Smart Shorties

Christine Smith, a teacher a Paul Lawrence Dunbar Academy in Toledo, had a problem.

The Temperance resident teaches math to fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders at the school, but she kept hitting a roadblock when she tried to teach her students advanced concepts-- they didn’t know their multiplication tables. She mentioned the problem to her friend, Alex Nesmith, who noticed it was odd that kids could learn complicated lyrics to hip-hop songs but not math facts.

That comment lit the spark.

“A little light went off in my head,” she said. Ms. Smith had her key-- and her muse. Mr. Nesmith is an Atlanta -based music producer and engineer who has worked with major artists such as Keith Sweat, Busta Rhymes, Dru Hill, Akon, OutKast and others. After getting Mr. Nesmith to agree to her idea, she went back to her 150 students at the academy and polled them for their top 2 or 3 favorite hip-hop songs. When they came back with E-40’s “Tell Me When T o Go.” Mr. Nesmith located the instrumental tracks.

Then Ms. Smith gave her students the assignment: Go write your own lyrics tot this music, but here’s the twist-- they have to involve your multiplication tables.

“They came back with these great rap lines,” she said.

But they didn’t stop there. Once the students were done, Mr. Nesmith came back to Toledo, paid for studio time and wove together lyrics written by seven different students to produce “ Tell Me What You Know,” a song that outlines the answers to the 12s multiplication tables.

The kids, working with Ms. Smith and Mr. Nesmith, even put together a dance routine to go with the song.

At the end, just 20 kids were involved in the actual production-- seven in the lyric and singing and 13 in the dance routine-- but all 150 learned their math facts.

“The most amazing thing was how they were into this,” Mr. Nesmith said. Ms. Smith agreed. She said the music helped the math facts click, one by one. “You cold see the flames coming out of their heads,” she said “You could see it in their eyes.”

Ms. Smith works with high-risk children, and some are in danger of slipping through the cracks of the educational system.

“The difference we’ve made in their lives is incredible,” she said. “We’re talking about kids that were hanging by a string, and their self-esteem has gone through the roof.”

One boy was a constant problem, according to Ms. Smith. Sullen and unmotivated, he’d switched schools several times and had been in trouble time and again. But work on this project changed him, she said.

“This kid was actually smiling,” she said, adding that he’d nag his mother because he was worried he’d be late for school. “he said he wants to come back (to the academy) this year because this was the most fun he’d ever had in his life.”

“I just love working with kids that everyone want to give up on,” she said. When it pays off, “That’s better than any kind of payment you’ll ever get.”

The producer agreed.

“It surprised me how the kids were like sponges-- they ate this stuff up,” said Mr. Nesmith, who has been in the music industry for the past 13 years. “This may change their lives in some kind of way. I don’t get that feeling all the time.” “ It was very cool to see the kids get something different out of it,” he said, adding that with professionals, the music and the process comes down to money and material things. “It was an eye-opening experience for me.”

The reason it worked was the music itself-- it’s something familiar to the kids, and something that is exciting to them.

“That’s why it works-- the old way of standing in front of the board is boring. These days you have to create something they can relate to,” Mr. Nesmith said. “It’s kind of like what we had when we were young and had “Schoolhouse Rock,” but hip-hop is the music of this generation.”

It’s paying off. Ms. Smith said the children’s proficiency tests skyrocketed from 0 percent to 48 percent in a year-- remarkable in an inner city district, she said. And at the end of the school year, the students held a performance for their parents, and all the students-- first and second graders included-- performed song and the dance moves.

“The whole school’s chanting it… And that right there was the goal,” Ms. Smith said.

Word of the project spread, including to Toledo native, substitute teacher and author Philana Marie Boles, author of “Blame It On Eve” and “Little Divas.” After she talked about a song at a session on hip hop music and the classroom at Camp Mariah, in Fishkill, N.Y., the pair started getting calls from all over the country, including Washington D.C. and New Jersey. One children’s author from Dallas has contacted them about developing a song encouraging literacy to go with his new book.

“That just started off as a charitable thing to get my students (to learn), and then we had so many people interested in it, we’ve had so many people contacting us.”

So they launched Spark The Mind-- an organization that hopes to get the hip hop method of learning to other teachers in inner cities. They hope they can get corporate sponsors to help foot the bill for other school districts to create and record their own educational tracks. They also plan to ask their Dunbar school districts to help them write lyrics to other songs, on topics ranging from area, perimeter, science, social studies, and more, that would be available to those districts that couldn’t swing the recording process.

“The kids we used were very, very good writers-- they even surprised themselves with how good they were,” he said.

They are trying to use Mr. Nesmith’s contacts in the music business to help them launch the program.

“ It’s such a great cause, I’m hoping to get some of my celebrity friends behind it,” said Mr. Nesmith, who added that he’s approached celebrities including Usher, Beyonce, OutKast and Akon to act as spokespersons for the organization.

He ought to know. Mr. Nesmith’s mother was a long time principal at a Washington D.C school-- and his father, grandmother, uncle and aunt were all in education as well, so this project had special meaning for him.

“I always wanted to do a project like this with (my mother), so it’s really been cool for me to tie in my music with education,” he said. “So many lives were changed because of her-- now I can see a glimpse of it.”