Desultory Doggerel or Perspicuous Pedagogy?

Is this an effective teaching method? I chose this video because I find the various mediums implemented to teach students Shakespeare’s plays (and educational material in general) very interesting. I mean, what do we think of this? At times the lyrics are decent enough and the writers include actual lines and speeches from the original text. At other times, words and phrases seem to have been chosen thoughtlessly. For example the line, “This greed be easy to sip like green tea”. Moreover, there may be a potential problem in using a material for educational purposes which is rampant with grammatical and stylistic errors. After all, this video is most likely geared toward high school English classrooms. Do teachers need to, and should they, dumb down the language of Shakespeare to make the material easier and more accessible to students? I was reading a funny article the other day in The Onion, which was written by a mock English professor who describes her attempt to relate Shakespeare to the pop culture her students are immersed in by presenting him as “the ultimate rapper” (here’s the link: http://www.theonion.com/articles/shakespeare-was-like-the-ultimate-rapper,11161/). Though this article is meant to be facetious, I think it accurately demonstrates the teaching approach taken by many instructors in classrooms across America. Flocabulary is a legitimate teaching company whose educational raps have been endorsed by various celebrities, news companies, and institutions, and which has been praised as being a revolutionary teaching aide (go check out their site: http://www.flocabulary.com). This Macbeth rap comes out of their Shakespeare is Hip-Hop teacher resource book. I’m not sure that educational materials such as these encourage critical textual analysis. I’m afraid instead they encourage students to shy away from grappling with the linguistic and thematic difficulty of Shakespeare. On the other hand, teaching aides such as these may be what’s needed to engage students and get them interested in Shakespeare. However, at what point are we sacrificing the integrity of Shakespeare’s writing and trivializing it until it represents something that would have made Shakespeare blush? At what point are we undermining the education of students in our effort to make material more appealing and stimulating to them? After all, isn’t Shakespeare pretty good as is? If we have competent teachers, do we really need all this to make Shakespeare exciting to students? So what do you think guys, Flocabulary: desultory doggerel or perspicuous pedagogy?