As a per diem substitute teacher, I am often dispatched to a secondary school at the last minute after an early-morning call from SubCentral. I tend to feel a bit off-kilter when I walk into an unfamiliar classroom where students are blasting Marky Mark’s socially jaded rap or young girls are passionately discussing the latest installment of “The Divergent Series.”

Whether you’re facing such a scenario as a teacher covering a colleague’s class or as a seasoned educator with a class of familiar faces, the overarching question remains the same: How do you get students to be engaged in learning while keeping their own interests in mind — and without losing your own mind?

All pedagogues need to understand that if their secondary-school students seem, for whatever reason, less than interested and (in some cases) less than respectful, it is not because of limited intelligence on their parts or inadequacy on the teacher’s part. Rather, their distraction stems from a combination of surging hormones, obsession with popular culture and a desire to rebel against authority. Students manifest their rebellion by attending to their immediate interests, such as the coolest song, the coolest movie or the coolest place to chill out.

What students may not realize, though, is that any time they are rapping, they are reciting poetry. Any time they discuss Katniss or Peeta from “The Hunger Games,” they are doing character analysis. Therefore, it behooves teachers to pay close attention to current trends and their students’ culture and interests.

When I had to supervise an independent reading project at a community-based alternative school, I let the students play rap music in the classroom under one condition: They had to address messages about life struggles in the rhythmic poems they were writing. While discussing the assignment with them, I was pleasantly surprised by how skillfully they put the lyrics of Marky Mark’s hit “Life in the Streets” within the context of the characters of young children’s author Walter Dean Myers. I am positive that they will now perceive both Marky Mark and Myers in a new interconnected light.

In another example, when the 7th-graders at a high-needs school had to match adjectives to descriptions, I was amazed at the eloquence of a girl who, while fishing for words to explain “brave,” defined the term by narrating the story of Katniss’ heroism in fighting the authorities.

I even learned that whenever you can’t bring the students into the realm of the characters in the book you are studying, you can try to bring the characters into the realm of the students. When members of a high school study group who were supposed to be filling in a chart with names of all the places in New York City that Holden Caulfield had visited in “The Catcher in the Rye” were instead talking about Lorde’s newest hit and about a club downtown, I got my “aha” moment. I approached their desks and casually asked how J.D. Salinger’s character would feel in that club (which might as well have been Ernie’s, the Greenwich Village spot that Holden visits in the book). Suddenly, the group became excited, saying how the prep school boy would feel bemused by the city atmosphere.

Of course, this method does not apply only to activities involving critical thinking or reading comprehension. Sometimes, a simple exercise can be spiced up by substituting pop culture names for generic ones. For example, drawing on the characters in Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, a teacher may say in a grammar exercise, “Edward and Bella, who/whom were in love, were unaware of Jacob’s jealousy.” In that way, the students will be more engaged in the exercise about relative pronouns because they will picture their favorite characters while contemplating which form to use.

As educators, we want our students to learn. We also want the students to find the connection between what they already know and enjoy and what has to be taught. Last but not least, we aim to be efficient and respected in our classrooms. We’ll achieve those goals more easily if we weave our pupils’ interests into the assignments we give.