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You're a sixth-grader in New York City. Your principal gives you a choice: Get free tickets to a Columbia University football game, or participate in a music video in which your assistant principal is the lead singer.
The 66 fifth- and sixth-graders who chose to sing, dance and act are glad they did: The video, featuring the song "Bored of Education," amassed more than 15,000 views in the first weeks it was posted. Here it is:
The video's main act, rapper I.C. Will, is indeed Ian Willey, the assistant principal at KIPP Washington Heights Middle School.
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The son of two ministers, Willey started rapping when he was 12. Growing up, his family moved around, finally settling in Louisville, Ky., a place where, Willey says, "I could be a white rapper and it wasn't that weird."
As a first-year teacher with Teach for America, Willey wrote and rapped when he could squeeze it in, keeping it separate from his life in the classroom.
"I never talked a whole lot about the fact that I was rapping on the side, unless it was relevant in class," Willey says. "It didn't seem that important to the work we were doing in the school."
But a group of filmmakers in Brooklyn disagreed. In 2011 they made a short film about Willey and his double life. Seeing the film made Willey reconsider the distance he had created.
"I started feeling more comfortable sharing it. I saw that kids can actually be inspired by this," he says. "And the pieces finally fit together."
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