Big Ballin’ – 7802

Summary

In this lesson, students listen to a rap song entitled “Big Ballin,” which discusses the “Captains of Industry” and the success of big business during America’s Industrial Revolution. The students use GoogleDocs to annotate the song for historical events, people, and places as well as literary devices (similes, metaphors, and allusions). The students also create questions that are inspired by the lyrics of the song. Using these annotations as the basis for research, the students use their information fluency skills to locate information that will help them understand the meaning of the song. Using this newfound information, the students annotate the song once more, this time paraphrasing the meaning of each stanza.

The students’ research is used as an opportunity to introduce how to create effective written historical arguments. The students use the information from their research in order to justify their answers several high level questions about the Captains of Industry. At the end of the lesson, the teacher reviews the notes from this time period (Standard USII.4b) through a think/pair/share based format, in which the students use the knowledge they have gained over the previous class and a half in order to create their own notes.

As an extension activity, the students research Cornelius Vanderbilt (who is excluded from the Big Ballin’ song) and use their research to write a stanza about this individual that could be added to the song.

Lesson Reflection

Teacher:

“I liked that this activity encouraged student curiosity and had the students practice finding answers to their own questions. Although a lot of the information they researched was not directly tied to the SOLs, I feel like the students learned more than they would have if they had listened to me lecture on this topic. I also liked that the lesson began with the rap. The rap obviously engaged the students and made them immediately interested in the lesson.

The student’s written responses will provide a great base for teaching historical writing. The students obviously have some good points, but many students failed to create a main point and support that point with specific historical evidence. After we do several writing activities, I may come back to this assignment and have the students answer one of these questions again in a longer format (Probably the one about whether the captains made their money fairly or not) and have the students create a thesis and support their thesis using historical examples. When we do this, the students will already have most of the research completed already. In this new essay, students can also tie in research into current events and current business practices to support their points.”

ITRT:

“One of the most important pieces of this lesson in my mind is the fact that it encourages student curiosity. The unique and interesting lyrics of the song not only initially engage the students, but also encourage them to immediately start asking questions. The beginning of this lesson provides an excellent opportunity for the teacher to model the “question generation process” for the students. For example, after listening to the song, the teacher could list all of the questions that the first stanza raised in their mind. For example:

• Why is Rockefeller comparing himself to Big Pimpin and Jay Z?
• Who or what is the Valdez and why is it mentioned in the song?
• What does Rockefeller mean when he says “gobble up?” Why does he use this particular phrase?

Other than question generation and curiosity, another focus of this assignment was for students to be able to create arguments and support those arguments up with historical evidence. As such, research was an integral part of this lesson. However, the research piece could be adapted for classes of varying levels. Depending on time and the level of scaffolding needed for a particular class, the research segment of the lesson could be adapted to be more “contained.” After the students create their questions, direct them to the Flocabulary Site for Big Ballin. By clicking on the blue links within the lyrics, students are taken to Flocabulary’s annotations of the song. A teacher could have their class use these annotations to answer their own questions and then use research techniques to find any “leftover” questions.

In the first class where we completed this lesson, we did not initially provide the students with the three guiding questions that they would answer in writing the next day. After the class ended, the teacher and I discussed how providing the students with these questions in advance might help to focus the students’ research, which it did.”