Amplify Desmos Math Is More Than a Curriculum

We are standing in front of 70 years of edtech history yelling “hey let’s do something different!”

I have worked on Amplify Desmos Math for ten years now, since before that was its name, starting with a very small team at Desmos in 2013 up through today where I am one of a city-sized group of collaborators. This week, we launched it into the world.

You should check it out. It contains activities that are so good I can’t believe they exist. The biggest threat to my ongoing employment at Amplify is my interest in using the curriculum we’ve built.

And Amplify Desmos Math is more than a curriculum.

By that I mean that it contains best-in-class K-12 digital and print materials, assessments, diagnostics, supplements, math centers, reporting, personalized practice, professional development, and the other resources that make this a math program more than a collection of math activities. 

But I also mean that Amplify Desmos Math is a statement.

For decades, the education technology industry has made statements, implicitly but also explicitly, that:

• math is merely a set of operational procedures with answers that are either right or wrong,

• teachers are merely distribution channels for explanations,

• students are merely small, malfunctioning adults, and that groups of students are little more than liabilities one to another, each one inhibiting the efficient distribution of information to their classmates,

• computers are merely systems for efficient information delivery and student evaluation.

You can read this statement in all of the sacred texts—all of the press releases, media profiles, and TED talks—and also in the majority of edtech products themselves dating back to BF Skinner’s teaching machine in the 1950s.

I have made my own share of statements too. I have spoken them into microphones, typed them into my computer, written them into my dissertation, sent them into your inbox, etc. But nothing that people read or watch carries the same weight as something they can use and do.

Especially curriculum. If I have learned anything over twenty years in education, it is that curriculum is the rudder of a teacher’s work. You can stand on the bow of the ship and say, “We should go east! Thank you for coming to my TED talk!” but if the rudder points west, the class is going west. With Amplify Desmos Math, we are offering teachers a powerful new rudder.

I could tell you that computers awaken student thinking and interest in ways that are impossible in any other medium. You could read about that idea in these words or you could teach that idea, like Liz Clark-Garvey in the above video. Liz tells her students that their search for the missing sand dollar is “gonna get a little bit more complicated,” and they are locked in.

I could tell you that students are just as thoughtful and curious as the adults of their species, that their thoughts and curiosity are an invaluable resource in their own learning. Or you could teach that idea, like Liz, who notices and uses all the thinking that her students offer her about locations in the coordinate plane.

I could tell you that teachers use skill and relationship to build on student ideas in ways that are productive, collaborative, and humanizing. Or you could teach that idea and support your students like Liz supports Annabelle, Micah, Saki, and Luna, students who understand that their ideas about the coordinate plane are valuable, and by extension that they themselves are valuable.

I could tell you that math is a communicative, social, and collaborative discipline, a close sibling, not a distant cousin, of the humanities, or you could teach that idea, letting your students know, like Liz does in that video, that the order of the coordinates was the product of subjective human choice.

This curriculum speaks louder than all of my words to date—spoken, written, or sung. It takes anything I would say about the relationship between teachers and students and their tools and embeds it in something you can pick up, hold, use, experience, and share.

Amplify Desmos Math says, this is possible. This relationship is available to you and your students, not in someone’s book or speech or imagination, but in something you can use and do here and now.

Odds & Ends

¶ Also in Amplify-related news, we kicked off a fantastic new podcast, Beyond My Years, in which Ana Torres pulls insights and ideas out of educators who have been teachers for decades.

¶ No one is doing more than Dylan Kane right now to help all of us understand the working life of teachers. His recent posts on student apathy and the start of the school year are fantastic.

¶ In an article on AllHere, Los Angeles USD’s ill-fated AI solution, the Washington Post features this quote from Alex Molnar which I’m going to turn into a tattoo somehow:

He believes school districts shouldn’t use AI until it can pass a two-question test: Is it good? And is it the best way to accomplish the stated goal?

IMO many of the districts rushing to write guidelines for AI ought to instead get aligned on their goals for teaching and learning.

¶ I offer a Mathworlds salute and godspeed to all the brave learning engineers, such as those in this characteristically sharp literature review from Jill Barshay, who are working to minimize hallucinations in the blocks of explanatory text generated by AI these days. Yet, I feel pretty detached from this work because, as Barshay alludes to, K-12 students seem rather reticent to read blocks of explanatory text at all, whether AI-generated or not, riddled with hallucinations or not.