My Students - The Rappers!

Part of the plan for my Julius Caesar unit required that my ENG 10 students realize that there is a musicality in Shakespeare's work that resembles so much of what goes into hip-hop music. Shakespeare's plays bristle with puns, irony, tricky word play, playful and acrobatic language, metaphors, the works! One final project option required that the students, by collaborating or working individually, create a poem or rap that interprets an incident or a plot line from the play. The final product needed to use rhymed or unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Over the long President's Day weekend, three students worked magic. John Suppa, Booshon Warrington, and Kyle Thompson composed and performed a rap that blew me away. It is a hip-hop version of Antony's eulogy for Caesar. They killed it (no pun intended) , and I had to share it with my wife and father, both of whom were deeply impressed.

It makes me so proud to have my students do something that I could never do, to exceed my expectations through sheer creativity and persistence, to come up with something so original that it garners praise from strangers.

If you want the MP3, just email me and I'll be happy to share.