A semester staple project: an Economics rap battle.
The assignment: to create a rap that incorporates terms and vocabulary used throughout the unit.
Economics teacher Scott Lii provided loose guidelines that helped prompt creativity, but seniors Abdurraheem Sheikh, Maggie Wang, and Lukas Blois took it above and beyond.
“We thought that if we go all out on this, we can maybe look back in a few years and enjoy what we did and also allow the class to have a good time and show the school our talent, and just have fun with it,” senior Abdurraheem Sheikh said.
The process took planning from each of the group members.
“So we were planning it and when we planned to go downtown, we had like our whole trunk filled with camera equipment and costumes and suitcases and different props and everything,” Sheikh said. “I mean, if this was with anyone else, I don’t think I would have done it as well or I wouldn’t think I would have had that much of a passion.”
We decided to just pour forever into it,
— senior Maggie Wang
This isn’t the first time these three have worked on an assignment together.
“So we all really love movies, especially Christopher Nolan, and we did a Barbie versus Oppenheimer type thing and we couldn’t really do that like low material, like put no effort into it,” senior Maggie Wang said. “So we decided to just pour forever into it. And it was also really fun just shooting it because it was like a little short film.”
So when the rap battle project came along the trio knew they had to go all out. Going all the way to downtown Dallas, the trio was on location for more than 12 hours.
Recording in a parking lot.
Editing all night long.
I really think it’s about the environment that you place yourself in and the people you surround yourself with,
— senior Lukas Blois
And then, the final econ project premiered, but Li wasn’t surprised by the group’s above-and-beyond effort.
“Their mentality was to go big or go home,” Li said. “So from their unit one project was, which was to make a movie trailer, they made like a literal movie trailer, and it was quite impressive to do a couple of things that did surprise me was, I mean, they went to downtown Dallas.”
For senior Lukas Blois, the amount of effort put into a project relates to the people you have around.
“So we had actually talked about it before,” Blois said. “Like, if it wasn’t the three of us, if any one of us was missing or if it was any other people, we really felt like we wouldn’t have tried that hard in any of these projects. And so I really think it’s about the environment that you place yourself in and the people you surround yourself with.”
