Play It Back: How to Get Students to Write the First Draft

Dad Cypher
Jul 15
2 min read

H2TW – Hip-Hop Transformative Tutoring and Writing: Transformative Tuesdays

🎧 Play It Back

After watching Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and the Clipse’s Let God Sort ’Em Out, I’m enamored by the transformative power of music. It soothes the soul like an Al Green moan or a psalm from a shepherd boy’s lyre. Music is God’s surgical tool. We need it now more than ever to help today’s students. The silence is growing. Soon we may all be lost in the void.

Like King Saul, many students suffer from PTSD. Living in their world is no different from a cell. They inspect emotional wreckage from loved ones who silence their voice with, “Whatever happens in this house stays in this house.” Divorced from pen and pad, the digital touchscreen is their foster home. Scholars fear that communication will soon be lost. But like GZA in Liquid Swords, we must take our seeds back to the essence.

Before emojis, hieroglyphics, and cave paintings, the voice reigned supreme. The tongue brushed images across our mind’s canvas. Maybe that was the problem. We imagined what the world could be instead of what it is. Radicalism begins with a murmur. Maybe that’s why God emcees are silenced—just like critical thinking when standardized tests are passed out.

Our teachers passed out. Their lights burned out—crushed like blunts on city playgrounds. No wonder Gen Z mumbles. They’ve forgotten how voice sounds. They’ve autotuned to the wrong frequency.

This summer, I found my voice—hidden under dead white men, tube socks, and a Vibe magazine with Toni Braxton on the cover.

Once upon a time, I felt the uppercut punch of 100 gorillas when my words rode red surfboards across my computer screen. My writing judged me—like my uncle or Ms. Restman, my third-grade teacher—the first teacher to scar me.

So, like my favorite emcees, I decided it was time to play it back.

I began to record my voice. I kept playing my thoughts back until I fell back in love with my voice. No matter if it sounded like yuck or Megan Thee Stallion—I owned both my ugly and beautiful.

And like Pusha-T, I yelled out, “So be it!”

I blew a breath of life—transforming words into power—without realizing those same words had the power to change me.

From my grandma’s spirituals to my mother’s blues, I remembered:

It was verbal milk that helped me grow.

I couldn’t live on bread alone—and neither can our students.

So I challenge every ELA teacher:

Let your students play it back.

Let them rediscover their voice—and then rediscover the power of the pen.

📌 Practical Tips for the Classroom