#hiphoped - Hip Hop Genius Video Script lyrics

When I was 20 years old I started teaching at a juvenile prison. While there were many things that separated us, I quickly discovered my students and I had one big thing in common – our love of hip-hop. For the next few years rap music became the main content for the cla**es I taught, and I saw disengaged students emerge as leaders and experts. Through engaging elements of hip-hop culture together, students and I learned language arts, life sk**s, and to love each other and ourselves more. As I continued to observe the ways in which our education system is rigged against Black and Latino students and students from low-income communities, I asked myself what else we as educators could learn from hip-hop—the insanely innovative and influential global phenomenon that has emerged from those very same communities. When I say “hip-hop,” I'm not just talking about music—or music, graffiti, and dance, which are considered its central elements. I'm referring to the blend of instincts, confidence, and ingenuity that develops in oppressed communities, as has been demonstrated through the evolution of hip-hop culture. I'm talking about a Jamaican teenager in the South Bronx taking two records of the same song and fading back and forth between them to create a new musical composition by playing the most danceable segment over and over. I'm talking about aspiring visual artists realizing they didn't need galleries to represent them for their work to be seen and instead painting on train cars and instantly having an audience of hundreds of thousands. I'm talking about a high school dropout from the projects of Marcy using his entrepreneurial hustle and rap sk**s to go from selling d** to selling CDs out of the trunk of his car to selling products at Macys. This is what my colleagues and I call “Hip Hop Genius.” Creative resourcefulness in the face of limited resources. Or as it is often said in the hip-hop community: flipping something outta nothing. How can this audacious approach impact our education system? For starters, we need to exhibit the brash creativity of hip-hop's pioneers. Just as hip-hop producers sampled songs from other genres, creating unique new sounds to please audiences' ears, hip-hop educators can borrow from diverse models and improvise innovative blends of educational practices customized to meet students' needs. If that sounds too abstract, take a look at the High School for Recording Arts in Minnesota where they've mixed project-based learning and competency-based a**essment with artistic, vocational, and business training, with dual enrollment at local colleges with a heavy dose of student leadership. We don't have to do the same thing that's been done before or follow one model, we can sample and mix multiple teaching techniques and school designs to find the blends that best serve our students. We also need to adopt the value hip-hop places on staying fresh. A hot beat yesterday was… a hot beat yesterday. Whoever sets out to make a hot beat today must do something new and different to remain relevant. The world is changing rapidly around us. The top ten jobs in 2010 didn't exist six years earlier. Hip-hop's premium on freshness must permeate our schools. And we need to be resourceful… In the 1970s thousands of families chose to replace their linoleum floors. In poor neighborhoods the old linoleum was left in piles on the street. Young people without access to playgrounds or dance cla**es turned their parents' trash into dancefloors and invented new moves, like the windmill and the headspin, to maximize its potential. Faced with our own resource constraints, educators need to find new platforms. What refuse could we be dancing on? And what are our new moves? Behind the mic, spray cans, turntables—and when it comes to their educations—students have brilliant ideas and instincts. Hip Hop Genius is not just about teachers using hip-hop songs to get kids to succeed in traditional schools, it's about changing education to respect and build from young people's brilliance. It's about the incredible possibilities that occur when students are engaged—not as consumers, but as creators. We don't need to tweak the content inside existing traditional academic structures. We need to think outside the cla**room and build institutions that are fundamentally more responsive to young people's interests and ingenuity. We need to create schools and school systems that not only teach hip-hop, they are hip-hop.