Austin Martin, a junior at Brown University, stands in front of an eighth-grade class at Community Preparatory School in Providence, R.I. He's here to test out the website he developed, which he hopes will help junior and senior high school students learn the vocabulary they'll need for their college entrance exams. He starts the class by connecting his laptop to a projector, and then he veers off the traditional path, away from rote memorization — and toward rap music. A short song clip plays over speakers: "So rude that your mentality is distorting your reality." Martin zeroes in on the word "distort." "OK, so in this example," he says to the class, "When they say 'so rude that your mentality is distorting this reality,' what do you think he means?" The program is called Rhymes with Reason. He's using rap lyrics to teach vocabulary, in the hope that some will connect more to popular music than they do to static words on a page. [READ MORE]