How cool was that? For the students to be like, “Yeah, that’s my teacher.” To see you in a music video — with clean lyrics — it’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s something that they can watch and listen to now.
I think the beauty of technology is I kept that personal. I remember, I think it was at the third block period. A kid came to my classroom. I’m not going to say his name, but he came into my classroom and he was like, “Yo, you rap.”
And I looked at him. I hit him with “what you’re talking about, Willis?”
He was like, “Nah, don’t try to hide it.” He threw up his phone.
I had an Apple TV join in the classroom. So he cast it on the home screen without telling me and then boom, there goes my video and the class went, “Wow.”
Then, it just spread around like like wildfire. … It felt good. That was a wild couple weeks at the schoolhouse. It was cool because when they would take test[s], I had my earphones on. I was writing bars. Students said my name like three, four times, “Mr. C!”
“Yeah, what’s going on?” [I would respond.] Then, I would secretly still work on my craft at the same time.
