ALUMNI IN ACTION
Rhymes, Reasons and Radicals: That Math Teacher Makes Magic
By Julia Halprin Jackson
Jordan Orosco, ’17 Math, Teaching Credential, has found a new tool to engage his high school math students: rap.
The first few seconds of the video could have been shot in a high school anywhere in America: A teacher clad in a button-up shirt, suspenders, red bowtie and glasses gestures toward a whiteboard covered in triangles, trying to get his class’ attention.
“We can’t have phones out,” the man says. “What’s going on? Trigonometry is super important. Oh my gosh, they don’t care.”
As the camera pans to students slumped in their desks, the man begins to rap to a hypnotic beat.
Let’s talk about a branch of geometry A new concept that’s a hot commodity We got some triangles, a big quantity It’s time for us to learn about trigonometry
Orosco's "Math Rap" took off in 2022.
This is just one way that Jordan Orosco, ’17 Math, Teaching Credential, a leadership and math teacher at Deer Valley High School in Antioch, California, gets students excited about learning.
Orosco was halfway through his second year of teaching when the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to translate his teaching approach, which includes a fair number of “corny dad jokes about math,” into a series of digestible and engaging online tutorials for his algebra and geometry students. Soon parents, students and teachers were accessing his content from all over the world.
At his students’ urging, Orosco decided to try his hand at TikTok. And thus, That Math Magician (a play on “mathematician”) was born.
“Kids always try to rap in my class, so as a joke I said, ‘Well, I could make a rap about math,’” Orosco recalls. “Then over spring break, I found a beat on YouTube and tried really hard. I was really proud of it. But I was scared to post it.”
The Antioch native was reluctant to share his music because, as an alumnus of Deer Valley High himself, he remembered all too well how judgmental high schoolers can be, especially during a time of global uncertainty. But That Math Magician needn’t have worried.
“Students came up to me in class and said, ‘Orosco, you’re kind of good,’” he laughs. “They were actually impressed. What I love about our school is that it feels very accepting. When I went here — it was only about 15 years ago — kids would get made fun of for wearing certain clothes, or if they were LGBTQ+. Now my room is full of all types of kids and they don’t comment on those things.”
Orosco released his first song, “Math Rap,” in 2022, to great acclaim at Deer Valley High and across the Bay Area. His music eventually grew — to use one of his puns — exponentially. Since attracting the attention of news stations like KTVU, KPIX, KRON, FOX40 and ABC7, Orosco’s music has been aired on 106.1 KMEL radio and even been shared on The Drew Barrymore Show.
During the 2022-2023 school year, Orosco wrote and produced one math rap per month, covering systems, MX+B (graphing lines), exponents, roots and more, culminating in his first mixtape, aptly called the Algebra Anthology. A 2023 segment produced by NBC3 Bay Area that featured interviews with Orosco’s students and a musical tour of Deer Valley High later earned a regional Emmy, and in 2024 Orosco earned his first personal Emmy, thanks to an NBC California Live segment about his success as a teacher that listed him as a producer. The attention and fanfare has been thrilling, but Orosco’s focus remains on his students.
“I feel like we need to meet students where they are,” he says. “As teachers, we have these goals and expectations, which are perfectly fine, but we have to realize where our students are and how we get them engaged so they can get where they need to be.”
Sometimes this can mean revising assignments so the material is more relatable, such as comparing exponents to the seemingly endless increase of likes and shares on That Math Magician’s TikTok.
“We need to meet students where they are. As teachers, we have these goals and expectations, which are perfectly fine, but we have to realize where our students are and how we get them engaged so they can get where they need to be.”
— Jordan Orosco
Finding the right note
Not only do his students listen to and follow his music, he says that many of them gain a better understanding of math concepts by watching his tutorials, listening to his lyrics and even playing them in class.
“I’ve found that music helps them,” he says. “It makes the concepts more relevant and encourages them to be engaged. They want to be in music videos that I make, and I say, ‘Yes, but you’ve got to do the math first.’”
His students have motivated him to take creative risks every step of the way, helping him film short videos on campus or begging to make a cameo in one of his songs. He shares that he’ll often hear students humming bars from his raps in class — six feet from the whiteboard.
NBC's California Live spotlighted Orosco and his music, securing him an Emmy.
“Math is a puzzle,” he says. “That’s how I try to frame it to the kids. When they say, ‘When are we going to use this?’ I say, ‘You’re probably not going to use it in your day-to-day life, unless you’re an engineer or a physicist. But there are real-world problems that you’ll encounter, and I’m giving you tools that you can use to solve them.”
Orosco’s next puzzle? Finding rhymes for “asymptote” (a straight line that constantly approaches a given curve but does not meet at any infinite distance).
“When I taught the kids that word today, I realized I hadn’t done a rap on graphing lines with asymptotes,” he laughs. “It’ll be a challenge, but it’ll be fun.”
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