My Screen-Free Summer School Class

Can we teach an old dog old tricks?

I just taught a couple of summer school classes here in Oakland, CA. The students were rising ninth graders and attending the class because some combination of parents and teachers insisted they needed some extra math for success in ninth grade. The students were not there for course credit (unlike the “intensive” classes down the hall) nor were they there, let’s say, for the love of the game.

“I have some lessons that fit the syllabus,” I told the teachers who were willing to let me get in their classes and make a mess of things. “How do you feel about digital lessons?”

These teachers told me they had put the laptop carts away for the summer. Their students would be off screens. Not my preference, but a worthy challenge. I planned for a) a teacher screen at the front of the room, b) paper on student desks.

Here is what I won and lost going screen-free, and how I’m now thinking about my work developing math edtech afterwards.

The Lesson

In the lesson, students watch a 15-second video of a thing happening—water filling a bowl, a student climbing up a play structure and sliding down. Then they fit a graph to that thing. We talk about the implications of the graph, pulling out mathematical ideas like a) the nature of a graph, b) the meaning of a point, c) the meaning of slope, d) the value of precision. This is Graphing Stories.

I had students create their graph of Tyler’s height as he climbed up and slid down the play structure. I walked around the class looking for a particular graph, a graph with a particular level of precision, one that caught some details but not all. I told that student that I loved their graph and thought it would be great for conversation. I asked them to go up to the front of the room and draw it on the whiteboard on top of a PDF of the handout that I had projected.

Then we talked about the graph. What happened in this section? What do you like about the graph? What should we change? Why? Okay, given everything we have all learned here, make your next and final draft.

Paper Wins

Our start time is faster on paper than screens. The difference between …

• passing out a handout

… and asking students to …

• get laptops,

• log into the laptop,

• enter the activity URL,

• correct their misspelling of the activity URL,

• log into the activity

… is minutes. Precious minutes.

Our range of start times is smaller on paper. This is subtle but important. Worse than the overall time cost of screens is how screens distribute that cost across students. With paper, the time difference between the first ready student and the last is measured in seconds. Screens, by contrast, involve more complexity and failure points, so the first ready student might wait several minutes for the last ready student to get ready. This is frequently experienced by the first students as time wasted.

Fewer barriers separate us with paper. Even when students are working on their laptops without distraction, I do not, personally, appreciate the glass and metal between us. I appreciate how paper lays flat on a desk and lets everyone see everyone else above it.

Paper Losses

Student screens give me more visibility into student thinking. In the digital version of the activity, I can access, present, and save the state of every student’s graph in real-time. Instead of walking around the classroom, I can quickly scan my screen for a particular graph, then show that graph in an anonymized mode for discussion. This is pedagogical power.

Student screens let me make better use of board space. With student screens, I can put the student’s graph in front of the class. I can then swap back to the video. I can put two student graphs side by side. I can bring the original student’s graph back. All at will, all without losing any work. Meanwhile, with paper, I have to ask the student to draw their graph on the board, and that’s basically all we can talk about until I erase it, and then it’s gone.

Students screens create dynamic connections between representations. As the video plays, a vertical line traces across the coordinate plane, helping students develop the connection between the graph and the world. I missed that.

What’s Next?

On balance—wins minus losses—I wish I had had devices here. We would have used them for a total of ten minutes and they would have helped me invite and develop student thinking in ways I couldn’t with paper. Overall, this experience makes me want new ways to mix media, to add a student’s print work to our digital space, for example.

It’s a bit outside the edtech industry’s power to make faster hardware, but all of us nerds should get into classes as often as it takes to understand that what you experience when you pop open a new tab on your professional-grade laptop bears little resemblance to the dragging sensation experienced by students when teachers say “get out your laptops.”

BTW

¶ I’m under no illusion that this use of technology in math classes is common. It should be. But so much of math edtech loses all the benefits of paper and gains none of the benefits of screens as I’ve outlined them here. With most math edtech, teachers gain quiet kids and, like, a graph of how many questions students did over time. I don’t blame parents for wondering whether that kind of technology is worth their kids’ one childhood.

¶ “What opportunities did I miss?” I asked Victoria Sepe, the teacher whose classes I had borrowed. She mentioned asking the group of four students to come up with a group graph versus four solo graphs, both to generate more discussion and to share some of the risks of presenting work. Smart. Writing that down for next time.

Presentations

I got to kick off a summer institute for Gwinnett County math teachers earlier this month. I arrived early enough to join grade-level sessions and was excited to see a lot of coherence across middle grades—both in content and pedagogy.

Next up:

• Florida’s annual math teacher & supervisor conferences this week.

• Arizona next week.

Come say hi!

Featured Comment

Megan Schmidt gets the value of what we’re up to at Amplify and the support teachers need to do it well:

As someone who is very familiar with various curricular resources and mathematics instructional practices, Amplify is impressive (and unique) in the ways it has built technology tools that are a conduit for student thinking and exploration. I remember when Function Carnival was new and students could *see* the actual effect their graph had on the man shooting out of the cannon, and then the teacher could display the entire class’s graphs on one set of axes.

And then as a district math coordinator, I’m concerned about what support math teachers will need in order to facilitate (orchestrate?) this kind of math lesson, where students need to toggle between a screen on their desk, a screen in the front, along with various verbal inputs from others in the room. At the same time, Amplify Desmos Math is really quite different from most everything else I’ve seen (in a lot of good ways), and I’m excited for our teachers to get to try it.

Odds & Ends

¶ Okay, can we please be adults here? When it comes to the effect of generative AI on student learning, the evidence is clearly pointing in one particular direction:

• Kids are using generative AI a lot.

• And they’re using it to cheat.

Or if you prefer more nuance: they’re using it to disintermediate the artifacts of learning (essays, answers, grades, etc) from learning itself.

Since we last chatted, the studies keep dropping. The hits keep coming.

• Nature retracted the big study showing positive learning gains from AI. (Hundreds of citations previously.)

• Researchers found that AI gives different feedback based on a student’s race and gender.

• A giant study of 30k Chinese students found that their AI usage increased homework scores, decreased completion time, and lowered exam scores by 20%.

• Failing grades are way up in UC Berkeley’s computer science classes.

• A study of 3.2M math practice interactions showed kids spending significantly less time on problems that are easier to send into an LLM (pure text-based) and a corresponding 25% decrease in exam performance. (The design of that study is so crisp you could layer it onto a sandwich.)

We need to be adults here. A thing got invented and its existence in the world—without denying any of its affordances—has not only failed to produce the learning gains promised by so many and instead produces evidence of negative transformation weekly.

All the usual suspects are placing their faith in pedagogical AI—the kind that won’t just burp an answer in a student’s direction—and that sounds potentially helpful during class. But why would kids use it outside of class where they have unrestricted access to the answer-burping AI?

I’m still working on some AI stuff that interests me, but now that this technology has arrived, the exciting education innovations are IMO almost entirely social and political:

• Curriculum that gives kids more reasons to do the hard work of learning.

• Stronger social ties in learning.

• More accountability between parents, students, teachers, and schools.

• Tighter connection between the artifacts and the learning. Blue books, public presentation of learning, etc, etc, e.g., these interesting pedagogical design patterns.

• A political economy that is quite a lot less cutthroat, one where grades and credentials aren’t perceived as one of a vanishing few exit tickets from poverty.

¶ Congrats to the Knicks on winning the NBA championship. I loved this clip of coach Mike Brown describing a pedagogy of relationship with center Karl Anthony-Towns.

He’s a great player. I come in with a plan. Maybe the plan doesn’t work. Who adjusts? Him or me? Me. I adjust. The adjustment’s not enough. Every once in a while, we aren’t on the same page. We talk about it. I adjust again. He’s feeling better. We talk about it. It’s my job as a coach to fit whatever scheme we have on both sides of the floor to all of our players.

¶ Jill Barshay won an award for outstanding reporting. Way to go, Jill.