","level":0,"displayType":"paragraph"},{"text":"Alabama teacher Ms. Merlette, 23, rewrote the lyrics to the popular song making them applicable to her eight and nine-year-olds’ anxiety over an upcoming math test. The original song, for which Cyrus was lauded for his respectful participation in black culture, unlike the appropriative actions of other artists, including his daughter Miley Cyrus, has now developed an equally popular counterpart featuring lyrics such as, “I’m gonna ace my test, I’m gonna raise my score, I’m gonna solve ’til I can’t no more,” in place of Cyrus’s chorus. Meanwhile, Lil Nas X’s rap was brilliantly transformed into the following lyrics: “I got the answers in the back, scratch work is attached, pencils in my bag and I’m solvin’ mighty fast. School is my task! I can do this math really quick and fast, education is that swag. Can’t nobody stop me from learning, can’t stop me from learning. The wheels in my head keep churning, they just keep on churning.”","level":0,"displayType":"paragraph"}],"displayType":"section"}]},{"elements":[{"text":"https://twitter.com/LilNasX/status/1129786620578631680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw","displayType":"twitter"},{"elements":[{"text":"","level":0,"displayType":"paragraph"}],"displayType":"section"},{"text":"Merlette Connects Learning & Enjoyment Through Rap","level":3,"displayType":"header"},{"elements":[{"text":"Ms. Merlette, who is currently a first-year, first-grade teacher at Sun Valley Elementary School located in Birmingham, Alabama according to the daily mail, prioritizes the enjoyment that her students can derive from learning. In an interview with AL.com, Merlette emphasizes the importance she places on giving her students a say in how they learn in the classroom, as well as the importance of making learning both fun and accessible to students by targeting it towards their interests, including rap music! According to AL.com, Merlette has also taught her students verbs and adjectives through the creative medium of rap battles. Merlette further elaborated on her teaching philosophy in her interview with AL.com, stating that children “can have fun while learning because they deserve it. All children should because they are still children”. Moreover, she emphasized that students “need us [educators] to never give up on them. Ever. We need to make sure we are doing everything we can to make learning fun and exciting for them by incorporating things they love into the curriculum, into the content, into the lessons, and into everything that is involved in schools.”","level":0,"displayType":"paragraph"}],"displayType":"section"}]},{"elements":[{"text":"https://twitter.com/LilNasX/status/1129391229865619456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw","displayType":"twitter"},{"elements":[{"text":"","level":0,"displayType":"paragraph"}],"displayType":"section"},{"text":"Video Gone Viral","level":3,"displayType":"header"}]},{"elements":[{"text":"https://twitter.com/LilNasX/status/1124040368117506048?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw","displayType":"twitter"},{"elements":[{"text":"","level":0,"displayType":"paragraph"},{"text":"Since Merlette posted the video of her students’ flawless performance on both her Facebook page and the Twitter account, @cocoabutterbf, on April 30, 2019, it has been viewed 21,000 and five million times, respectively. From the number of views the video has gotten, it’s clear that its received international attention – attention that includes both Billy Ray Cyrus and Little Nas X, themselves! Both Cyrus and Lil Nas X retweeted Merlette’s original post of the video and Lil Nas X even tweeted a response to the video saying, “i’m cheesing hard as hell watching this. this beautiful lol”. Ms. Merlette remarked that the song was a win-win for her students as the rapper’s attention was incredibly exciting and they aced the math test they were preparing for! Merlette recounts one of her students saying, “Ms. Merlette, he saw our classroom. He saw us in our element”. Merlette underlines the enthusiasm her students experienced as the most important aspect of the video’s creation since the song and the video were both about and for them. Merlette also emphasizes her pride in the children for the way they took on their math test. Not bad for her first year of teaching!","level":0,"displayType":"paragraph"}],"displayType":"section"}]}];
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var articleDescription = 'Need an extra dose of cuteness? Check out the viral video of Ms. Jasmine Amani Merlette’s class of first graders excitedly singing their own version of Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’s rap-country hybrid smash, “Old Town Road”.';
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