The Math Kids Most Want to Learn

Notes from teaching summer school math to the 95% of students.

Oakland USD offers summer school math for two groups of students heading into their first year of high school. One group is trying to earn a year of Algebra credit in a month. Very tough task. Very motivated group. Another group of students is taking math to get them ready for Algebra. Maybe their Grade 8 teachers recommended they take the course. Maybe their caregivers pressed the issue. Theirs is not a small task either, but I think it is worth considering these two groups of students as emblematic of the 5% and 95% of students in Laurence Holt’s 5 Percent Problem.

Briefly restated: lots of edtech works for the 5% most motivated students. Lots of edtech only looks good after you throw 95% of students out of your efficacy research study population. As they heave those students out of their research studies, some edtech operators will then blame the students or blame their teachers for that lack of motivation.

Our work at Amplify lives or dies based on how well we understand the needs of that much, much larger group of students and their teachers. So I wrote the super cool coordinators and teachers of the summer school program here in Oakland and asked if I could teach a couple of their classes each week this summer. They said sure yeah.

Last week, I taught Function Carnival. There were several moments of unusually high interest among this group. See if you can figure out their common element.

What did you see happen here?

You start Function Carnival by playing an animation which students will eventually graph with a function. I asked students to share what they noticed, making sure that they said something no one else saw.

Why do you think this graph is wrong?

Before I asked students to create their first graph, I made a graph that was incorrect and asked them to tell me why it was wrong.

What do you like about your classmate’s graph here?

I gave them enough time to create a first draft of a function sketch but not enough time to make their favorite draft. Then I pulled one up for the entire class and asked them to share features they liked about it …

What do you think they should change about it?

… followed by features they’d change.

The comment element is them. The math is them.

The common element in each of these moments of high student engagement was the student. Specifically, their thoughts. Even more specifically, their concrete and sensory thoughts about mathematics.

I shared with them new ideas for their graphs—ideas like non-linear functions, parabolic symmetry, piecewise functions, but always in the context of helping them better understand their own ideas.

Kids are self-centered creatures who like learning and talking about themselves more than any other subject, a feature they happen to share with most of humanity. Happily, effective teaching means engaging with what students already know, so their interest in talking about themselves aligns with my interest in helping them learn more than what they know. It isn’t always the case that what’s most interesting is also what’s most effective, but it often is and it was here.

Featured Comment

I suspect Elliot Beck speaks for the majority of teachers with his pragmatic and non-ideological perspective on generative AI:

Largely in agreement with your position on AI. These issues have been so interesting to consider and I enjoy following the narrative. I don’t have a huge dog in this fight, I’m just a math teacher who wants to find ways to help my students using all the resources, (AI, tech, non tech, whatever) available to me. Use the best and leave the rest.

FWIW, the summer school math teachers aren’t using an adopted curriculum. I have spent time co-planning with them and the number of times they have discussed generative AI is zero. It’s not that it’s come up and been rejected for reasons of principles, ethics, or lack of training. For what I suspect are purely pragmatic reasons, it just hasn’t come up.

Odds & Ends

¶ Check out the winners of the Polypad Art and Music Contest. Gorgeous math.

¶ The Walton Family Foundation has released a new survey about generative AI usage. The Pundit Accountability Tribunal, of which I am the only member, has issued a “pay no mind” advisory for this one, folks. They report some impressive teacher usage numbers, but the same polling firm found 40% weekly teacher usage and 10% daily teacher usage (!) back in March 2023 (!!) just a few months after the release of ChatGPT. Even Ethan Mollick is quoted about the data saying, “I was sort of surprised to see the numbers look as good as they do.”

¶ Speaking of Ethan Mollick, he has a piece in Edutopia about generative AI and he’s recommending K-12 educators use generative AI to … flip their classrooms? I feel like I have stepped out of a time machine into 2011.

¶ Apple announced a suite of generative AI features embedded pretty deeply and invisibly into the operating system. It isn’t anything that is likely to change anyone’s life but it seems likely to enable some modest quality-of-life improvements. In my view, this is also a likely outcome for generative AI in education.

¶  New Hampshire Department of Education enables free access to Khanmigo AI pilot for all New Hampshire educators and students. Quoted: the NH education commissioner, Sal Khan, a district superintendent. Not quoted: teachers, students. I don’t mean to be glib here. Obviously, it would not be hard to find some early adopter teacher to give a quote. I just note how often the enthusiasm for these kinds of deals seems driven top-down rather than bottom-up. The contract draws from COVID-era relief funds and it will be interesting to watch renewal rates after those funds expire.

¶ Teachers at this tech-forward school banned cell phones. They say they’re ‘never going back.’ When I was in the classroom, Science Leadership Academy was known for riding basically every wave of technology early and thoughtfully. The fact that they’re banning mobile phones should serve as a strong signal to everyone else.

¶ I would not consider Glenda Morgan any kind of skeptic about edtech or generative AI and she had this to say about generative AI tutors, all of which I co-sign:

But even beyond the misreading Bloom problem, thus far I am unconvinced that the kinds of tutoring currently offered via AI matches the concept of watching a student’s thought processes and identifying the core issues they aren’t understanding. Instead, AI tutoring today seems to consist of breaking down problems into component parts and explaining the components. This is no doubt helpful, but it is not tutoring in the true sense of the word.

¶ Jill Barshay gives six great pieces of advice to education writers on Covering AI in Education. (Also: it’s always exciting to see a little bit of edit history in the URL slug.)

¶ While tech and business leaders look to chatbots to remedy the crisis in teacher retention, DC Public Schools tried one weird trick: paying early childhood educators more money. Pick your jaw up off the ground. I understand this solution requires collective will that is uncommon and tax increases that tech and business leaders are likely to oppose, but it did increase employment by 7% and 62% of teachers agreed with the statement, “Because of the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund payments, I plan to continue working in child care in DC longer than I thought I would.” How many teachers would agree with that statement if you replaced “Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund payments” with “teacher assistant chatbots”?