Savvy Teacher Remixes Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ and Schools Kids in Geometry

Forget boring lectures when you can get ‘reckless every time I square my radius.’

Beyoncé performs ‘Formation’ onstage during the Pepsi Super Bowl 50 Halftime Show at Levi’s Stadium on Feb. 7. (Photo: Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images)

Mar 18, 2016· 1 MIN READ

Culture and education editor Liz Dwyer has written about race, parenting, and social justice for several national publications. She was previously education editor at Good.

Psst, math teachers: Want to put your students to sleep? Go old school and deliver a boring lecture. Want them to be able to enthusiastically calculate the circumference of a circle? Turn to Beyoncé.

At least that’s what Ciera Paul, a seventh-grade geometry teacher in New Orleans, decided to do to get her students to learn and have fun while doing so. Paul took Queen B’s hit song “Formation” and reworked the lyrics so that they became math formulas.

The results are in a video that shows Paul’s classroom singing verses such as “I’m so crazy with my circular measurements / Pi times diameter gives me the circumference / I’m so reckless every time I square radius / I multiply it times pi to get the area.”

The fan page Beyoncé Legion posted the video on Facebook on Tuesday. Since then, it has been liked nearly 54,000 times, has been shared about 71,000 times, and has racked up around 3.1 million views.

Watch how teacher Ciera Paul remixed the lyrics to Beyoncé's Formation to help remind her students of circumference and diameter formulas.
Posted by BEYONCÉ LEGION on Tuesday, March 15, 2016

“One Sunday night while I was at home, Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ came on the radio, and I thought to myself, ‘I bet they’re going to like this song,’ ” Paul explained to ABC News. It took her about 30 minutes to come up with lyrics that matched the melody.

Some politicians and law enforcement advocates called for a boycott of Bey in January after the release of the music video for the song. The video features scenes of a boy dancing in front of a group of police officers and a New Orleans Police Department squad car sinking into the bayou. Her subsequent performance of the song at Super Bowl 50—complete with backup dancers dressed in outfits that paid homage to the Black Panthers—ignited threats of protests.

The anti-Beyoncé protests fizzled, and on the Beyoncé Legion page, fans are applauding Paul’s willingness to do whatever it takes to ensure that her students learn. With 1 million STEM jobs needing to be filled over the next decade—and a gross underrepresentation of students of color in STEM fields—using creative methods to get kids into math is needed. After all, Paul’s students will probably never forget Bey-inspired lyrics like “Geometry matters down in Louisiana / Remix these lyrics with vocab because math matters.”