Teaching Kids Not to Get Scammed

Five takes on a lesson I taught a few days ago.

I taught a seventh grade class here in Oakland, CA, a few days ago. We learned about increase and decrease by percentages in this Amplify Desmos Math activity. Here are five short takes on What Happened and What It All Means.

1. Students want answers to three questions before they learn.

These kids and I were new to each other and I got the sense they wanted answers to three questions before much learning could begin:

• Do you like me?

• Do you like what you teach?

• How much do you expect of me?

I think every teacher answers those three questions in their first thirty minutes with a new class even if no one says anything out loud.

2. When will you ever use this? Right now!

It’s one thing to tell students, “you might use this math someday.” It’s another to bring that future into the present. I told the kids, “Look, if someone thinks you don’t know the score, they might decide to give you less than they owe you.”

The move: “Which of these prices seem like you’re definitely getting scammed? Which ones seem like you’re maybe getting scammed?”

3. Humans Giving Chatbots a Wedgie (Part 1,000,000)

A kid was looking at this problem. 

In order to make more money, DesWorst Granola bars are now 10% shorter.  If the original bar was 15 centimeters long, how long is the new granola bar?

He was staring at the problem. No work. What’s your move? If you’re a chatbot, you start chatting and you ask the student to chat back. You’re a hammer and the kid’s a nail.

However, if you’re a human with eyes and hands, with ideas about math and human cognition, you start gesturing and ask the student to gesture back, especially to gesture where they think 10% is and isn’t.

Tutoring 101: figure out what kids know, however they know it, and start from there. I’d love to see a chatbot tutor manage it.

4. Multimedia Decision Fatigue

This was a multimedia classroom and we picked our spots pretty carefully, especially for digital technology:

• Digital technology. Interactive screens for experimentation. Text-based check-in screens I could draw on for instruction. A digital card sort where our platform would tell me the most challenging card for the class.

• Teacher presentation. Communicating & revoicing ideas, creating collective effervescence, setting the stakes.

• Paper. Nearly any kind of operational math work.

“Which of these modalities should I use and when? How do I balance the time cost of switching modalities with a kid’s need for variety?” Challenging questions IMO!

5. What makes discussions work?

Discussion questions are like swimming pools—accessible to fewer kids the deeper they go.

When I’m trying to figure out the question, “How well can these kids swim?” I stay away from deep-end-of-the-pool questions like, “How would you analyze the mathematical validity of this conjecture?” (a fine question for strong swimmers) and stick instead with questions that rely on visual perception like “Which words do you see in both answers?” That question hit. It didn’t access the full depths of the mathematics, but a huge fraction of the class had something they wanted to share.

Odds & Ends

¶ EdSurge’s Daniel Mollenkamp asks, “Is There a Problem With ‘Mathbots’?” and I offer a few answers.

Human teachers will be able to look at a sketch, ask for a couple words about a part of it, and then respond, using the context of the classroom, Meyer says. For a chatbot to have comparable knowledge would require a student to type pages and pages to try to communicate in words what they communicate so effectively and simply with multimedia, Meyer adds. Plus, even then, the human teacher could have incorporated facial cues from the student as clues to their understanding, which would have eluded a chatbot.

¶ Education Week on How Students Are Dodging Cellphone Restrictions. There is a species of parent that simply baffles me.

Parents fight the phone policy saying their student has the right to use their phone for classwork and communication because they bought the phone and gave it to their child.

¶ Kristin DiCerbo, Khan Academy’s Chief Academic Officer, offered some fairly candid thoughts on what they’re seeing in student interactions with Khanmigo, their AI chatbot:

Transcripts of student chats reveal some terrific tutoring interactions. But there are also many cases where students give one- and two-word responses or just type “idk,” which is short for “I don’t know”. They are not interacting with the AI in a meaningful way yet. There are two potential explanations for this: 1.) students are not good at formulating questions or articulating what they don’t understand or 2.) students are taking the easy way out and need more motivation to engage.

I would love for any of these large edtech chatbot platforms to report some very blunt descriptive statistics like a) the number of turns students take in the median chatbot interaction or b) the word count of the median turn or just c) monthly active students. Nobody reports these metrics—just the total people who created an account—which only makes me more curious about them.

¶ Sal Khan gave a speech in Santa Barbara, CA, and this is an interesting reflection:

You know, it’s very tempting when you see a new technology, especially if you have a background in tech. I have a background in engineering; especially if you’re a technologist, it’s very tempting to think that’s really cool technology. I want to use it somehow — which is always the wrong way to do it. You should never have a solution looking for a problem. You should say, ‘Well, what are the problems we’re trying to solve in the world?’ And then we should try to solve them in the simplest possible way. The problem that I’ve thought about a lot, and I realize Khan Academy is there to hopefully help folks solve, is how do we personalize education for and how do we give more people access to world class learning, and how do we support those supporting the students more? How do we support teachers, and how do we support parents more? And if the technology is pencil and paper, so be it. But maybe AI can be part of that solution.

It probably goes without saying that “maybe AI can be part of that solution” is light-years from “I think we're at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” Have the chatbots lost Khan?