Alex Kajitani, 2009 California Teacher of the Year and a finalist for National Teacher of the year, never figured he’d become a rap singer.
No, Alex is a math teacher, teaching 8th graders the ins and outs of mathematic problems.
But when Alex struggled to connect with his students and found they were far more interested in the latest hit song than they were with rote learning, he adapted.
Now, Alex is known as the “Rappin’ Mathematician.” Starting with the “Itty, Bitty Dot” (a lesson in decimals), Alex expanded his rapping to all manner of math problems.
“When I did the itty, bitty dot - after rehearsing all night - the kids laughed at me,” Kajitani said. “But by lunch, the kids were all singing the rap and by the end of the week, their test scores soared.”
With two CDs of “Rappin’ Math” under his belt now, Kajitani continues finding new ways to make math relevant to his eighth grade students - and is having fun doing it!
You can find the “Rappin’ Mathematician” at www.mathraps.com and you can listen to the interview with him by returning to the home page and clicking on listen.
Stay tuned for more focus on excellent teachers and education employees by listening to or downloading programs from Schoolhouse Talk.
Allan Odden is Co-Director of Strategic Management of Human Capital (SMHC) in public education, a project of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). The mission of SMHC is to improve student achievement and reduce achievement gaps by getting more powerful instructional practices into all classrooms through reform and restructuring of state and district human resource management systems, focusing initially on the country’s largest 100 districts, most of which are urban. He also is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Co-Director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). CPRE is a consortium of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Pennsylvania, Harvard, Michigan, Northwestern, Teachers College-Columbia University, and Stanford Universities. He formerly was professor of education policy and administration at the University of Southern California (1984-1993). He is an international expert on the strategic management of human capital in education, teacher compensation, education finance, resource allocation and use, school-based management, and educational policy development and implementation.
For the last ten years, Jim has worked as a UniServ Director for the Kettle Moraine UniServ Council, an affiliate of the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the National Education Association. Prior to that, Jim was a high school teacher for fifteen years.
