Great Teachers Are Interested More Than They're Interesting

One way to not fix the alienation of online learning.

Po-Shen Loh, the renowned coach of the United States International Mathematical Olympiad team, has recognized that online learning is frequently dull and wants to fix it.

“Most people had the experience that a Zoom math class was very effective at putting children to sleep,” he told CNN. “I started to think about why these classes struggled to keep people engaged when social medias such as TikTok and Twitch were so successful. That’s when the idea to rethink the entire Zoom experience came to me.”

His plan is to have high school students teach live online classes and to partner them “with professional actors, comedians and theater-majors who watch the lessons and provide real-time feedback to make sure their delivery is energetic and entertaining.”

The tradition of the teacher as showman is a long one and probably best embodied in the character Robin William played in Dead Poet’s Society, someone who would read Shakespeare in the style of John Wayne and Marlon Brando.

There is nothing wrong with this style of teaching per se. Given the choice, I’m sure most people would rather be funnier and a better public speaker than not. But for teachers, these returns diminish significantly over time.

One example here is all of the companies in the 2010s who saw the success of Khan Academy and said, “Okay we’ll do that, but [x],” where [x] was anything from stronger production values, professional animation, celebrity narrators, etc. All of those improvements made the videos more interesting but learners didn’t prefer the difference in numbers large enough to matter.

What kids want far more than a teacher who is interesting is a teacher who is interested. 

Being interested in your discipline is a start, though there is something deeply off-putting about someone deeply obsessed by a discipline that you find deeply alienating. 

Instead, what students find most interesting is someone who is interested in them. Students like and learn from teachers who like and learn from them. They like teachers who see themselves as students of their students. 

Interested teachers ask questions that help them understand the fullness of their students, as humans perhaps, but certainly as math learners. Interested teachers are unsatisfied with math problems that help them learn about only certain aspects of certain groups of learners.

The problem is the problem.

That brings me to this demo video for Po-Shen Loh’s program in which a very warm high school student named Elena Baskakova helps a group of students solve this problem.

Problems that are great for math competitions, environments in which we are very expressly not interested in every student, environments designed for sorting and excluding, are often lousy for classrooms where we hope to draw every student into mathematics.

Baskakova tells the class, “All right, so we have our first daily challenge question here.”

What many students will notice at that moment, particularly students who have historically felt that math is an exclusive club with no room for them, is that many students have solved the problem even before the teacher has finished introducing it! They are spamming the chat with the answer right now! No amount of warmth or good humor from Baskakova can fix that. Her efforts at engaging her students are undermined by the math problem itself.

Solving the Problem

The engagement problem here isn’t solved by teaching Baskakova to juggle or yodel about mathematics or by encouraging her to be even more inviting.

The engagement problem here is solved by recognizing that the math problem is posed in a way that allows for an immediate solution by particular students with particular skills. It is posed in a way that prioritizes valuable skills like calculation and abstraction. But many students who don’t yet have those skills have other valuable skills that this problem doesn’t care about, skills like estimation, questioning, pattern recognition, spatial decomposition, etc. 

When students learn that math is uninterested in the skills they can bring to math, they frequently decide by association that math is not interested in them, and decide in response that they are not interested in mathematics. Game over.

There are alternatives here. In most of them, the teacher will take advantage of a live math class to co-construct a math problem with their students, rather than posing problems that are pre-constructed.

Headless Problems

As described by Jane Kang, headless problems remove much of the information and setup from a question so as to enable students to wonder, “What might I need to answer this question here? How would different kinds of information change my approach?”

Tailless Problems

Tailless problems, by contrast, remove the question so as to enable students to wonder, “What questions could we ask here?”

You can also pose the problem without numbers, allowing you to ask for estimates. You can pose the diagram on its own and ask students how many different shapes they see. You can convert the static diagram to an animation and ask students what they notice or wonder.

Math competition problems are posed on paper and limited by paper. They include the head, tail, numbers, and necessary information to enable a quick solution. “Quick” is a great attribute for a strong performance in a math competition but terrible for an environment where you’d like to invite more students to participate.

When our team created a digital curriculum, we took great care to ask ourselves, how might this new medium transform a student’s opportunities to be smart and reveal to a teacher new reasons to be interested in their students. The results for engagement are self-explanatory.

I don’t doubt Po-Shen Loh will see lots of success with his program, especially as it seems designed for an enrichment, rather than a core, learning experience. But I suspect he’ll do a good job serving kids who have been well served by math class already. Making room for students who have felt alienated by mathematics means more than training teachers to take up more room with more theatrics. It starts with math problems that make room for more students.