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Jake Scott loves mathematics. He sees the subject as a "beautiful sport." So, as a math teacher at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, he was discouraged by his students' aversion to math. He couldn't get them to see the elegance of equations and formulas...until he began to rap them. He created the persona "Mr. 2 Pi" who would rap the formulas for quadratic equations, undefined expressions, graphing trig functions, and other math principles. While the raps piqued his students' interest in math, Scott realized they also needed visual clues to truly understand the materials. So he began to make rap videos, and soon involved his students in their creation and performance. The result? Students loved the approach so much, they volunteered for summer
math classes.
Scott left teaching this past spring to devote more time to his educational rap videos, which he hopes will reach students far beyond his own classroom.