It is safe to say that few members of the math faculty get asked the kind of question that Peter M. Plourde did at the start of a recent algebra class here at Northeastern University.
“Plourde,” a student, Behailu Abreha, said, “who’s better lyrically, J. Cole or Drake?”
Mr. Plourde paused, taking in the question about the two rappers. “You put me on the spot,” he said before analyzing each man’s writing ability, weighing how such factors as their use of profanity complicated an evaluation of their skills.
“If I had to lock them both in a room, I think Drake would come out with the better lyrics,” Mr. Plourde concluded, as a few students nodded enthusiastically. He clearly had settled a running debate.
That Mr. Plourde can speak with authority on a facet of popular culture that would perplex most of his colleagues derives from his background, and his dual passions for education and entertainment.
He is a full-time lecturer in mathematics for Northeastern’s Foundation Year program, while also teaching general education at the New England Institute of Art and courses on topics as varied as statistics and the music industry at Bay State College.
And, for nearly two decades, he has made a career as a hip-hop artist. As his alter ego, Lyrical, Mr. Plourde has released albums and opened for heavyweights from rap’s golden age. He still regularly records and performs around town.
In his teaching, Mr. Plourde has sought to bridge his two worlds, calling on his background to connect with his students.
Hip-hop, as both a musical genre and a larger form of cultural expression, is not new to the college classroom. Some 300 courses on the phenomenon are offered at colleges, according to New York University’s Hip-Hop and Pedagogy Initiative. But most of them tend to be offered in music or black-culture departments. Sometimes such courses can be found further afield. Sujatha Fernandes, for example, an assistant professor of sociology at Queens College, has used hip-hop to teach Marxist economic theory.
Mr. Plourde is notable, however, not just for his dual identity but for using hip-hop to teach math, most often in Northeastern’s Foundation Year program.
The program, now in its third year, was created in response to the findings of a longitudinal study of Boston public-school students. Nearly three-quarters of the Class of 2000 entered college, but seven years later, only 36 percent had graduated from a two- or four-year college, the study found. “They’d solved the access question, but not the success and completion question,” says Molly Dugan, director of the Foundation Year program.
Her program is “high-touch,” as Ms. Dugan describes it, and pulls together successful aspects of similar efforts tried elsewhere. Students are grouped as a cohort (73 this year, out of 300 applicants), taught by a dedicated eight-member department, and given intense academic and personal advising to help them manage what she calls their “complicated lives outside class.”
Most are first-generation college students and don’t arrive on campus already knowing how higher education works. So students earn a year’s worth of credits in their academic courses, while also getting a heavy dose of such college-going skills as time management and working with the financial-aid office. Some educators “say ‘they’re not college-ready,’ and that’s the end of it,” says Ms. Dugan. “We say, ‘let’s teach them how to do it.’”
Making a Connection
The program is still too young to have produced graduation data, but early signs are encouraging. More than 85 percent of its students have enrolled in their second year of college, at Northeastern or elsewhere.
Hiring the right faculty is critical, Ms. Dugan says. Ideal candidates should know their subjects and, more important, how to teach it in several different ways. She looks for faculty, like Mr. Plourde, who have taught in urban high schools.
“We meet students where they are and in ways that are not traditional to higher-education pedagogy,” Ms. Dugan says. At the same time, she is sensitive to the suggestion that students like those in her program, who are predominantly African-American and Hispanic, can somehow only be interested in academics if it’s through such vehicles as basketball and rap.
Mr. Plourde’s identity as a rapper didn’t figure into the decision to hire him, she says. “That’s honestly completely secondary to his skills as a math teacher. We hired him to teach math and connect with students.”
Then again, his biography is undeniably an asset in forging that connection. Growing up in industrial Lowell, Mr. Plourde says he let his rapping skills shine far more than his mathematical abilities. It wasn’t until he transferred to a high school in nearby Chelmsford, and the prevailing culture around him changed, that he discovered being smart could be socially acceptable.
Similarly, he tries to show his students that behavior informed by hip-hop has its place, as does a more formal way of acting. “That code-switching is what you try to teach kids in college,” he says.
In his first year at Northeastern, he kept Lyrical under wraps and taught class in a conservative shirt and tie, until he performed for students during homecoming. Now that he’s in his second year, his alter ego is well known. He resists pleas from his students to “spit a 16,” or recite a verse of his lyrics, he says. When he does agree to do so, it’s at the end of class and only if they’ve gotten through all their work.
And he’s realistic about the limits of his celebrity. “When it’s wasting part of class time everyone wants me to rap,” he says, “but if it’s their time they’d rather watch it on YouTube.”
The Power of Math
He does, however, use his knowledge of the music industry as a teaching tool. During a recent class, his students had to devise an algebraic formula to represent how much money a rapper would earn if his or her album sold enough copies to achieve gold or platinum status.
They had to account for payments that the rapper would have to make out of his or her advance to record the album, market it, produce a video, and pay management and legal fees. The earnings grew vanishingly small. It was a lesson Mr. Plourde learned himself, when he signed a one-album, one-video deal.
To heighten their interest in the exercise, Mr. Plourde offered a glimpse of his other self. He reached into his green duffel bag and fished out a shrink-wrapped copy, pressed on vinyl (to appeal to disc jockeys at dance clubs), of his single, “The Focuz Is Back,” from his 2005 album, “Infiniti.”
The students gaped as they passed the record to one another and took in an unfamiliar image of their teacher sitting in the front seat of a silver Infiniti with its door open. He wore a black and gray Celtics cap cocked leftward, a silver chain with pendants of a microphone and headphones dangling around his neck, and a cool stare.
“That’s gangsta,” one student said admiringly, turning the record in his hands.
Lyrical’s lyrics, however, are far from hard-core. He sometimes records with his students, and his songs have titles like “Poeteacher” and “Ghetto Intellectual.” He may well be the first hip-hop artist to make explicit reference to Fibonacci numbers in a song.
Beyond the immediate lesson on writing an equation, or teaching the students how little artists actually earn, Mr. Plourde had a larger point: getting students to understand the power of math. Grasping how numbers work will help them in other areas of life, he says, like understanding compound interest or mortgage rates.
“The people who know the numbers make ridiculous cake to this day,” he told his students, citing the profits that record producers and companies earn from their artists’ sales. “You want to know the math.”
