SAN RAMON — Students rhymed as hip-hop beats thumped in Deme Sakkis’ ninth grade world geography and cultures class.
“Kids crying, people are dying, bombs are flying,” Teresa Adeleye, 14, rapped into a microphone, in front of classmates as they cheered her on.
Adeleye and her fellow students wrote the lyrics to songs that covered topics from world religions to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to colonialism — their coursework for the past several months — but the music sounded like what these students listen to on their own time.
“They’re interacting with the material creatively, which shows an understanding beyond regurgitating facts,” said Dave Haberman, who coached the students as partner Doug Allen provided the music.
Haberman, 28, and Allen, 27, visited Dougherty Valley High School on Monday as part of their KlabLab Sound of Knowledge Tour 2012.
The pair, and their manager Joe O’Loughlin, started Pleasanton-based KlabLab in an attempt to use the power of music to help students learn. They’ve been touring classrooms around the Bay Area for the past month, helping students write and record songs.
“It started out with an idea to make educational music that you’d hear on the radio,” Allen said.
“Instead of being about your ex-girlfriend, the music is about cellular structure, the order of operations and tectonic plates,” Haberman said.
Haberman said he came up with the idea while in a teaching credential program. Both he and Allen were musicians; they have been working on KlabLab for about a year now. The name of their company is a play on the word “collaboration,” they explained.
The music that students are creating during the tour is being entered into a contest, with a grand prize of iPads for the winning songwriters and $10,000 for their school. The winners will be determined by which song gets the most votes on their website.
KlabLab now has a tour bus complete with a recording studio; this week, their tour heads to Southern California. A KlabLab album is in the works for the summer, and the duo plus O’Loughlin are set to begin a nationwide tour in the fall.
They don’t charge the schools for their visits. The bus, equipment, tour and contest are being paid for by “unnamed angel investors,” Haberman said.
Haberman said they are working on a long-term strategy to make money from their work but didn’t give details. “The goal is to become the hub for creative education,” he said.
In Sakkis’ classroom, Haberman and Allen broke the students into groups of four to six and had them work together to come up with hip-hop lyrics. Huy Nguyen, 14, sat in his group pulling facts from his class notes. His group partner, Sarah Ahmadi, 15, scribbled notes as Haberman and Allen coached them along. The group rapped together and laughed as they tried to get historical facts to rhyme.
Sakkis said the visit from KlabLab was a great way for her students to engage with the subject matter. “I think they’re going to remember whatever they wrote about,” she said.
At the end of the hour, a student from each group came to the front of the classroom. Haberman introduced them and handed them the mike, and Allen played the music. The students then rapped their lyrics as their classmates enthusiastically cheered them on.
“I knew that music is great for learning, but I never knew how much fun it would be,” Ahmadi said. “The best part was the interaction with my friends. I thought this was going to be corny, but it was great.”
