ROXBURY - Inside the brick-walled cafeteria of Roxbury's Tobin School, the elementary students and their tutors clapped out rhythms underneath a food pyramid poster, rapping in unison to a hip-hop beat.
"Now we likes to zap 'em. We write 'em. We raps 'em. Kick a rhyme. Mention a prime. So if you think that you be knowing 'em. It's about that time to be flowing 'em. Kick a flow. Everybody gotta go. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 . . ." It may never be a hit on Billboard, but "The Prime Number Rap" is helping some students learn math.
"Most kids are into hip-hop," said London Hardy, director of the Young People's Project. "It's another way to reel them in. If we can get kids interested in math through hip-hop, we're gonna do it."
Founded in Jackson, Miss., in 1996, YPP is a math literacy program that recruits college and high school students to teach math to younger students. The program incorporates hip-hop in its teaching, specifically to help memorize prime numbers.
"It's just fun learning. Everybody likes to have fun. We just sort of trick 'em into learning," said Kevin Edmundson, a Northeastern student who helps supervise the activity.
Every afternoon, 40 students or "math literacy workers" fan out throughout Boston trying to make learning math cool. Being taught by other students helps younger students learn, the literacy workers said, but using hip-hop doesn't hurt either.
"I think hip-hop helps us reach kids because it's on their level. It's something that they listen to every day," said Elie Chery, a math literacy worker and ninth-grader at Matignon High School.
And students clearly respond to the hip-hop.
"It gets you kind of motivated in order to learn something," said Zaira Miles-Diaz, a fifth-grader at the Tobin School. "You get to have fun while you're doing it and you don't even know you're learning,"
She even wrote her own verse to go with the "The Prime Number Rap":
"When I'm cruisin' in my limo or ridin' on my bike.
All my tutors say `ooh' as I rap upon the mike.
They say I have no talent, but I tell them I'm the bomb.
And I can rap my prime numbers while chillin' with my moms.
17, 19, 23 . . ."
The creative method, insists Hardy, is helping students conquer concerns about math.
"Almost every workshop we do, 90 percent of the students end up knowing all the" prime numbers under 100, he said.
And it can get competitive. One recent afternoon, students churned out prime numbers in "face-offs," where two students named prime numbers until someone made a mistake.
The day's "face-off" winner: Tevin Leonidas.
"I like the work they give us. Using rap helps us learn the prime numbers," said Leonidas, who is a third-grader.
"And it makes it more fun."
