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Lights flashed, the sound mixer zapped and the rapper Grand Hank ripped
across the stage at Snyder High School in Jersey City.
More than 1000 students filled the school’s auditorium yesterday and howled
right on beat. But they knew Grand Hank was no regular gangsta rapper.
He donned a white lab coat-lined with shiny green sash-and revealed
himself as Tyraine Ragsdale, a chemist and scientific rapper.
“Knowledge is power - but when you don’t learn - you can burn,” he
rapped.
Ragsdale, of Philadelphia, a former chemist with Johnson & Johnson, was
just one of the real-life scientists students met yesterday to talk about
science careers.
The New Jersey Association for Biomedical research, a non-profit group based
in Elizabeth, sponsored the event as part of its new partner-ship with Snyder.
Students in the school’s Health Professions Magnet Program attended with
students from Academic High School and the Bridges Program.
Snyder entered the partnership to expose its students to the variety of
science careers and the people working in them, and perhaps link them to
internships, said Gerry Nocia, Snyder’s job placement director.
Speakers included Ophelia Gona, an anatomy professor at the University of
Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, and Joseph Ruffin, an animal care supervisor
with Schering Plough.
But
Grand Hank, whose company Grand Hank Productions now informs students about
science and education careers, may be best able to reach students and
shatter stereotypes about who a scientist is, said Jane Mackta, the association’s
executive director.
“The image of the scientist is a nerdy person with a pocket liner who doesn’t
talk the language of the rest of the people,” she said.
With a few giant flashcards and a booming rap beat, the articulate chemist
spoke the language of rappers and scientists.
Almost every hand shot up when he asked how many students want to attend
college. But he warned that they must master the English language to be
successful, that he himself took jobs as a DJ and construction worker before
earning his chemistry degree from the University of Pittsburgh.
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He then held up names of African-American scientists and inventors on giant
flashcards: Elijah McCoy; Charles Drew; Louis Latimer; Benjamin Banneker; Henry
Blair and Garrett Morgan.
Students knew only Morgan, who invented the stoplight and gas mask.
So Grand Hank asked the student volunteer to dance as he rapped about the
achievements of McCoy-the inventor of self-lubrication for machines; Drew-discoverer of blood plasma; Latimer-maker of electric lamp filaments, and
Blair - maker of the ticking clock. “In history books it’s not even
mentioned,” he rapped.
Kareem Grace, 14, summed up what he learned with the same quick sound bites
of a rapper. “Stay in school, don’t do drugs,” he said.
But even doing these things won’t necessarily lead to success, warned
Gona. Gona, who is African-American, recalled how she grew up in the
segregated South, made great grades but still never though about what she wanted
to be. “I didn’t know anything,” even after college, she said.
Few African-Americans were going on for advanced degrees, so Gona earned a
PhD. in biology, She sadly told the students that UMDNJ hasn’t hired a
African-American PhD. in 17 years.
She warned these aspiring doctors and biochemists that they’ll be competing
with students from top high schools and that they must start preparing now. Her
suggestions: learn five new vocabulary words a day and study at least two hours
a night.
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Grand
Hank Productions Incorporated © 2003
