Building Beats’ Marcus Rosario on Finding Creative Freedom Through Remote Learning

2020 has been the year of reflection for communities across the board. Most notably, the education system has had to restructure its methods and surroundings, affecting thousands of teachers and students internationally. Looking at our community specifically, this Sunday, December 13th, via our Year End Education Convention in partnership with our friends at Eto Ano, we’ll be sharing the stories and anecdotes of NYC based educators, education administrators & students who have been navigating working under the confines of school shutdowns due to COVID-19, messy re-openings and the education agenda of Betsy Devos under the Trump administration over the past four years.

Marcus Rosario is a music educator and community lead at Building Beats, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that has implemented over 2,500 in-school and after-school workshops in DJing and digital music production in schools and community centers through out New York City. Below, Spurge Carter of Eto Ano, and Marcus discuss the transitioning of non-profit programming during COVID-19 and the silver linings during this tumultuous year.

POND: What’s your background and how did you get into education? 

Marcus Rosario: I was raised by two teachers so I’ve always had this teacher mindset. Tutoring was my first unofficial job, at this police storefront, teaching kids things like basic math. In college, I gravitated to the college radio and that’s where I met most of my friends. When I moved to New York, I still wanted to DJ and do radio but teaching also was important for me to explore. 

My friend started this program called Building Beats and he invited me to volunteer for it and I just really liked it. There was always a big void in New York for arts education and music education and I wanted to give back in that sense and teach what I would’ve wanted to learn. No one taught me to DJ, I had friends showing me stuff but no one actually mentoring me. After a year teaching math, I transitioned to Building Beats in 2016. I started by volunteering and eventually started teaching workshops and getting used to being in a classroom setting with kids, as well as, helping the organization grow too.

POND: What is Building Beats? 

Marcus: Pre-COVID, we would get contracted with different schools all over New York City,  public, private, or charter schools, as well as homeless shelters and juvenile detention facilities to teach production classes. Since COVID, we also started offering podcasting classes too. The only thing we need for our workshops are laptops and headphones because we teach on the cloud. Everything we primarily teach from can be found on our Toolbox on our website. But by the end of each class, students will come away knowing how to make music to a degree. We don't expect all these kids to become full on music producers and DJs. But the skills that we teach them that will help them have more confidence in what they want to do. 

We've been teaching in all five boroughs and in the last month and a half we've got contracted with about 20 schools in California, so we're teaching remote there now too.

POND: Right when COVID happened what was that transition like for you and Building Beats?

Marcus: In January, our executive director decided that we should already start planning for schools to shut down. So once schools finally did close in March, we ended up creating a website, on our platform called bbConnect, which was kind of like a resource hub for anybody that wanted to take a free music class or a free music production or DJ class. 

We also started creating a lot of content which can be found on our blog, BB Toolbox, because we realized, as educators, there's a lot of other educators out there who were using our platform. Being cooped up inside, kids were wanting to learn how to make beats. So they can check our website and see the tutorials that we've put together. Our really popular ones are like “How to make a Pop Smoke type beat” or “How to make a Juice WRLD type beat”. 

By April or May, schools were like, okay, we can do remote teaching and our system has already been set up to do everything through the cloud. So we started remotely doing workshops and creating resources for other teachers to use. COVID definitely raised Building Beats’ internet presence. 

We held a couple of in person classes too. I had one actually that went back to remote like two weeks ago because of the schools closing in New York again. I was teaching in person at a residency in Alphabet City. I was going in there once a week. It was interesting because I hadn't been in a classroom and so on. So going in there was weird at first, but I got used to it.

POND: How has it been for you personally? 

Marcus: The new normal is definitely online. The teaching online experience is considerably harder for actual school teachers. This summer, the Building Beats workshop leaders taught a several hundred students in a couple different summer programs, an anti-gun violence employment program through the Mayor's office and it was kind of challenging, because kids are still pretty uncomfortable on camera and strictly talking on the microphone.

A lot of times as a teacher you're talking strictly to a chat room. You feel like you're really talking to a wall. Getting used to that was a bit of a challenge. But then when you think like you're not making any sense and you have the student show the music that they've made, then it's like, whoa, they actually were paying attention. Oh, my gosh, you actually listened to me. That was a rewarding feeling. Usually, when you're in a classroom with the kids you can see their process or you can walk around and if they have questions and you can answer them. With a remote aspect, you don't see the process until they share their screen or invite you as a collaborator, that kind of thing.

I definitely have a lot of love and respect for actual teachers who are still doing the remote thing, because they're on from really late to really early. The zoom burnout is real.

POND: Are you able to connect with students despite the new circumstances? 

Marcus: It sometimes takes a while for students to open up. Being online can be really, you know, not human. But I think after a while there’s a breaking point where students really kind of open up. Students also give me feedback too, because it's not like all of the programs work for each student. One of our workshop leaders has a curriculum where he breaks up the class into departments, so you've got the press/PR department, and the kids that are in charge of running the social media for the release, when it comes out, setting up the plan, then you have the graphic design department, and they're the ones that are going to make the art for all of the tracks. So some kids, you know, just gravitate toward that and realize that this is what they like to do. There’s always a lot of patience required and just being persistent, just with working with the kids.

POND: What’s the relationship to the city and how does being a New York-based program affect Building Beats? 

Marcus: Nothing is cut and dry. We’ve been certified through the DOE, so there’s a relationship there and when schools hit us up we can tell them we’re cleared to work with DOE. There's a lot of funds and grants that the city provides for arts organizations so we apply for them. Pre-covid, organizations like The Met or The Brooklyn Arts Council, would hit us up and have some of our students DJ their big galas or events. 

With Building Beats being based in New York City, we always want to teach the kids that when you think about hip hop, it was born in New York City. Hip hop, in its original form, is music that was born out of nothing. All you need is a pencil and your fist. You can make a beat, and then another person can rap over it. So here we show that all the kids need is a laptop and headphones that they can get from their school and they can make music.

POND: Do you have any perspective on if the presidential administration has had any effect on the city wide education or, more specifically, your program? 

Marcus: The schools get money for arts programming and with those budgets they pay Building Beats for a workshop. I think within the last couple of years, schools have definitely felt the pinch, especially during COVID, a lot of the schools can't afford to have a lot of unique programming. 

One of our big, long standing partners has been WINNYC, which provides safe housing, critical services, and innovative programs to NYC homeless women and their children, and I know they’ve definitely felt the crunch in regards to technology and stuff like that. So it has been an issue, especially in New York, with budgets and stuff. But I think that's what encourages us to make our work as accessible as possible, to provide a lot of stuff on our website for free. 

POND: I saw that you were recently fundraising for Giving Day? Do you want to tell me about that? 

Marcus: Every year after Thanksgiving, there’s Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and then Giving Tuesday. Every nonprofit you can think of is raising money, even though the new ones that have popped up because of COVID. 

Building Beats participates too. It’s great because a lot of people's employers will match donations. We're running our campaign for the whole month because usually on the last day of the month we get random donations from people taking advantage of tax deductible donations for their taxes for 2021. I think our goal is like $5,000.

POND: How are you feeling about 2021? What's your plan and your hope, especially between a new president, a potential vaccine, etc? 

Marcus: We're as optimistic as we can be. The exciting thing is obviously teaching in California and expanding remote teaching right now but we're hoping to get back in the classroom with kids, because it just feels better when you're in a room with a bunch of kids making beats. I know it's going to be an interesting winter, but we're still going to be trying to create a lot of content to help anybody that wants to learn music, they can just hit our website. 

Every February we have our big fundraiser too, bigger than Giving Tuesday, our ‘Doughnuts Are Forever’ fundraiser. It happens around Presidents Day weekend. This group of promoters, Rare Form, started throwing a big party to celebrate the music of J.Dilla and for the last couple of years Building Beats has been the charity benefactor for it. This one in February is going to be a bit different because it's going to be done remote, typically we would have it every year at Brooklyn Bowl but we're hoping we can go bigger and wider because we're not limited to just having to be in New York, because it's online we want to use the global reach.

We also have our bbLeaders group, which is our top performing students that have taken classes with us. They're the ones that want to keep making music as a career. They want to be a DJ, they want to be a producer, they want to be a rapper or a singer, etc. They meet every week and we work to provide them different opportunities - internships, mentorships, DJ gigs, etc. They're the ones that are getting the gigs. If we get hit up for a DJ, they're the ones getting their music placed in a podcast, commercial etc. So we're always trying to build more opportunities for them.

POND: Lastly, is there anything else you wanted to express in terms of the challenges or joys of working under this new world or anything in particular that you've learned?

Marcus: It was always a breath of fresh air working with youth, because they're the future. I remember feeling so crappy after the first day of the George Floyd protests. It was in June, I'm arriving to teach a brand new class, but I just remember, how fulfilling being in that space with them was in spite of that. It’s rewarding in so many ways that it's hard for me to say. When you know that we're all in this together. It just makes more sense to keep going.

We want people to learn more about the issues that cause all these systemic problems. Building Beats’  whole ethos, our whole platform is addressing these things with our own work and making education as accessible as possible.

New York has some of the most segregated school districts in the country and our mission is creating this equity in education. Music is political and we want kids to realize that its empowering in itself. We want them to take that with them and make the world a better place.

Tune in to our Year End Education Convention this Sunday, December 13th on Baby TV.