YouSaid · the spoken record

Jo Boaler

lines on the record: 90
first: 2021-09-27
most recent: 2021-09-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think what we know now is that what we need for this 21st century world we live in. A flexible mind School should not really be about teaching kids particular methods, but teaching them to approach problems with flexibility, being creative, thinking creatively is really important. So people don't think the words maths and creativity come together. But that's what I love about maths is the creative different ways you can see it. And so helping our kids There's a book I like a lot by being by physicists You probably know this book called Elastic. You might know it and it's about how we want elastic minds same kind of thing flexible creative minds and schools do very little on developing that kind of mind. They do a lot of developing the kind of mind that a computer now does for us”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you're born groupatizing, I think, but some kids have developed that. Ability, if you like, and you can learn it. So this to me is part of how wrong we have maths, that we think to tell whether a kid's good at maths, we're going to give them a speed test on. On multiples. But actually, seeing how kids group dots could be a more important assessment of how well they're going to do a maths. Anyway, I diverge. What I like to do though when I start off with kids is show them I'm going to give you maths problems. I'm going to value the different ways you see them. And turns out you can do this kind of problem asking people how they group dots with young children or with graduate students and it's engaging for all of them.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of lines. Some people see segments. And I collect them all and I put them on the board. And at the end I say, look at this. We are a class of 30 kids and we saw these seven dots in 18 different ways. This is actually a mathematical term for this. It's called groupizing.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do something actually there's a video of me doing this on our website that I love when I first Meet students. And this is what I do I show them a picture. This is the picture I show them. And it's a picture of seven dots like this. And I show it for just a few seconds, and I say to them, I'd like you to tell me how many dots there are, but I don't want you to count them. I want to group the dots. And I show it them and then I take it away before they've even had enough time to count them. And then I ask them, so how did you see it? And I go around the room and... Amazingly enough, there's probably 18 different ways of seeing these seven dots. And so I asked people tell me how you grouped it. And some people see it as an outside hole with a center dot. Some people see like stripes.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I didn't know he was going to come up and say that. And I didn't have in my head like this is the kid who could have this extension task. Can still do that as a teacher when kids get excited about something or they're doing well in something, have them extend it, go further. Great.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Students in the class. Yeah. I think what's important though is teachers to have the perspective that they don't know who's going to be excellent at something before they give out the activity. And in our camp classes that we ran, sometimes students would finish ahead of other students. And we would say to them, can you write a question that's like this but different? And over time, we encourage them to extend things further. I remember we were doing one activity where kids were working out the borders of a square and how big this border would be in different case sizes. And one of the boys came up at the end of the class and said, I've been thinking about how you do this with a pentagon. And I said, that's fantastic. What does it look like with Pentagon? Go, you know, find out, see if you can discover.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will show what they can do with a rubric and also write notes. Like, you know, in the next few weeks, you might like to learn to do this. So instead of kids just thinking about I'm an A kid or a B kid, or I have this letter attached to me, they're actually seeing mathematically what's important. And they're involved in the process of knowing where they are mathematically. At the end of the year, sure. they can have a grade but during the year they get these much more informative measures”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's not conducive for deep learning. And yes, have a great at the end of the year, but during the year you can assess kids in much better ways, like teachers can, a great way of assessing kids is to give them a rubric that kind of outlines what they're learning over the course of a unit or a few weeks. So kids can actually see the journey they're on. Like this is what we're doing mathematically. Sometimes they self-assess on those units and then teachers”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not a fan of grades and tests myself. I think grades are fine if they're used at the end of a course. So at the end of my maths course, I might get a grade because a grade is meant to be a summative measure. It kind of describes your summative achievement. But the problem we have in maths, classrooms across the US is people use grades all the time, every week or every day even. My own kids, when they went through high school, technology has not helped with this. When they went through high school, they knew they would have been graded for everything they did, everything. And not only were they being graded for everything, but they could see it in the gradebook online and it would alter every class they went into. So this is the ultimate what I think of as a performance culture. You're there to perform somebody's measuring you. You see your score.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we've set out for the state of California the whole of mathematics K10 as a set of big ideas and connections. So we know that teachers, it works really well if they say, okay, so a big idea in my grade is measuring. And instead of reading five procedural statements that involve measuring, they think, okay, measuring is a big idea. rich deep activity can I use that teachers measuring to kids and as kids work on these deep rich activities maybe over a few days turns out a lot of maths comes into it So we're recommending that let's not teach maths according to all these multiple, multiple statements and lots and lots of short questions. Instead, let's teach maths by thinking about what are the big ideas and what are really rich, deep activities that teach those big ideas.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On these standards. So the standards themselves, I think of maths and many people think of maths in this way as a subject of like a few big ideas and really important connections between them. So, you could think of it as a network map of ideas and connections. And what standards do is they take that beautiful map and they chop it up like this into lots of little pieces and they deliver the pieces to schools. teachers don't see the connections between ideas nor do the kids so anyway this is a bit of a long way of saying that what we've done in this new initiative is we have set out maths as a set of big ideas and connections between them so this is grade three So instead of there being 60 standards, we've said, well, you can pull these different standards to get in with each other. And also value the ways these are connected.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is something that's a standard. The textbook authors say, or I'm going to make a question about that, and they translate the standards into narrow questions.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an interesting example. In third grade, there are three different standards about unit squares. So, this is one of them a square with side length one unit called a unit square is said to have one square unit of area and can be used to measure area.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I do think there's a way of teaching maths that changes everything for kids and teachers. So I'm one of five writers of a new framework for the state of California, a new maths framework that's coming out next year. And we are recommending through this maths framework that people teach in this way. It's called Teaching to Big Ideas. So at the moment, people have standards that have been written and then textbooks have taken these standards and made not very good questions. And if you look at the standards, like I have some written down here, just reading the standards, it makes it math seem really boring and uninspiring.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so do many parents believe that. There's one method that you memorize and then you reproduce it. So until people have really had an experience of what I think of as the other maths, until they've really seen that it's a really different subject. It's hard for them to be able to shift their kids to see it differently.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, I mean, I haven't experienced parents worrying that their kids will be better than them. I have experience parents Having a really bad relationship with maths. Know not wanting to help, not knowing how to help, saying things. Like another study showed that when mothers say to their daughters, I was bad at maths in school, their daughter's achievement goes down. So we know that kids pick up on these messages, which is why I say you should fake it. But also, I know that lots of people have just had a really bad relationship with maths, even successful people. undergrads I teach at Stanford have pretty much always done well in maths They come to Stanford thinking maths is a set of methods to memorize.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one of the things I say to parents, and when I give parent presentations, even if you hate maths, you need to just fake it with your kids. You should be always endlessly optimistic and happy about doing maths”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some interesting implications for this. I mean, you can see how it works. If you have maths anxiety and you're helping your kids with homework, you're probably communicating things like I was terrible at this at school. And that's how it gets passed on to kids. So one implication is if you have a really bad relationship maths, you hate maths, you have maths anxiety, just don't do maths homework with your kids. But we have on our website, we have a little sheet for parents of ways to interact around maths with your kids.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a difficult subject. One study found that The amount of math's anxiety parents had predicted their child's achievement in school. But only if they helped with homework.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. You did that for me. Yeah, absolutely. And I share that with teachers that even in this broken system of what they have to do for districts and textbooks, a single teacher can change kids' maths relationship or other subjects forever.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I went to the defense in the math department, and it was so interesting because this young woman spent like two hours sharing her work. All of it was visual. In fact, I don't think I saw any numbers at all. And I remember that day thinking, wow, I could have brought her like 13 year old into this PhD defense. They would not recognize this as maths. When Miriam is currently won the Fields Medal, all these other mathematicians were. Connected all these previously unconnected areas of maths. And so, but when she also shared that when she was in school, when she was about 13, she was told that she couldn't do maths. She was told that by her teacher.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think our education system still uses an approach that was in classrooms hundreds of years ago. The textbooks have a lot to answer for in producing this very uninspiring mathematics. But yeah, if you open up the subject and have people see and solve it in different ways and value those different ways, somebody I appreciated a lot is a mathematician called Mariam Miz Acarni. I don't know if you heard of her. won the fields medal. She was from Iran, first woman in the world to win the fields medal in mathematics. She died when she was 40. She was at Stanford. But her work was entirely visual. And she talked about how her daughter thought she was an artist because she was always visualizing. And I attended, she asked me to chair the PhD defense for one of her students.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. Silicon Valley, where I live is filled with people who are dropouts at school or who had special needs, who didn't succeed. It's very interesting that have gone on to do amazing work in creative ways. I mean, I do think our school system is set up to value. Good memorizers who can reproduce what a teacher is showing them and push away those creative deep thinkers, often slower thinkers. They think slowly and deeply. And they often get the idea early on that they can't be good at maths or other subjects. So, yeah, I think many of those people are the ones who go on and do amazing things.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I share this with teachers, I say, you know, I'm not suggesting you put on the bottom of all kids' work. I'm giving this feedback because I believe in you. One of the teachers said to me, we don't put it on a stamp. I said, no. Don't put it on a stamp. But your words are really important. And kids are sitting in classrooms all the time thinking, what does my teacher think of me? Does my teacher think I can do this? So it turns out it is really important to be saying to kids, I know you can do this. And those messages are not given enough by teachers.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That energy. Turns out it's really important. There's a study that was done, it was actually done in high school English classrooms where all kids wrote an essay for their teacher and this was done as an experiment. Half of the kids got feedback from their teacher diagnostic feedback, which is great. But for half of the kids, it said an extra sentence at the bottom that the researchers had put on. The kids who read that extra sentence did significantly better in English a whole year later. The only change was this one sentence. So, what did the sentence say? The sentence said, I am giving you this feedback because I believe in you. The kids who read that did better a year later.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of kids start to give up on themselves and maths around from about fifth grade. And then those middle school years are really important. And fifth grade can be pivotal for kids just because they're allowed to explore and think in good ways in the early grades of elementary school, but fifth grade teachers are often like, okay, we're going to prepare you now for middle school and we're going to give you grades and lots of tests. And that's when kids start to feel really badly about themselves. And so middle school years, our camps are middle school students. We think of those years as really pivotal. Many kids in those years are deciding, yes, I'm going to keep going with STEM subjects. Or no, I'm not, that this isn't for me. So, I mean, all years are important. And in all years, you can kind of switch kids and get them on a different pathway. But I think those middle”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there are some people who really can't get there because they're not given access to that good teaching. But that would be huge, that change. As to doing lots of maths, if maths was interesting and open and creative and multidimensional, I would be all for it. We actually run summer camps at Stanford where we invite kids in and we give them this maths that I love and that in our camp classrooms they were three hours long. And when we were planning, the teachers were like three hours. Are we going to be able to keep the kids excited? Three hours? Turned out they didn't want to go to break or lunch. They'd be so into these mathematical patterns. We couldn't stop them. It was amazing. So yeah, if maths was more like that, then I think having more of it would be a really good thing.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the US, there's an idea that excellence is important, but then kids are given the idea in many ways that you can either do it or you're one of the people who can't. So many students in the school system think they're one of the kids who can't. So there's no point in trying hard because you're never going to get there. So if you can switch that idea, it would be huge. And it seems from what you've said that in the Soviet Union that idea is really different. Now, the downside of that idea that anybody can get there if you work hard is that thought that if you're not getting there, it's your fault. And I would add something into that. I would say that anybody can get there. But they need to work hard and they also need good teaching.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been successful. Yeah, I think that's very interesting. And there is a lot of success people coming through the Soviet system. I think something that's very different to the US and other countries in the world is that idea that excellence is important and you can get there if you work hard.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way, that's why we want to, that's one of the reasons we want to open it up so that there are different ways of accessing it. And then that's not really a problem.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is why being a teacher is so hard, and people really don't appreciate how difficult teaching is when you're faced with, I don't know, 30 students who think in different ways. But this is also why I believe it's so important to have this multi-dimensional approach to maths. We've really offered it in one way, which is here's some numbers in a method, you follow me, do what I just did, and then reproduce it. And so there are some kids who like doing that, and they do well, and a lot of kids who don't like doing it and don't do well. But when you open up maths and you give, you let kids experience it in different ways, maybe visually with numbers, with words. What happens is kids, there are many more kids who can access it. So those different brain wirings you're talking about where some people are just more able to do something in a particular particular particular part”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's great when things are challenging, but there's something that's really key to being able to deal with challenging maths. And that is knowing that you can do it. And I think the problem in education is a lot of people have got this idea that you're either born with a maths brain or you're not. So when they start to struggle, they think, oh, I don't have that math brain. And then they were literally sort of switch off in their brain and things will go downhill from that point. So struggle becomes a lot easier and you're able to struggle if you don't have that idea. But you know that you can do it. You have to go through this struggle to get there. But you're able to do that. And so we're hampered in being able to struggle with these ideas we've been given about what we can do.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not taught, and we love as well color coding, like when you represent something mathematically, you can show color to show the growth. And kind of code that so if I have an algebraic expression for a pattern, maybe I show the x with a certain color, but also write in that color so you can see the relationship. Very cool. And yeah, particularly in our work with elementary teachers, many of them come to our workshops and they're literally in tears when they see things making sense visually because they've spent their whole lives and not realizing you can really understand things with these visuals. It's quite powerful.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said they had to solve it. They had to work out what was going on and how he intuitively worked out what the problem was. But then it took him three weeks to show it mathematically. I thought that was really interesting that how you can have this intuition and know something works. It's kind of different from going through that long mathematical process of proving it, but so important.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I love to value what's hard in maths instead of being afraid of it. We know that when you struggle, that's actually a really good time for your brain. You want to be struggling when you're thinking about things. So if it's hard to think intuitively about something, that's probably a really good time for your brain. I used to work with somebody called Sebastian Thrun, who's a great sort of mathematician, you might think of him, an AI person. And I remember in one interview I did with him, he talked about how they'd built robots, I think, for the Smithsonian and how they were having this trouble with them picking up white noise.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Einstein is well known for thinking visually. And people talk about how he really didn't want to go anywhere with problems without thinking about them visually. But the other thing you mentioned that sparked something for me is thinking with intuition, like having intuition about maths problems. That's another thing that's often absent in maths class, the idea that you might think about a problem and use your intuition. But so important. And when mathematicians are interviewed, they will very frequently talk about the role of intuition in solving problems, but not commonly acknowledged or brought into education.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is what the neuroscience has shown us that when you work on a maths problem, there are five different brain pathways and that the most high achieving people in the world are people who have more connections between these pathways. So if you see a maths problem with numbers, but you also see it visually, that will cause a connection to happen in your brain between these pathways. And if you maybe write about it with words, that would cause another connection. Or maybe you build it with something physical that would cause a different connection. And what we want for kids is we call it a multi-dimensional experience of math, seeing it in different ways, experiencing it in different ways, that will cause that great connected brain.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely people who come into the classes I do who are more interested in visual thinking and like visual approaches. But it turns out what the neuroscience is telling us is that when we think about maths, there are two visual pathways in the brain. And we should all be thinking about it visually. Some approaches have been to say, well, you're a visual learner, so we'll give you visuals and you're not a visual learner. Actually, if you think you're not a visual learner, it's probably more important that you have a visual approach. So you can develop that part of your brain.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I always say that you can take any maths area and make it visual. And we say to teachers, give us your most dry, boring maths, and we'll make it a visual interesting, creative problem. And turns out you can do that with any area of maths. And I think we've given, it's been a great disservice to kids and others that it's always been numbers, lots and lots of numbers. Numbers can be great, but you can think about maths in other ways besides numbers.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love a mathematics that some people don't even think of as mathematics, which is beautiful, creative mathematics, where we look at maths in different ways, we visualize it, we think about different solutions to problems. A lot of people think of maths as you have one method and one answer. And what I love about maths is the multiple different ways you can see things, different methods, different ways of seeing, different. In some cases, different solutions. So that is what is beautiful to me about mathematics, that you can see and solve it in many different ways. And also the sad part that many people think that maths is just one answer and one method.”
2021-09-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #226 – Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source