By Gabbie St. Pierre
Last summer, Parkway South High School math teacher Scott Degitz-Fries, ’96, ’01, began receiving emails from students with lots of questions about what the upcoming school year would look like. “These were students scheduled to take one of my classes for the upcoming school year, reaching out to me in the middle of summer because they were worried about how they could possibly learn calculus over Zoom,” Degitz-Fries said.
For the 25-year education veteran, the move to virtual learning felt like learning how to teach from scratch. Knowing the difficulties he and his students had already faced, Degitz-Fries felt he needed to share a message of hope with his students. “I wanted to let them know that no matter when we returned for in-person learning, we can make it through this time together.”
To deliver this message, Degitz-Fries turned to one of his signature teaching strategies: singing. With a passion for singing from a young age, Degitz-Fries was inspired by one of his education classes at Maryville to bring singing into his math classes. “I took a course called creative problem solving, and for our final project we had to present on a way to introduce creativity into our teaching,” he said. “It was in that class I discovered I could write songs to help students memorize different theorems for my math classes.”
His final project featured his first-ever song, “Ice, Ice, Trig Derivatives” set to the tune of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby.” The song has been taught to every class Degitz-Fries has taught in his career thus far and he’s added around 65 new songs to his classroom repertoire since.
The song he wrote in response to virtual learning was a parody of the song “You’ll be Back” from the hit musical “Hamilton.” In it, he reassured students that one day they would be together again in person. The lyrics included, “You’ll be back, don’t you fret. You’ll learn lots online, don’t stress or sweat.”
Degitz-Fries posted the song to his YouTube channel, and it went viral overnight. The video was shared in a variety of local new sources and viewed more than half a million times on Facebook. “The best part of the video’s success was knowing that other teachers were using it in their classes to help entertain and reassure their students,” he said.
