necessary. I thought you could teach really serious academic content, get people where thy have to be in terms of the standards in achievement, while also doing something that’s really engaging.
fE: Are there any artists that inspired you?
BH: I listened to a lot of different artists in high school. I remember the moment that I got the idea for educational hip-hop; back then it was rap music. I was listening to Talib Kweli. The line was: “You stopping us is preposterous like an androgynous misogynist. You’re picking the wrong time stepping to me when I’m in my prime like optimus.”
I looked up some of those words and found out what they meant. And I realized that the way he was spitting those rhymes … didn’t sound really corny. There’s always going to be something a little bit inherently nerdy about it, but it doesn’t have to sound like Barney.
fE: Where do you get the ideas for your songs?
BH: It really depends. If we’re working on the science project, literally we’re looking at the state standards. If it’s a vocabulary song, I’ll sometimes go online and look at what kind of stories kids are reading in middle school. So maybe it’s about vampires or maybe it’s about a girl who overcommits herself and promises she’ll be at her brother’s birthday party but also at a dance with a boy. We’re really taking ideas that kind of exist already and then just adapting them.
fE: When you’re on tour, is it hard to make a connection with students?
BH: We’ve done programs where we go in to a school for 45 minutes and do a show and then leave and there’s zero one-on-one activity. But there is connection. Even in that short amount of time, you get to know the kids because some of them have outsized personalities.
We’ve also done residencies where we go in each day, in some cases for two weeks. Getting students to write their own rhymes and working with them in small groups allows for a lot of one-on-one interaction, and that’s always really, really fun.
When you get to say to a student, “Wow! You’re doing some amazing things here, you’re using a metaphor, you’re using end rhyme”—especially if it’s a kid who traditionally is being told, “You’re not smart, you’re doing a bad job”—that is a really special moment.
fE: Do you feel there are similarities between poetry and rap?
BH: A lot of people have pointed out that connection before. You use a Tupac [Shakur] verse when you’re discussing slant rhyme alongside Emily Dickinson and the reaction from students is just very different than if you leave him out. I think it opens them up more to appreciating how dope Emily Dickinson is.
fE: Where did you get the idea for the Week in Rap?
BH: We put a lot of emphasis in school on learning history, like the history of the Persian empire. But if kids don’t know today what’s going on in Iran … well. Obviously it’s not one or the other.
So, each Thursday we write a song covering the past seven days’ headlines. We create a music video for it, and put it up on our site for free. And then we have lyrics that contain links to the actual news stories. We’ve also partnered with Channel One, which is a TV program that goes into schools, and every Friday we’re a part of the program.
fE: Is it difficult to get teachers to see value in what you do?
BH: A lot of teachers think it’s an awesome idea. They get what we’re doing is essentially what “Schoolhouse Rock” did, except with hip-hop music.
On the other hand, there are definitely teachers who are very hesitant about it. A lot of the notions that they have [of hip-hop] are negative … and they don’t necessarily see how you can separate the music itself from the content that they associate with it. And a lot of times teachers say, “Yeah, I bet my students would like that but guess what? I have actual teaching to do in my classroom.”
We don’t have the full results from our efficacy pilot yet. But so far, of the sites that have reported back, not only have we shown that our vocabulary program (The Word Up Project) raises student achievement, but it’s also raising test scores on state tests, which is a really, really big thing. When we say that to teachers, they are much more likely to take what we’re doing seriously. We know people know Flocabulary is fun, but can we also teach? What we’re seeing now is that we can. We can teach.
Blake’s Favorite Sites: The Huffington Post, The New York Times, ill Doctrine
