A Brooklyn company brings some fun to the classroom
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Students at P.S. 58 in Brooklyn participating in a Flocabulary ‘fill in the blank’ exercise. PHOTO: RALPH GARDNER JR./THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By RALPH GARDNER JR.
May 11, 2016 6:00 a.m. ET
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Before you dismiss the idea of teaching third-graders vocabulary through hip hop—as was happening one morning at Brooklyn’s P.S. 58, the Carroll School—you might want to recall your own odyssey learning how to read.
I was reminded of that slough of childhood despond when I recently came across my final report card from first grade. In it, my teacher, the appropriately named Miss Hirt, made it clear to my parents that while I was being promoted to second grade, it was only by the skin of my teeth.
“This book must be read this summer,” she wrote sternly on the inside cover of “New Friends and New Places,” a tome whose prose was so tedious that slogging through it, as my father made me do every afternoon before I was allowed to play, constituted a mild form of torture.
Contrast that to the video “Ice Cream Taster” that the third-graders at the Carroll School were chanting along with. It involved jobs that children might consider aspiring to when they get older, and started with the lyrics “Young lady I don’t want to get you upset but you’re not going to grow up to be a princess.”
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The week’s vocabulary words. PHOTO: RALPH GARDNER JR./THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Also embedded in the catchy two-minute, 37-second video were vocabulary words such as “sensitive” and “numb.” As in “For my job, I need a sensitive tongue. And even when it gets numb, the job still gets done.”
After the video ended, I issued my own snap quiz to Gavin Ng, 8, asking him to define numb. “It’s when your finger gets really wrinkly it hurts.”
Good enough for me.
“It’s one of the things that gets the students most excited about learning,” Stephanie Cullaj, a third-grade teacher, said of Flocabulary, the Brooklyn-based educational company that creates the videos and lesson plans. “Two students leaving for spring break said they want to take their quiz early.”
Contemplate that. Children eager to take tests.
But does it actually work? Ms. Cullaj believes it does. “You can remember the jingle in a commercial. And the activities associated with it let them be creative. They can take it where they want to take it.”
Flocabulary is the brainchild of Alex Rappaport, a composer and producer, and Blake Harrison, a rapper, who met in 2003 while waiting tables after college at a San Francisco restaurant.
While playing basketball one day, Mr. Harrison shared an idea he’d had since high school. “Somebody should make rap songs with SAT words,” Mr. Rappaport said his friend told him.
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A fourth-grade student’s notebook. PHOTO: RALPH GARDNER JR./THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
They made a demo and sent it around. “To our surprise we got a call back from SparkNotes,” Mr. Rappaport remembered. “They said, ‘We love this. Make us two more and we’ll pay you $5,000.’ We were shocked people were going to pay us to write these songs we loved.”
Today, Flocabulary is in 20,000 schools from the South Bronx to Alaska and has 47 full-time staffers at its office in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood. Mr. Rappaport said that on average students scored 25% higher on state reading tests than those who don’t use it.
The cost to schools is $1,600 a year, which is what the PTA of P.S. 58 pays for it.
“We’ve always believed that it all starts with authentic student engagement,” Mr. Rappaport said. “Music is one of the most powerful learning tools we have. After kindergarten, music all but disappears. There’s no reason it can’t be part of the lesson sequence. You can hear a pin drop in this classroom when the music is playing. Listening is a key part of literacy.”
Jon Coifman, the parent of a P.S. 58 third-grader, said he has been impressed by his son Alex’s enthusiasm: “He asked me on the way to school, ‘When did they get rid of the Whig Party?’ It’s something he picked up on one of the videos.”
In charming ways, the program may be a victim of its own success. When third-grade teachers, and the teacher in a fourth-grade classroom I visited, asked questions about the videos and vocabulary, the problem wasn’t getting children to raise their hands, but to put them down.
One boy wouldn’t take the hint and kept thrusting his hand in the air. “I understand you’re excited, but it’s not cool,” his teacher told him. “I’m not going to ask you again.”
The phrase “I’m not going to ask you again” was the only part of the morning that reminded me of my own academic experience.