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Photo credit: Robin Harper
One Louisiana teacher is helping her students get their grades in “formation” with a little help from Beyoncé.
Ciera Paul, a seventh-grade math teacher at ReNEW Cultural Arts Academy in New Orleans remixed Beyoncé’s hit “Formation,” changing the lyrics to teach a math lesson to her charter school students. The song teaches a geometry lesson, and includes clever lyrics such as, “I’m so crazy with my circular measurements. Pi times diameter gives me the circumference. I’m so reckless every time I square radius. I multiply it times Pi to get the area.”
Paul told ABC News that she had always joked about remixing a song for the class lesson, but hadn’t gotten around to actually doing it before the Beyoncé remix. “One Sunday night while I was at home, Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ came on the radio, and I thought to myself, ‘I bet they’re going to like this song,'” Paul said.
Paul spent about 30 minutes writing up new lyrics to the song, and then presenting the lesson to her class Monday morning. “They were all just like this is so fun; this is so awesome,” Paul said of her students’ reactions to the math lesson.
“This is just an interesting way to change it up a little bit and get away from the traditional teaching methods of just pens and paper,” Paul said.
After posting the video of the “Formation” math remix online, it was picked up by various media pages, and has been viewed over 1 million times collectively. “I never expected it to be what it is now,” she said.
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