EP019: Mic Check, Math Check: The Flow of Hip hop & Learning with Professor Lyrical

Professor Lyrical: …it’s the blending of that, right? “It’s like, what can I do today that is. Academic and artistic?” Those things are the things that I love to do. ’cause I don’t have to do one or the other. I can spit bars that are dope, that are also intelligent, right? If I watch Star Wars and then inspires me, I’m like, you know what?

I’m gonna write the Star Wars verse, but I’m not gonna make it cheesy and corny and just make the end word happen to rhyme with, you know, favor so I can rhyme lightsaber, even though I might rhyme lightsaber, right? It’s gonna be deeper. It’s gonna be doper. Yeah, it’s gonna be complex. You know: 

let the force be bygone and some master Qui-Gon. Force never dies. We just multiply on. 

Melt that iron on with five of its ca on. Light sharpens light, sabers we pipe on. Right right on through the dead of night to the dawn dedicated like a Mennonite whenever cite Psalms with a couple light sabers I place in my tight palms. Devil’s bounce like Luffy, I’m chewing fruits at the God’s baby.

Maybe all my poems, I’m quoting it up along. Broken Model. Ahsoka Tano. Them paddawans, they travel on and sometimes they act sinister. Hurt Third Sisters wanna be Grand Inquisitors.

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

You heard a little sample up there at the top. this was just amazing. You gotta check out the homework for today’s episode because there’s a whole lot of really great things like that you gotta go check out.

So, uh, let’s get into it.

Peter Plourde, AKA Professor Lyrical is a hip hop artist, mathematician, and an educator who seamlessly blends music with academia. Originally from Lowell Mass, he holds a BS and an MS in mathematics. From UMass Lowell, and a doctorate from Northeastern University, now associate professor of mathematics and director of faculty Development at the University of the District of Columbia. He uses hip hop to engage students in learning; earning national recognition for his innovative teaching methods, but beyond the classroom, he’s built a respected career in hip hop winning major freestyle battles, including Pitch and Flow at the Kennedy Center. His 2005 album, Infinity won album of the year at the MIC Hip Hop Awards and his Put ‘Em All to Shame Project combined, a full album and a 200 page book not a small undertaking. As one half of the rap duo ProQuo, he continues to push the boundaries of music and education, proving that hip hop and higher learning don’t just mix. They’re a powerful combination. Pro, thanks for joining today.

Professor Lyrical: Hey, thanks having me, man. That’s that, that sounds better than I am in real life.

Joel: Hey, I’m all about making us us nerds look and sound. Good. So, I’m really excited about this. I’ve been trying to branch out with some of the guests that I’ve been bringing on outside of my sphere. So mathematics, number one, not my thing, I do not math as a theater school dropout at one point. And you know, male, pale and stale over here. Yeah, hip hop rap. Casual observer, but definitely not into it all the time. So I’m excited to talk to you about how you’re blending those, but let’s just start off with the nerd origin story. uh, Which came first. How did you make a transition to get to where you are today?

Professor Lyrical: Yeah, man, it’s a great question. I appreciate it, Joel. Yeah. When I was a kid I was definitely like nerd first. I’ve been at the Star Wars since, you know, I could say it. And that was probably the intro. Liked all of the higher concepts that came up in sci-fi and wanted to make sure that I could understand them better.

So, you know, kind of drifted towards math, but the original school system I was in, it probably wasn’t that cool to be into math. It was much more cool to be rapping. And so that’s kind of what I led with publicly. And then, kind of behind the scenes, you know what I mean? I was filling the gaps in, moved to a different school district where it was a little cooler to be smart and was able to, you know, be on the debate teams and the math clubs and all that kind of stuff.

And then in college, you know, you kind of create your own identity. So, but the funny thing is, when I was in college, I didn’t go in as math. I started undergraduate with they were like, you know, do something with the math. We don’t know what, you know, you’d like rap. How about, accounting, you know what I’m saying?

Oh, is too boring. I can’t do accounting. And I had a good economics professor. He was unbelievably nerd. Balbir Sihag, by the way, at shout out to him at, UMass Lowell and I really saw the step up in the math level that was required to understand on a deeper level. And then, you know, later did, went on UMass Low as well, did my master’s in math, and from there kind of put ’em all together and just instead of keeping ’em separate, I was like, look man they’re coming together at a headway, so why not go full tilt with Professor Lyrical and do it on front street?
 

ProfLyrical Song: This is the math, the masterclass realness. Professor Lyrical smash the class ceiling. When I be keepin’ it professional., never when anyone question how the lyrics come outta my mouth come out to inform on my credentials. Now my potential now’s a minimum. It’s kinetical now. Incredible how I rhyme this well, we’re spin in the mathematics out. Without a doubt, I’m turning up the house lights. How can one professor have such incredible shelf life?

Well, preserved like peaches and herbs might fit in your jam. Well united once it served right. Sit your down, son like that’s your third strike. Clean off your plate. Where’s your manners? Get your words right? Yeah. You heard right Pro’s nouns and verbs tight. That’s why y’all can handle the balls. That’s the dirt bike 

Joel: Hip hop and math seem like maybe an unlikely pair. And they both definitely get misunderstood in the, in their ways. And I, you know, I find interesting that you kind of seem to debunk, demystify both at the same time for different audiences. You’re known as a clean, conscientious rapper. I, you know. I love the tracks and things that I’ve been listening to. Gravity, the remix with that one was amazing.

I, and you know, I love it. But what, why do you think people have those, have misunderstandings about math or what math is fundamentally or hip hop.

Professor Lyrical: I think with math you don’t really, I think first of all, when everybody’s a young kid, we all like math, right? We all think it’s cool. We’re learning the facts and we’re, you know, adding, multiplying, subtraction might mess you up. Fractions, right? That’s usually where people start to jump off the bus a little bit because it requires a little bit of work, right?

It’s not just like. As obvious when you start layering the concepts on top of each other, we do adding and multiply pretty well naturally as humans, right? But then you make us go in reverse with the subtraction and division. It’s like, wait a minute, what did we just do?

And it no longer is as clearly intuitive when those concepts start to stack up as you move on through the math, right?

But at the end of the day. The things you do with math are early on clear, like, Hey, I need this to do basic arithmetic. And as you get into the weeds a little bit, it’s like, well, what the hell We know this for, like what am I gonna use this?” And you don’t get a chance to see “the really cool stuff unless you persist in it.

Right. A lot of times it can be pretty boring. Let’s face it in a lot of like high school kind of math curriculums, unless you have faculty that are coming up with ways to make it culturally relevant. And that’s kind of where the hip hop comes in. I think it has an easy way, instead of just using the stale examples that are in textbooks that have just been sitting there for years, it’s like, why not reinvigorate them and put in things, you know, people always talk about, meet students where they’re ad it’s like, what does that look like?

Right. And you can do it with hop culture and hip hop culture, movies, comic books, all the geekdom that, you know, we dwell in I think has a lot of concepts that are cool there, you know, and that we can really break into them. So.

Joel: So that’s how you sort of get those kids who weren’t math people and engage in hip hop. Talk about how you use it in the classroom. I watched a YouTube video of yours. I guess it was 10 years ago when you came out to your students as the rapper, and you were like trying to keep that, trying to keep that really professorial line. When that line dropped you know, how did you find one, why did you decide to drop that and to blend these two?

Professor Lyrical: I never had a situation before, so that was my first year at Northeastern University. And I never had a situation before where I wasn’t known already from the population of the students. Right. So I’m from Lowell. I was teaching at Lowell High School. At Lowell High School. Everybody knew, you know what I mean?

It wasn’t the secret. I mean, that’s part of the, probably the reason I got hired in the first place. At Northeastern. It kind of also was I performed at Northeastern. It’s, but you know, it’s a university and and kids from all all over the place. Coming in. I teaching in first year. and the first year program, I think a lot of times when kids are new to college and they’re coming in, they got a lot of other things to be worrying about them, like, who’s my professor? And all this kind of stuff. You get a little bit older and savvy and you start finding out who they are, what time the classes are. But when you’re coming in as a freshman, you are lucky to know what you have, you know, at your second period of the day on a Tuesday.

Right. So I was I couldn’t believe it that nobody knew and I was like, oh. And there were really like two people who did know. And I pulled one, one of ’em her name is Deja. I pulled over aside and I’m like, “look, you can’t be telling anybody,” like, I’m gonna keep this is great for me. Like this is a whole new thing for me where I don’t get on the first day, “yo, can you spit a 16 kind of thing.”

So we just went with it.

We kept it as secret as we possibly could. And then when we had our little carnival, spring break kind of thing, I just decided to say, “Hey, you know, there’s an artist coming. There’s a rapper coming to campus.” And everyone’s like, who’s it gonna be? Is it Drake? You know? And we’re gonna have a performance.

And so we did it up big through the college and, we had the news there and the media there, it was really cool. It was a lot of fun for them to just be like mind blown, you know? 

So that semester I was not doing the normal stuff that we’re talking about in the classroom to make it connect. I was trying to keep a line and be like, “Hey, class today, let’s look at, you know, multivariate calculus” or whatever it was that we were teaching.

And try to not do that right, but still try to be engaging. So it was kind of fun for me ’cause I was trying to use. Ways that other faculty might have to use if they’re not rappers. You know what I’m make, and

Joel: Right.

Professor Lyrical: it was pop culture movies, Marvel, DC, you know, those are are Hip hop tangential. Right.

Joel: right. 

Professor Lyrical: they don’t necessarily have to be, there’s a lot, you know, hip hop has become mainstream culture and it finds its way into the movies as well.

And so, you know, it was kind of easy to do actually, because that geekdom was the same kind of, culture you want to create in the classroom where it’s okay to be a geek where it’s okay to be a nerd. It’s okay to be smart, and it’s a badge of honor among us, and we wanna make it a badge of honor for those who traditionally maybe were like me when I was younger and think that they needed to hide Right. Oh, no. College, you can change your whole identity, man. You be you want, you know?

Joel: Yeah from year to year. Sometimes people come back from summer and it’s like, yo, I thought you were like, I came up in the nineties. It’s like, I thought

you were grunge. No, I’m hippie this year. Not, it’s like we’re all experimenting.

Professor Lyrical: Oh yeah, you can go from gangster rap now to anime real quickly. You know what I mean? And like it’s, there’s a blur there, right? You know, you listen to the Drill Rap and all of a sudden you’re, you know, you’re watching, you know, Luffy or something, you know, it’s fine, you know?

Joel: Talk a little bit about the. The rap career, then the hip hop and you know, ’cause you always had that kind of going on the side.

And building a legit name for yourself. Rubbing shoulders with some people who, who went on to become huge named what was it like? Did you try to keep keep the nerd out from that side as well.

I’m trying to, I’m trying to paint you as a, as this evil super villain with, but not, you know.

Professor Lyrical: Nah it’s I think early on before, before I was Professor Lyrical and I was just Lyrical. I had, you know, a toe in the water with teaching high school, right? That didn’t happen immediately. That happened later. And the thing was, is that I had started speaking in schools.

We were doing shows. Shout out to my man Fee he’s doing crazy stuff as well, too. New England rapper. And shout out to Ruby. His his girlfriend. And they, they rocked together and we were all a group. Since high school, really we were Excalibur, we shortened the name to X-Cal kind of casually.

It was really just us three through college and whatnot. And the reason I bring all that up is like I’m starting to get into the like idea that every time we perform at a school, kids are going crazy. We have their ear, they’re listening to us. Like what’s a little different about me already at that point is that I have my college degree, now I’m going through college, get the degree, and now we’re talking to kids who are just a little bit younger than us, really like high school kids and middle school kids.

They’re finding that part of it cool. You know what I’m saying? And so you’re like, whoa, wow, I wasn’t really expecting that. And you find the people who are bringing you in as educators thought that’s cool. And I could start to see like, okay, maybe this is something that you could market as well, as opposed to just kind of, “oh, by the way, you know.

I got this college degree” kind of thing, which was a little different for hip hop. But then I heard this dude come and speak at Harvard. So I moved to Cambridge and partly because of taking trips to perform and do open mics in Cambridge, shout out to the Lizard Lounge, which was a place I was able to go when I was underage.

It was one of the first places they could go. They had spoken word poetry on Sundays and Jeff Robinson Trio. Right? But you’re in that environment now. I always likened Harvard and Cambridge to like a Lowell on steroids. Lowell’s a city on a river, a lot of diversity. A couple colleges really a community college and a university, right.

Compared to, you know, MIT, Harvard, right. But the idea is just 20 miles down the street, you get this more popping kind of nightlife and environment mixing in. And they’re bringing artists all the time to Harvard. Right. And one of ’em was an old school artist by the name of Chubb Rock, and he’s in the, he’s talking to people, telling ’em he got his master’s degree.

Now this is before I did. I’m like, damn, this is like a blueprint for me now. Like I’m hearing rapper has a master’s degree, like this is what I’m talking about. Right. So I’m getting excited by that kind of stuff. So seeing that out there kind of made me a little bit more comfortable with it. When I’d go into other spaces I’d be like, “yo, you know, Chub Rock, he got a master’s.

You know what I’m saying?” And and now I’m looking for people who are doing similar things. Right? I’m trying to find people who like, have that maybe double life and like how are they blending it? Most of the time it wasn’t very intentional. It was like you’d find out if you happen to be at a conference where somebody’s speaking and they’re like, “oh, by the way, I have this degree.”

And you start finding out a bunch of rappers have college degrees and so forth, but they’re kind of keeping it in the closet like, like we don’t wanna let you know kind of equivalent to don’t wanna let the nerd out ’cause that’s not seen as in vogue in hip hop culture necessarily. I think now that it’s switched quite a bit.

In terms of people who are comfortable at least speaking about it. I’m not saying that every rapper’s like that, but you know, people like J. Cole, he is a college educated person. You know, it’s and he’s actually one of the more prominent people in the field, and he’s just as legitimate as a lyricist.

And that’s what I’ve always tried to be. I’ve tried to be. It true to the craft, you know, a master craftsman, lyricist kind of thing, freestyler and still be, you know, authentic in the classroom. So tho those, it’s a challenge, but that’s I like that. I think that’s what separates me a little bit from the average person maybe.

Joel: And there’s probably a little bit of a parallel between the craft of of freestyle and lyrics and, you know understanding how things fit together and mathematics. Right.

So, so you’re building a toolbox. You know, we started counting on our fingers and then we, once we got a little bit more abstract, we had to denote patterns and things and how things work together. 

So you’ve competed in high stakes, freestyle rap battles and defended a doctoral research, which one was harder?

Professor Lyrical: Freestyle battles. Yeah. Yeah. So for me, like going through the academic stuff, I had sort of imposter syndrome going through it. I would find myself sleeping in the library. I would I was just like, not gonna fail. Right. And so, because the doctorate stuff’s later in life and you’ve gone through.

The freestyle battles and rap battles and, you know, I would spend like weeks and weeks planning for a rap battle. You know, like I, I would, all I’d think about is that rap battle, it’s frontal lobe. It’s like, I cannot be embarrassed on this stage. Right. That’s the worst thing that can possibly happen, you know?

A dissertation defense or something like that. There’s a few people and you’re in a small room and everybody’s kind of a nerd and they all kind of know what you’re talking about, right? But now you’re in front of, you might be in someone’s home territory and you’re up on stage and, you know, it can get really grimy real quickly if things go south.

So, getting ready for rap battles is, to me, is like. It’s a shorter thing. It’s not as long. The process is shorter, but it’s nerve wracking at a different kind of level because you’re on public display and in the information era. Now on social media, it’s like something goes wrong. You know? A lot of people are gonna see it real quickly.

And to be fair, when I started my career battling, there wasn’t like social media the way it is now, right? Like, I mean, you’re lucky if someone has a camera or whatever, but you know, then as time goes on you’re like, “oh wait a minute, this is being videotaped.

Oh, wait a second, this is gonna be on tv. Oh wait, this might show up online.” This could, you know. So you start thinking about it and it put those added pressures. But but for me the imposter syndrome ensured that it wasn’t as difficult ’cause I over-planned and over-prepared, you know, for everything that I needed to do.

And that’s kind of been true to you if you’re gonna do something at a craftsmanship level, I. I find the same thing you need in mathematics to be successful is the same thing. You need to really write lyrics at a high level. You have to be willing to lock yourself in the basement and just not come up for air for like, you know, seven hours at a time.

Before you know it’s midnight and you started at like lunchtime, and you’re like, where’d the time go? You know? And if you have that ability, I think you can do both, because that’s all they require. We trick ourselves into thinking like. You know, oh, this math problem’s just too hard. I can never get it.

But, you know, you stick at it for a while and come back to it. Take a break maybe for a little bit, you know, maybe eat a sandwich or something, and then, but before you leave the house to go to the movies or something like that, like do your due diligence, you know, and be like, look, I’m not leaving until I get this kind of thing.

And that’s kind of guided me through it, you know,

Joel: Yeah, fuel the brain. Get some calories up in there.

I, I. 

Professor Lyrical: I got a little bar right here.

Joel: I talk a lot in some of my workshops about the caveman brain, and you know about, there’s a, there’s, I don’t know if this is true or if this has been debunked, but I did cite it in my book with that asterisk that there, there was an ESPN article several years ago that said that master chess players can burn upwards of 4,000, 5,000 calories during a tournament. Just sitting and thinking, and your, you know, your brain consumes like 20% u upwards of, I’m gonna get the numbers wrong, but like a large portion of the calories for the size. And I always tell people, I’m like, the more you make your audience think. The more things you put in front of them that they have to hold and juggle, the less they’re paying attention. Because we’re cavemen and we’re wired to conserve calories and to, you know, to always have one eye over your shoulder, even if you’re focusing on that frontal lobe stuff. So how do you, when you’re getting into some of this higher level stuff with with students, how do you chunk out concepts? Like, have, do you have any tips, advice, things that have worked for you? Different ways of pivoting a concept to present you know, something that might be useful to the listeners who are maybe a technical practitioner, maybe not exactly in math, but they’ve got these complex things they’re shoving at people and they’re like, here’s the white paper, now make a decision on it.

And I was like, bro, I, you know.

Professor Lyrical: Well, there’s two ways to answer that. I mean, the, actually something you asked earlier comes back into play. You were mentioning the freestyle part. Right. And I, when I was at Northeastern, I was able to teach, I was pretty much the only person teaching this for the Graduate School of Education.

They had a need for mathematics methods, courses being taught for future educators of math who were in the graduate program. And so they were like, “Hey, Plourde, you want to teach that?” And I was like “I absolutely do.” And so I got to teach that course. And basically you’re readying mathematicians to go out those are my students now, right? Math people who like math and came to a very expensive school like Northeastern, just so they can be a math teacher. You don’t find too many people necessarily willing to do that if we’re being truthful, that are gonna go drop $80,000 a year on their education and they want to go be a math educator, right?

It’s like not necessarily what they’re doing.

Joel: Get those people. Get those people while they’re hot. 

Professor Lyrical: Exactly. Need this to say five to seven people in my class, like tops. Right? So those classes are fun. And to the idea of the chunking, what it’s more like this. I’m trying to get those students to think about when they’re going to be the educator in the classroom and how are you gonna teach to the person who isn’t like you, who doesn’t necessarily like math?

So of course you need to have the lesson plan. Written out properly. We talk about that, right? Having sort of entry points as you’re chunking. Like here’s a point where you can switch the subject. Here’s a point where you can bring in something dynamic. Here’s a point where you can go to multimedia, right? Here’s a point where you can get active crowd participation, much like a hip hop show, right? So the way I would do it is I would think about it as a performance, not being that necessarily what we wanna be, the sage on the stage. We are facilitating a class. And just like when you’re MCing a show, maybe as the master of ceremonies and not just the rapper, how would you think about this for the customer who’s viewing the show, right?

The patron. What’s the experience gonna land like? And so to the educators, I would say, look, the freestyling that I do as a performer. Is relevant in the classroom because you need to be able to come off the script when it isn’t, when it isn’t working, or when somebody’s very real natural curiosity is peaked and you need to address that. The worst thing to do is to not address that and go back to your script, right, because it’s calling for that live moment of human interaction. And in the AI era, and I was even talking about this, you know, while I was, I haven’t been in Northeastern full-time for seven years. I’m still there, actually employed as adjunct faculty, and I still work with my old team quite a bit and I’m actually speaking one of their classes coming up relatively soon. But when I was there full-time, we were talking about the advent of AI and how we could be replaced.

In fact, in one of my first TEDx talks I did I think it was 2014 ish, probably. I have to double check that date. The TEDxPiscataquaRiver up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I mentioned we as calculus instructors could easily get replaced if we’re not able to do something different than what AI is gonna very easily be able to do and can probably do it better when it becomes efficient enough. So like what are you gonna do? And one of the very main things that you can do is address your audience and have that human interaction piece to really understand where they’re at. And that’s just it. I mean, that’s the secret of it. It’s really trying to find out who are the people in front of you.

And a lot of times when you’re performing on a stage, you’re just performing a preset script. And that can be boring too.

Are you interacting? Are you finding out who’s there are? You talk, we all watch a comedian interact and riff off of when somebody’s a heckler, and it’s usually the best part of the show, right?

So just being comfortable with it comes from the preparation, your due diligence that you’ve done before, but knowing, hey, these are my points where I can freestyle and riff a little bit. And heaven forbid if I need to totally go off the script, like, am I willing to do it? Am I comfortable with that?

And not feel like the day was a failure? 

Joel: But there’s so much preparation to it, but at the same time, the improv or the being ready to switch or jump on a concept that someone throws out at you, you’re really doing Yes.

And with the audience.

And and I imagine you get that with the students too. Like what have you learned from students? Like, because our brains, we often see things one way and we think that it’s our job as educators or technical communicators to impose our knowledge, but it’s our perspective on students and then they come at you from a completely different direction. And it’s like wild and like that, being open to learning yourself when you are the professor, you’re the one who’s up there talking, I think is key. Coming down to the level, not down to the level, but coming to the level of the students using the pop culture, using the hip hop, I would imagine is a way of getting that connection, that human, so that it’s, you know, computer calculus, it’s like conversational calculus.

Professor Lyrical: “Yes, And.” I like that. Well, let me answer that way. Yes. And I also would use, and I think I got this from teaching the math methods courses too, using the faculty. Right? See, in my position now, I’m not only an associate professor of math, I direct faculty development, right? So I’m stealing the best ideas from other educators now and taking all the credit, right?

So I kiddingly tell them that. I say, Hey man, if you like what I’m doing, it’s. Thank yourselves because I’m just, it’s the amalgamation of everything you guys are doing, and it’s true. It’s the same thing with the students. It’s you’re taking their objections, you’re taking their criticisms, and all the aha moments that work and you’re just remembering them the same as you would if you were performing on a stage.

What was the best part of your set? It’s probably gonna translate multiple times. What’s the best part that I did here? Let me pat myself in the back. Okay. But really what landed well with students and what didn’t? And be okay with taking both of them. I, and I do the same thing with faculty, you know, and now I do a thing called MSFs, which it’s not something I invented, but just following other good advice that other educators do in mid-semester feedback sessions.

And instead of waiting to the end. When we get our evaluations back, have a neutral person come in, maybe a colleague, and come in and just do a little survey with your class and be like, Hey, what things am I mucking up?

What things do you want more of? And give me back the report. I just leave the room.

Anonymously. And I do these for other faculties and we create that culture right where it’s okay to tell me I’m not killing it. Right? And you know what you’re doing, Dr. Plourde, you’re really messing up when you do here. Like why are you making homework due Sunday midnight when we’re not gonna get any sleep.

Is that what you really want? You know, so you take these little pieces of criticism that as you go, but it’s not just from the students, it’s actually from the faculty as well too. So I gotta give credit to them as well.

Joel: Yeah, you’ve gotta have that, that vulnerability and, you know, ah, it might sting a little bit, but, it’s like what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger a little bit. 

All right. This is Joel just busting in here for a quick second. What an amazing conversation with, uh, Professor Lyrical. I’m too truly enjoying this, and, uh, you know, his transformation has been just amazing, the way he blends academics and, and arts. And, uh, if you wanna learn how to do a little bit of this, uh, I got a book coming out and you can, uh, check it out. You can actually sign up right now to be part of the Book Army. Get an early copy of it. Just go to nerdthattalksgood.com/book. Sign up, drop me a message, let me know you want it. Uh, all I ask of you is an amazing review when it comes out in a couple months.

You can also go there, support the show, learn how to be a nerd that talks good. That’s what we’re all about. Um, I got really exciting stuff coming up, uh, the next couple guests. So, uh, keep, uh, keep tuned and, uh, let’s get back to, uh, this awesome conversation with Pro.

So you’ve been in, in academia and math for so long, if you could rewrite math education in the US what do you think the first thing is you would change at any level?

At you know, primary. College, wherever. Where would you start your jumping off points?

Professor Lyrical: My knee jerk reaction is textbooks. And I think we’re in the OER world now, the, you know, open resources where. Open education is kind of a movement now where we’re kind of there, but for years I would cringe at textbook examples, kinda like I was speaking to earlier because it’s such like a central part of the Country America examples, right? Like, you know, a farmer is bailing weight. It’s like, what are we talking about? Like, farming’s cool, but not everybody is, you know, on the, in the heartland or, you know, you know, Biff is shining you know, his, you know, his shoes on the, it’s like, all right, we can do better.

We can do better. So building in the engagement. With the actual examples that you’re gonna do is only second to actual experiential education in the first place. Right? So having more experiential situations for students, I think that’s what we naturally want. It’s why math’s fun when you’re little, right?

Because you’re throwing dice on the floor or marbles on the floor and you’re making connections and associations to things that matter to you. And we lose that when we become adults and we’re like, well, you guys are all mature now. You can just sit there in the chair forever and read the boring textbook.

And it’s like, no, but that’s not what we need to do. So we’re in a cut and paste error as well with textbooks and even with, you know, it’s big business now with all of the computer assisted technology that we have out there. I also hope will go away to be frank with you. Pearson is a multi-billion dollar company.

I’ve used Pearson products for a long time. Cengage products still do, but they’re cut and paste. Like, “here’s the example. Now you do it.” Right and there’s not a lot of ingenuity going on there for our students. They’re really just learning how to, you know, cut and paste, plug and chug, and it’s not really what we talk about for critical thinking.

And I think math gets too much credit for being the engine of critical thinking. And it might as well be any other subject if that’s all we’re gonna do in the classroom is just do cut and paste, kind of plug and chug. That’s not critical thinking. I would rather do a lesson that is visual. That is, audio based that gets as many of the senses and as possible and brings in people from the margin who haven’t traditionally had much success in mathematics, especially at a higher level. And let and say to them, look this is your environment too. We’re building this for you. Show them and demonstrate that.

And a lot of times that looks like game theory. That’s what I start with, is game theory in the classroom, playing games where your natural creativity and curiosity comes into play, and then later you backfill with the mathematics that you did. Now let’s write what we actually did and now let’s formalize it.

And that’s empowering because you’re seeing that it’s rooted in something fun and curious. And that now we can formalize it and be precise and use the rigor that mathematics demands at the higher levels so that it doesn’t seem like a foreign language and that it makes more sense intuitively.

Joel: Yeah the cheese sauce before the broccoli, you’re like. Aha. Surprise you. You learned something.

Professor Lyrical: Yes.

More we can get students just making their own lessons and making their own videos. Now I just think is a win, right? So just bring in the technology, let them engage and they do better. Just like our younger, I have an 11-year-old son. Just let them do what they’re gonna do and it’s usually pretty darn good when you don’t give ’em too much instruction.

Give the instruction later if needed, you know?

Joel: Yeah. Let their, let the concepts and things stay in the textbook. And, you know, don’t try to, don’t try to story tell from the textbook,

but you extract those concepts and then let them bring the culture, let them bring the examples. And so, and then. Pull the cover back and haha, this was the concept all along. It’s kind of that. And it’s a total win when people are like, I’m interested in that because I have that problem that I have to solve. It’s not of an equation you’ve put in front of me. I could care less if it’s gonna, if it’s a tool that I’m gonna be able to use, then I’m gonna learn it because gosh darn it, I’ve got stuff in my life that relies on it. And I find that’s. The place that so many people who have a tool start is with the tool.

“Let me show you this and then tell you why it’s important.” I like to flip that and say, you’ve got this problem in your life, or you’ve got this thing you wanna solve, and let’s look at how we can do it together. Oh, look what I just happened to have. 

I want to kind of go back to this concept when we were talking about the rap battle versus working with peers and colleagues and things and I had this picture in my head of broadening circles of audiences, right? When you’re in a room with friendlies, people who you typically know, right? The pressure you were saying is not quite, as on the emotions, are not, the stakes aren’t quite as high and, you know, you would get on a stage maybe with people who have varying levels of I’ll just call it technical knowledge being sort of read into the concept and then you open this prospect to video and it being shared more widely and how do you handle situations when you have an audience, or you may have an audience that has a varying level of that technical knowledge, you can’t always gauge it ahead of time. They’re not students. You’re not like, I know we’re here, or I want to get us here. The students are here. When you’re, so you get up on a TEDx stage and you know, you’ve got a very limited amount of time to deliver remarks but you don’t know where everybody is, for example.

How do you handle that situation?

Professor Lyrical: I think getting people engaged from the outset is key, right? So at a TEDx, like opening with a rap would probably be a way to grab everybody’s attention and then at least have a short window by which they’re gonna listen to the next thing you say.

I think it’s a little different in classroom spaces.

I think a lot of times that you can actually turn to the students quickly to let them do some of what I would’ve called, maybe the grunt work, which would be let them talk about the things that they know that are the pillars of the subject that are there, and let other people hear them. And normally what happens is your extroverts want to do that, and your introverts don’t. Right? And so how we think about managing spaces that, like I’m an introvert naturally, but I’m a creative extrovert.

And so as a creative extrovert, I really come alive when there’s something creative that’s being asked. And if it’s something mundane, I don’t.

But for the mundane stuff, you can usually get the extroverts be willing just to speak about anything. Right? So I’ll sometime, I mean, I’m thinking that in mind, and I don’t want it to be extrovert dominated because I want to bring in those introverts, but I’m, that’s the way that I’m strategically thinking about it, like what lesson am I gonna do that needs participation now?

Lemme find out where my extroverts are and then let me find one that’s gonna need everybody, and how can I make that really creative so that my, I know introverts like me, and a lot of us geeks in general, right? We’re gonna sit in the back of the room a lot of time, but if you make it engaging to what we wanna do, we come right alive.

So it’s thinking like you gotta know who the players are in the particular room. And that’s a little bit easier when you, like, when you talk about the friendlies and so forth, about finding out who’s in your class early and getting the buy-in, let them do the grunt work. In terms of like if I said what is the Big Idea?

Like I do a lot with quantum mechanics, right? And so if I was to ask you like, what are the big co, I don’t mean you personally, but if I was to ask my class, you know, what are the big ideas in quantum mechanics as opposed to me telling you what the big ideas in quantum mechanics are. Let some of the extroverts who’ve seen it in pop culture talk about it.

I might start the lesson that way. What have we heard in pop culture about quantum mechanics? That it can, and it can be wrong. That’s fine. Like what’s something you’ve heard about out there in quantum mechanics? Right. And now that’s gonna get those introverts as well. After the extroverts take the first couple of wax at it, they’re gonna come in and probably talk about when they saw.

A Marvel movie, right? Or they saw, you know, Antman was in the quantum realm, right? Like, that’s gonna come out and letting those places thrive because that’s great, that builds engagement. We can talk about what’s wrong and what’s right, you know? So, I think it’s critical that you have those fun things first.

Whether it’s the rap first, or it’s talking about, you know, Marvel comics and DC and those kind of things, and the Arrowverse and the multiverse and, you know, all that stuff is wonderful. So.

Joel: Yeah. And that’s the opportunity you get to “Yes. And” them, you’re like, yes, that’s the way it is in pop culture and this is the part of it that they’re drawing on. That might be right.

Professor Lyrical: Lot of wrong there.

Joel: Lot of wrong there. Exactly. And say, and the wrong. And the wrong is fun. And I love Ant Man’s one of my that’s, I love Paul Rudd in anything. He’s just hilarious. Who are

Professor Lyrical: Say there might be some physical stressors on our body if we suddenly grow 50 feet 

Joel: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Now we go over to the biology class and we talk about why whales have to be underwater because their body weight. Yeah.

A lot of, there’s a lot of problems with that too. 

Who are some of the other. Communicators that you admire either in math or, you know, rappers, hip hop artists that you look to that you admire now who are doing some pretty amazing things.

Professor Lyrical: A great question. There’s ones across spectrums for sure. When I think of people that do something similar to me Dr. Chris Emden Dr. Chris Emden has used. Hip hop and stem together. He’s at Columbia University. He went out to USC for a while and he was an endowed chair out there for a while, and his dad passed away and he went back to New York City where he’s from, and he’s got bars and he runs these amazing science programs.

He brings in Wu-Tang to his class. I mean, he’s a celebrity, right? I’ve performed with him at Columbia and done some stuff with him. So I look to him as almost like a big brother, mentor when I was doing. Research, trying to find other people doing something like this. His name just kept popping up, and so we eventually met.

He’s just a fantastic communicator. I love him. You know, some of the popular people too that are out there in, in pop culture everybody points to the Neil deGrasse Tysons of the world. I think he does an excellent job and he gets stuff wrong as well. Like we were just talking about. He’ll say something, I’ll be like, Ooh, oh, that’s I wish he didn’t say that.

You know, because. I pay a lot of attention to circles that are a little bit more marginalized. And when I think of marginalized communities, I think of our flat earther friends. It is a growing community, and he will once in a while say something that I know they’re gonna jump on and nitpick because he didn’t say it technically correct, and he just.

Like he’ll talk about, oh, we weren’t really out in space that far. And I’m like, Ooh, you might not want to say that. Everybody does a good job when you’re trying to popularize the subject, but with that, making things popular, it’s usually a lot less rigorous. And so our little science STEM hats go off.

I’m like, oh, that’s not exactly right. I do it too. But it’s usually the people that are at least willing to walk up to what isn’t correct to write what that line is, to build the engagement where you’re gonna maybe have an issue or two. That’s that’s not there. But there, there’s so many, I mean, there’s so many disciplines that I just watch somebody speaking and I’m like, wow, they’re great.

There’s different styles too. There’s people in. In quantum science that I will listen to speak and they’re very measured and I don’t know if you know who Sabine is, but Sabine Hossenfelder does a whole series. She’s for years has been doing a series on quantum mechanics and physics and so forth, and she’s usually very, I don’t wanna say conservative, but measured about in terms of like, yeah, that’s not right. Let’s stop at the gobbly gook here and stop at the magic like this. That’s not what quantum is, right? But now, because she’s become more of a figure on YouTube, much like Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? Neil Degrass is an esteemed physicist, but now let’s face it, he’s really his bread is buttered from what he’s doing in the space of being a communicator. Sometimes they have to say something for a little extra shock value, and I get it. But tho those people, they walk the line and I appreciate what they’re able to do. So. Great question though. There’s so many, but I would point to people to see them as wone some work with NASA and he’s in those spaces too. 
 

Joel: I’m compiling my list of of guests for next season. So yeah, I’ll start reaching out and yeah, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s on my on my wishlist. I’d love to get him on. People like Hank Green.

What I appreciate about a lot of the creators and the communicators is when they show that they are wrong or when they show that I’m curious and I don’t know, And you know, I think when you get up to a certain level of point, people don’t wanna do that. They feel like they’ve got this authority. They feel like they have to be. You know, they have to have this veneer of, you know, everything I say is super accurate. 

And to deGrasse Tyson’s credit, he often says, “we just don’t know.” Like, I think, and, you know, in technical communications we often. Make statements. Now in, in math, I would believe it’s a little bit more, you know, ones and zeros, black and white. But where are the squishy areas? Where are the, are? Are there things in math that we don’t know yet? I mean, where is it?

Where do we go from here? We know so much.

Professor Lyrical: You can win a Fields medal with all of the unsolved math problems and proofs that are out there that we just kind of think are right, but we don’t really know. That’s not really what keeps me up at night, to be honest. I’m not really trying to, you know, go win any Fields, medals or anything like, that’s the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Mathematics.

Right. It’s not really exciting time for me because it feels too disengaged, it’s too much in the basement. And just buy your lonesome like I’m trying to overcome my life has been overcoming being that person who’s comfortable in the basement to be more of an extrovert in general. Right. Because it is needed, because we have so few people raising the banner and for stem, and, you know, even the geekdom, right? It’s like, who are our geek heroes? That’s almost an oxymoron, right?

When you’re thinking about, you know, public, front facing people like Joel, maybe you’re gonna be the, you know, the flag bearer, right? So when you think about it.

The whole essence of your show is finding people who communicate right in a space where we don’t historically, let’s face it, have some of the best communicators. So it’s tricky when you’re trying to like point to examples because that’s exactly what we need more of. It’s, but in math, just sitting in the basement all day is not gonna get me to that place necessarily.

So I’m always looking for things that are a little bit more interactive, that are gonna point a flashlight, or I should say a spotlight onto STEM science in general. As opposed to, you know, just being some random person working on another unsolved problem with, you know, my lonesome or a couple people from school.

Joel: That, that’s awesome. I’m real excited about the stuff that you’re doing. I mean, again, not a math guy at all. My, my son, 15, gifted in math but could care less about it and, you know, so, so, and sort of the point of earlier is giving them something to point a spotlight on that says, Hey, this is useful.

It’s like, next year we’re probably gonna do economics. And ’cause he’s, he wants to know where the money comes from.

He wants to know about money. I’m like, bro. There’s, you’ve got, you know, there’s psychology involved in that. There’s so much interweaving that, yeah. I think coming up out of the basement and seeing where math rubs up against the gritty, sweaty human aspects of the world is amazing. 

I wanna kind of close with just. What keeps you fresh? What keeps you grounded, you know, is it a day night light switch thing? You know, the between, all right, but the college professor is off and the professor lyrical is on.

I mean, it’s, they’re both part of your personality.

Did, is there like a third? Is there like a third identity? We might do you garden?

Professor Lyrical: Uh, Dad Dad is definitely the, my son is definitely, I’m actually in his room while I’m talking to you right now while he’s at school. No, my life is really embedded in my son’s life. And so, and I find that thinking about him usually does center me in terms of like, you know, you want your kids to be proud of you, right?

So it’s like, what would, you know, I’ll ask him sometimes I’ll say, “Hey, should, would you be mad if I go do this show?” He’s like, “go do it. Like, daddy, I want you to be bigger rapper.” And half of my earlier life when he was younger and now he’s 11. I said earlier he, when he was like five, it was a real question for me.

Am I going to go to this random show location for some reasonable amount of money? Maybe, but I’m gonna be gone maybe two or three days. Is that something I really want to do and leave my wife? You know, like all this kind of decisions come into play. So that one, I can’t understate. But the rest of it is kind of a synthesis.

It really is. And I do wanna give a shout out to my university. I’m at the University of District Columbia, and the shout out that I want to give is that I was one of the lead faculties for a program that we have in quantum literacy. And I think this is so needed, and this is like a shout out to people to maybe do something similar. So I’m with an organization called Qusteam, which is a national outfit for quantum information science. And we’re trying to make quantum a minor that you can adapt at any college. I mean, we’ve actually finished, we’ve written the four courses and we’ve embedded the A of arts into there.

So you see certainly where I fit in among my peers, that all realized we need to do more to engage people in these big ideas. And what we did at UDC, we started an associates program. It’s the, you know, even just like maybe blue collar STEM the call from the people in the area, especially the National Quantum Congress, that the World Congress that happens out here every year for quantum.

They’re like, look, “we just need people that are quantum competent. We don’t necessarily need people at the PhD level. We have those, they’re out there. We need people who can come in at the ground floor, maybe mid-career, who understand quantum, like what are the big ideas? Could you guys make a program?” We jumped all over that.

We were already starting to do that anyways, and we went full tilt and we did it at the lowest level that we could in terms of, you know, how high you need to be in terms of the academic ladder. We did it at the associates level and you know, over half of our student population, or roughly half of our student population in our institution comes through the associate pathway because we are a, well, the only public option in Washington DC So what we dub as our community college is also inside of the university, and that’s where like half the students come through.

So like a lot of them are gonna enter right into the workforce. We hope they continue on and get their bachelor’s and master’s and doctorates at our institution, but they don’t always do that. Some of them are ready to enter the workforce and with we’re answering the workforce is saying, look, we’ll take an associates.

And so we did that and hopefully they’re gonna get there. But we did it with the A, you know, with the arts by trying to get people engaged through all of the same things that we’re talking about. That stuff is what, to answer your question, it’s the blending of that, right? “It’s like, what can I do today that is.

Academic and artistic?” Those things are the things that I love to do. ’cause I don’t have to do one or the other. I can spit bars that are dope, that are also intelligent, right? Like that’s, that keeps me up at night. If I hear something that’s motivating in that kind of light, I’m like, Ooh, that’s dope. If I watch Star Wars and then inspires me, I’m like, you know what?

I’m gonna write the Star Wars verse, but I’m not gonna make it cheesy and corny and just make the end word happen to rhyme with, you know, favor so I can rhyme lightsaber, even though I might rhyme lightsaber, right? It’s gonna be deeper. It’s gonna be doper. Yeah, it’s gonna be complex. You know: 

Let the force be bygone and some master Qui-Gon. Force never dies. We just multiply on. 

Melt that iron on with five of its ca on. Light sharpens light, sabers we pipe on. Right right on through the dead of night to the dawn dedicated like a Mennonite whenever cite Psalms with a couple light sabers I place in my tight palms. Devil’s bounce like Luffy, I’m chewing fruits at the God’s baby.

Maybe all my poems, I’m quoting it up along. Broken Model. Ahsoka Tano. Them paddawans, they travel on and sometimes they act sinister. Hurt Third Sisters wanna be Grand Inquisitors. This good search like Prime Minister. Beat ’em nice on beats and mics. I might finish ’em Obi-Wan, Annakin. My son. Obi-Wan now we back at one, Brian midnight.

Them teach ’em the ways of the force gravitational to pull ’em back if they stray off course. Of course I got one with the forceps, surgical, 

you know what I mean? Like it’s just bringing it all together. Right. And they’re like, that’s for me is fun. That keeps me up at night. I’m having fun with it. It’s deeper.

It’s like, ah, yeah, that, that stuff.

Joel: That’s awesome. I’m glad I’m glad I got you to do that on the on the recording. It was so good. I will drop in some links obviously to UDC and your page, and you got an album coming up.

Professor Lyrical: Yeah, that verse is on it. That verse is on a song called bad and Good. And yeah, the album’s called Dr. Plourde. Thanks for mentioning. It comes comes, well, it’ll probably be out by the time you guys are seeing this. He’ll search for Dr. Plourde, that’s the real name, Professor Lyrical, and uh, got on vinyl too, so you can get on vinyl.

And professor 

Joel: I got my turntable back here. 

Professor Lyrical: send you one. I just got the test pressing myself and it looks as good as it sounds, so

Joel: Oh, exciting. Well, well thank you so much for joining. This has been great. I’m gonna drop a whole bunch of links. I’m gonna cha chase down all the shout outs that you gave because I, you know, what I love to do is give homework, so anybody who’s listening go to, yeah, I think my homework might be a little bit more fun.

Professor Lyrical: I dunno. I think I rate my teacher. That’s probably the criticism of me, like gives a lot of homework, but you know,

Joel: Yeah, but you know, some of your homework is is, you know, go listen to this and

get ’em engaged. This Pro this has been amazing. So, so much fun. We’re local. I’m in DC I’ll give you a shout when I get back down around that way. Yeah, I would, ah, that would be amazing. But thank you so much for joining.

Again, just we need more teachers. We need more people like, like you out there. I hope you’ve inspired some people.

Professor Lyrical: Oh, that was the last plug. Go be a professor. Because you know what, this is the thing that they don’t tell you that. I always wanna say, and sometimes the university, if I say it the wrong way, they might not like it, but I’m gonna say it anyways. When I was teaching high school, I didn’t have any free time.

If you’re teaching K through 12, you’re a saint and you deserve double, triple your pay, right? Like it is, you don’t have time to breathe. Right? It’s unbelievable. So we gotta big up what those folks are doing, right. At higher ed, it’s the inverse relationship. We typically get paid more money and have way more free time, right?

It’s like not only the nine months and not only all the holidays, but like we might teach two classes, right? And that’s a full-time load for a lot of us. Some three classes, whatever, right? Four for the absolute worst. And it’s, you compare that to anybody teaching K through 12, they’d kill for that. And so I find that to be a little backwards, but in, in any event.

Some of my fellow artists out there, if you’re trying to think of a of a pathway that will allow you some extra time to, you know, you gotta write your articles and do your homework and so forth. But there’s certainly some free time in there for some creative thoughts. You can definitely find the time with the with the load that’s maybe higher ed schedule.

So big shout out to higher ed.

Joel: That’s awesome. Yeah. Big shout out to higher ed. Again, thanks for joining. This has been awesome. And may, maybe I’ll get out to a show.

Professor Lyrical: Absolutely. I’ll have to let you know. I appreciate it, 

Joel: sweet.

Professor Lyrical: Thanks