Too $hort’s Dimensional Analysis
One of the most interesting changes in my life since starting this teaching career last year has been musical. I found that listening to hyphy hip hop made me much more able to understand things my students were talking about. (The first time I realized this was when a student that I think of as bright, articulate, and polite drew a picture of the “Dummy Retarded Bus” in an assignment. When I asked him what it was about, he told me not to be concerned — it was just a reference to a popular song. And thus began my education in hyphy.) Not only is it helpful to pick up the slang, but I also found some great material for remixing. But now, to bring it full circle, hyphy itself has something to give back to the world of math education. The song “Blow the Whistle” by Too $hort starts out like this:
I go on and on
Can’t understand how I last so long
I must have super powers
Rap two hundred twenty five thousand hours
Get a calculator, do the math
I made a thousand songs that made you move your ass
And for the last three hundred months
I made sixteen albums with me on the front
and they bump
Which, despite the bit of questionable language, presents a couple interesting questions. Like, first off, how many years are there in 225,000 hours? That’s a perfect question to answer using dimensional analysis. Another one: if $hort dog made 16 albums in 300 months, how many albums per year is that? And if he made a thousand songs in 300 months, how many days did he spend on average per song? I haven’t tried this on a class yet, but if I taught physics or algebra I definitely would.
