When his biology students don’t understand gametes, Brandon
Cuffee drops the beat. “Meiosis dos is similar to meiosis uno,
shout out to Gregor Mendel from the garden to the genome,” he
raps. Unlike most rappers, Cuffee mentions the 19th-century
genetic scientist Gregor Mendel between references to
professional athletes LeBron James and Andy Pettitte. Cuffee
teaches Spanish classes and a biology class for English for
Speakers of Other Languages at Gaithersburg High School. In
2011, he started recording songs about how to conjugate verbs in
Spanish and how cells divide. When the songs turned into music
videos on YouTube, they went viral. “The kids are proud, and the
kids are sharing it,” Gaithersburg High School Principal
Christine Handy-Collins said. Cuffee said one of his students
volunteered to be his marketing director, sending links of his
YouTube videos out to news media and local organizations. All
this, Cuffee said, started as a joke. Two years ago, in his
seventh-period Spanish class, Cuffee said he to