This week, our very own Rohen Shah – a former Detroit teacher and 2-time University of Michigan alumni – won 2018’s National Tutor of the Year Award! The award is given annually by the National Tutoring Association. Up to 5 awards are given per year – one in each “category” of tutoring. This year, only one (Private Practice) was given, and it was to Rohen!

I’m not surprised. None of us are. The only surprising thing is that he didn’t get the award sooner, as the Executive Director of the NTA pointed out in her speech as she introduced Rohen. Here’s the clip, including hi-lights of his acceptance speech:

Rohen began tutoring full time when he was was 16 (you read that right), and tutored 80+ hours a week during college in Ann Arbor.

There was so much demand for his tutoring back in 2008, that he was promoted to “Head of Math” at Far From Standard Tutoring in East Lansing at the age of 18. Not only that – he was asked to write a book, which he did, called Acing Calculus.

In 2010, I took his job as Head of Math – because he was promoted to CEO (just before he was legally old enough to drink). He was younger than all of us – but you could never tell by talking to him.

By the time he started his own tutoring company in 2014, DiagKNOWstics Learning, the rest was history. His online videos and adaptive learning platform has helped tens of thousands of students across the world, and his educational rap music videos (of which I have the honor of doing the music production) have been viewed by millions of students.

If that’s not changing the world, I don’t know what is.

-Michael Dante
Director of Music Production, SKULE.org
michael@skule.org 

Our latest song, about gender equality, just hit a million views! This is our most viewed video to date. The song is called The F Word: Feminism, and teaches us that the word feminism actually refers to gender equality, contrary to what many people assume. The video was directed by well-known Bollywood Director and YouTuber Rupan Bal, and features MC SKULE and IV Green.

Among those who messaged us saying they liked the video include a leader from Amnesty International, The Daily Show‘s Roy Wood Jr., and professors from around the country. The popular online feminist community Being Feminist also published this article about Rohen and the song. Stay tuned and thank you for sharing the video!

In case you’re looking for a fun way to engage kids in a summer reading program, educational rapper MC SKULE‘s latest viral music video encourages kids to read! The song, Read with Me, parodies Walk the Moon’s hit song Shut up and Dance and has already received over 120,000 views on Facebook. The song was also performed as a part of the 2017 Liberty Fest performance in Canton. Check out the song here:

Read with Me was created in collaboration with Crissman Elementary School in Utica, Michigan. It features Anna Hilliard and IV Green – as well as the entire student body and staff members, who share our goal to inspire other kids to keep reading and learning. Laura Hamrick spent a month with the students in preparation for the song, creating props and rehearsing. Music was produced by Michael Dante, and Mixed and Mastered by Chuck Alkazian of Pearl Sound Studios. Directed by Drake Whelton. We hope you enjoy the song, and please share it with your community members.

Let’s get as many kids as possible to engage in one of the best human endeavors: reading!

To bring the school year to an end, my middle school math students at Voyageur Academy and I teamed up with the school’s music teacher, Mr. Vercellino, to make a parody to the Bruno Mars song “That’s What I Like“. The song teaches about “Equations”; I hope you enjoy the video! Lucky for Math, that’s what I like 🙂

What an eventful week! Our latest song, 99 Math Problems, was released 5 days ago, and has already been featured in NBC’s Local 4 News in Detroit! The song has received nearly 400,000 views on Facebook, as well as an additional 40,000 on YouTube. It has been featured on the Homepage of the National Tutoring Association, among others. It is available here for a free download, or to support the cause in the process, you can buy it on iTunes for 99 cents (Get it, 99? coincidence? I think not!).

Collaborating with Grammy Winner Chuck Alkazian, this is already MC SKULE‘s most popular song (crossing the quarter million views that Let’s Go Out and Vote received). It features Anna Hilliard and IV Green. It’s so much easier to surpass your prior work when you have a bigger, loving, SKULE family on your side – which now includes 25 of the most adorable children who were featured in the video, including their families and loved ones.

The song aims to teach students that math is something they shouldn’t be afraid of. They also shouldn’t feel bad if they make silly mistakes in math. Often times, students get discouraged because of silly mistakes they make at a young age, and then they give up on math early on in the process. As the song says, “If you get a problem wrong, don’t give up or stop yearning – because mistakes are proof that you are learning.”

Getting straight to the point, here’s the thing: We need your help. We are a non-profit, and our only revenue stream is donations. The songs cost money to produce, and we need your help to be able to continue this work. Even a small donation would go a long way. Please visit our donation page, watch the cute video of students explaining what they got out of being in the song, and please help us out in whatever way you can. There are also some cool prize options if you look at the right sidebar while you scroll down. Please feel free to reach out to us at info@skule.org with any questions, concerns, ideas, or words of support.

Join the SKULE family and help us #MakeLearningFun

 

I am so excited to get started with this work! We look forward to working with everyone! Please email me at amber@skule.org if you have any ideas that you would like to see us implement!

Motivation is a key ingredient to successful learning. The best analogies or visuals will still fail to teach a student who isn’t motivated. My team even ran an experiment a few years ago, where we found that students who couldn’t solve certain SAT Math problems were suddenly able to solve them minutes later when the problems were presented as a “viral” meme puzzle.

Students spend hours binge-watching TV shows and listening to the same song repeatedly – without being forced to do so. What if they were that naturally inclined to learn math or history?

Students today have grown up with gadgets – many of them have probably read from an iPad before a book. When a student gets to choose between an iPhone and a boring math textbook (with confusing language and an endless list of problems), it’s no surprise that they choose the device that lets them access almost anything in the world within seconds. To “win” the competition for a student’s attention in 2017, Learning needs to appear in a more engaging format than a textbook.

The idea of making songs that teach students content has been around for a while. Teachers who want to incorporate songs into their lessons face a lot of difficulty in doing so. Creating a song on your own can be costly and time-consuming. The internet offers a lot of options, but not necessarily good ones. When I tried searching for songs to use with my own students, I found that most songs fell into two categories: songs are either too dense with content, or only cover content superficially. The dense songs are intended for people who already understand the content, since you can’t summarize a semester in 3 minutes. The superficial songs are entertaining songs that throw in relevant content vocab words, but don’t actually “teach” material.

Over the past few years, My old team tried to make songs that struck a balance between these two extremes. We’ve made some music videos and have performed in classrooms. The next phase is SKULE.org – a non-profit whose mission is to #MakeLearningFun

Our goal is to build a database of innovative learning materials – our goal is to have a topic list, and a searchable database of songs that teach each topic. These include songs that we create with schools across the country, as well as ones that are submitted to us. This way, teachers have a one-stop-shop to find high-quality educational songs. These videos will also include skits or other innovative ways to convey content while engaging students. We will also partner with DiagKNOWstics Learning to make an adaptive learning “KNOWadulting” platform available to all students for free. With this, they can learn real-world skills that aren’t taught in school. For example,”how do I get a debit card?”, “how do I do my taxes?”, and “What is my credit score and how do I improve it?”

We would love any and all help in achieving these goals over the coming year! Any help (donations and/or volunteering with us) would go a long way!

-Rohen