Dan Meyer (Hey That's Me!) Teaches the 95%

Deprogramming the negative messages students internalize about math class.

Okay here is the final installment of our July summer session. Throughout July, we have looked at the ways different teachers try to tell the 95% of students that edtech often writes off, “Hey you’re written in. You’re invited here.”

What is this move called?

I didn’t make a career out of teaching, but the majority of my experience teaching was with students who were on their second or third tour through algebra and who consequently felt quite convinced that math wasn’t for them and they weren’t for math. 

When I critique chatbot tutors, I am trying to speak for those students, or at least I’m trying to recall the techniques that changed their minds about math and compare them to the techniques available to chatbot tutors.

Let’s look at some of those techniques.

Before we analyze this last clip—only 49 seconds long—let me encourage you to imagine a typical math class. In that class, most of what the teacher does is mathematically correct. They offer correct definitions and they show correct procedures, and the task for the student is to go and do likewise.

At that point, the class splits into two different camps—the students who understand how to do likewise and the students who don’t. It is very alienating to be in the camp of math students who don’t know how to do it even though, in many classrooms, it is the larger camp.

Here is a video where the teacher is not trying to say or do correct things.

Teacher (Me):

And I need you folks to help me out right here with Shira the Sheep.

Where's Shira the Sheep?

You see the sheep here?

Student

Yep.

Teacher

Do you see the sheep right here?

Student

No.

Teacher

Here's what's gonna happen is we're gonna use an inequality like this right here and Shira the Sheep will come down out of the sky and start to eat some grass.

Check it out right here.

Watch this.

Ready for this?

I'll press try it, and here comes Shira the Sheep.

Shira the Sheep … eat some grass, and then, oh, no,

Shira, come back.

Oh no, not great, not great.

Didn't die.

Floating away happily to who knows where.

I want you folks to open this screen up and to see if you can get all of the grass eaten or drop straight in the water.

Try different things out, you and your partner here, okay?

So one person grabs a laptop and then come on back, folks.

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Conversation starter:

• How does the teaching in this lesson deprogram common messages students internalize about math class?

Featured Comments

Many thanks for your analysis on the Equation Roundtable activity from Jalah Bryant last week.

Elliot Beck shared four ways that clip counter-programs common narratives about math:

What a way to demonstrate that:

1. There are multiple ways to solve a problem.

2. There is valuable information to be learned from your classmates.

3. Collaborating in a group is a good thing.

4. We value the process and the product at the same time!

Rachel Henigan:

I love the way she invites the group of 4 to all have different ways to start-- setting up the idea that it would be impressive. I also love that starting is the goal in general. I think of all the times I’ve tried to coach stuck kids to just do something to both their and my ultimate frustration! Having this whole class energy around only doing the first step is fun and productive.

Odds & Ends

¶ Occasionally, I worry that I am out of touch. I worry sometimes that my perspective on AI and education is out of touch with reality, with the value of technology, with people themselves. “Maybe these titans of technology understand human-computer interaction better than I do,” I wonder every so often. And then you see an ad like Google’s “Dear Sydney,” in which the dad of an aspiring runner asks AI to … write a first draft of a fan letter from his young daughter to Olympian Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone? Do I have that right?? Like McLaughlin-Levrone would be happier to get beige AI prose than a few heartfelt words written in crayon from a kid? I get no points for hating this ad. Everyone hates it. Google had to turn off the comments. But right now I am feeling that, yes, someone is out of touch here and it is not me.

¶ The Tools Competition has announced its 2024 winners. I don’t really understand the Tools Competition, but it consistently produces winners that are smaller, weirder, more interesting, and more international than most grant competitions. I’m poking at coteach.ai right now, which uses AI not to edit or generate lesson plans, but to pull in supporting resources—warmups, practice sets, etc.

¶ While I am pretty pessimistic about most applications of generative AI to education, I am pretty agnostic about general applications. I am not rooting for this technology to fail. That said, I found CNBC’s AI’s Trillion Dollar Time Bomb segment to be a useful summary of some of the fundamental commercial and economic challenges facing generative AI, all of which are upstream from the generative AI edtech companies trying to create AI tools of actual value to teachers.

¶ Generative AI edtech company MagicSchool has released its 81st AI tool for teachers—a tongue twister generator.