Embedded - 318: Amazed at How Things Are Amazing

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

Darryl Yong (@dyong) is a mathematics professor at Harvey Mudd College (and former classmate of ours, also at HMC). He is working with HMC’s Clinic Program, putting real industry projects in front of teams of college students. He’s also teaching number theory to prison inmates and helping teachers in the chronically underfunded Los Angeles Unified School District. Darryl writes about his career in education at Adventures in Teaching (profteacher.com). You can read about his experiences with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. If you dig into the archives a bit (2009) you can read about teaching at a high school, for example adapting teaching to different students. What he took away led him to create Math for America Los Angeles, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of secondary school mathematics and computer science teacher leaders in the greater Los Angeles Area. Darryl’s personal page (darrylyong.com) and his HMC page (math.hmc.edu/~dyong). Also, check out HMC’s Clinic Program page.  

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White. I'm here with Christopher White. And this week, we are excited to be speaking with Professor Daryl Yong. Hi, Daryl. It's great to talk to you. Hi, everyone. It's so honoring to be on your show. While we knew each other many years ago and for a very long time, could you tell us about yourself as though you were introducing yourself to a new class? I would say I'm just your average geeky Los Angelino who loves art, music, gadgets, anime, food. But professionally, I'm a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College,

where we were classmates. And I also helped to start a nonprofit professional development organization for secondary school teachers called Math for America Los Angeles. Okay, I'd say you're well above average, but we'll let that slide. We like to do this thing we call lightning round, where we ask you short questions and we want shortish answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask how and why. Are you ready? Okay.

Ready. What's a college class you'd like to teach but you haven't? Oh, yeah. I often get to teach almost everything I want. So I can't think of anything right now. Maybe a class on preparing food. That would be fun. Like the chemistry of food.

Oh, cool. What's been your favorite class to teach recently? I just co-taught a writing seminar on food and culture. There's just something like a theme going on here? You're a math professor, right? We did think you'd take this right. Yeah. Have you had breakfast?

I have not had breakfast. All right, continuing on this theme. Your favorite popsicle flavor? Grape. Really? Okay. Favorite mathematical identity? Maybe E to the I pi plus one is zero.

Yeah. Since you mentioned anime, what is your favorite anime right now? Ooh, right now? Oh, gosh, there's so many. I watch almost the entire season's offerings every season. Maybe Psycho Pass season three is my favorite right now. Writing that down. What do you think of My Hero Academia?

Oh, I love that show. I'm hoping that it will continue being good and not getting crappy. Do you have a tip everyone should know? Emacs is awesome. Still? I agree, but we're going to get emailed on that. Okay, we should get on to the bigger questions. One of the reasons we asked you to be on is because Harvey Mudd has this thing called CLINIC. Could you explain what that is?

Sure. So CLINIC is a longstanding feature of the curriculum at Harvey Mudd College. It's something we're very proud about. It's got a rather misleading name. It doesn't necessarily relate to medicine, although the founding faculty members who came up with the idea wanted to give Mudd students a clinical experience similar to what medical students receive as part of their training. And so that's why the name Clinic.

But Clinic is a year-long capstone experience for students at Harvey Mudd College that engages teams of four to five students working together for a client, typically a company, a nonprofit, or some governmental agency. The sponsoring organization outlines the project requirements, approves the team's proposal for accomplishing the work, and receives weekly progress reports. And it's a long-standing program. We've had this program for over 57 years now. About 1,700 projects have been completed for sponsors, ranging from the really well-known ones like American Express, AT&T, Google, Intel, Toyota, along with less well-known companies and startups. It's a required part of the engineering and computer science majors at Harvey Mudd and an optional part of the math, chemistry, physics, and biology majors.

Do you both remember the clinic projects that you worked on as a student? I do. We were both on the clinic projects that you worked on as a student? I do. We were both on the same project. For half. Oh, for half. For half of a CS client. Because my major was whatever I wanted. So I did CS engineering and a thesis.

So, you know. Cool. Yeah. So how does it differ? So other colleges have, I remember my brother did something called co-op. And of course, their internships. So how does it differ from a co-op or an internship? students who are working together and not necessarily always from the same disciplinary field. We often have interdisciplinary teams because, you know, many challenging problems in engineering and science draw on various disciplinary domains. There's a faculty advisor who sort of nominally acts as a cheerleader and a therapist. And then also all of the work that's created

is the property of the sponsoring organization. So the company retains all of the intellectual property. So that can be sometimes different from the way that some schools do this kind of thing. So I remember our clinic project, I was a math major, but I did a lot of CS. I think I did, it was a CS clinic, right? And we worked for the aerospace corporation doing some sort of network health monitor, right? Or, or something like that. It was, it was downloadable modules to, uh, enable you to dynamically download different modules to

monitor different health characteristics of a piece of equipment or something. It's been a little while. I was really only there for the initial definitions, and then I switched over to an engineering clinic. And one thing I remember was that it was kind of my first experience of working. Well, was it? Was this after our internships or before? I'm sorry, Daryl.

Yeah, that's okay. I think it was around the same time. Maybe it was junior year. Yeah, I think it was one of my junior years. If it was junior year, then this was my first experience kind of working on an industry project of any kind. It was intimidating. Yeah. And we'd go to the company and we'd have meetings there periodically. So that was kind of, it was a great experience to, okay, this is what it looks like outside of school. And this is what

people who are at jobs look like. They're not goofing around all the time in the same way that you may be a student is. And having to make plans and things that was it was it was a good intro to those basic concepts of hey this is not school work um these people want something from you and you have to plan it and kind of figure out how to achieve the goal that they've said um right and it it's great that we can remember these things after all these years. And I don't know if you can remember other things, you know, I hadn't worked on team projects much before that. Not successfully.

So it was kind of my first team project too. And learning to work on a team was challenging. Yeah, my engineering one, we worked for Lockheed Martin trying to create

a test suite that would allow them to look at embedded compilers and figure out which ones conformed to C standards. That was your E4 project? No, that was and I wrote all of the tests and it was one of those things where some of the team, it was engineering, so these weren't CS majors and none of us knew what an embedded system was. And one person was sort of in charge of documentation, and it really was a very team dynamic.

And I remember when we went to Lockheed Martin, they took away my camera. And it didn't occur to me that they would take away my camera, but of course they did. Actually, I think they just took the film. Wow. So long ago. Film? Oh. Yeah, no, I remember similar dynamics.

And I remember being frustrated that some of our team did more of the work than some of the other part of the team. But these are things you have to experience. So, and students aren't paid for this this is more like a class right um that project class right okay that's right it replaces one of their classes and they take that that class for both semesters of the senior year typically yeah um and some of the majors you can do a thesis instead. Right. That's right. I think I did both. I don't know why.

Yeah, we were insane. Overachievers. Yeah, you can't say that. Confused by the requirements. So, Alicia, now I'm curious. Did this clinic experience, the Lockheed Martin one, have anything to do with what you ended up doing in your professional career? It was super, super helpful, but it wasn't like I saw that and I said, Oh, that's what I want to do.

When I did finally get to writing C proper C I knew all of the tricks, all of the ins and outs. And I knew all of the compiler idiocies to look for. So it turned out to be very useful. I mean, just reading the C manual with the idea of how am I going to test each piece was incredible. And I must have done that senior year because I remember I already knew people in industry and they were like, what are you doing? And you didn't ask me, but I'm going to answer the same way. Now that I remember, this was before I applied for jobs or internships. And I'm pretty sure that my clinic project got me my first internship at Cisco because I aced the interview because we'd been

doing networking constantly and doing hard networking stuff, uh, and networking code and that I hadn't really worked with before. And there were questions in the interview. It was like, Oh, I know that. I've been just, I just did that. And, uh, so I credit working on that clinic with getting me my first job and that launching my career. Very cool. Yeah, I remember my clinic project was a project with ESRI,

a geographic information system software company. And our job was to implement shortest path routing between two locations on a map on a limited memory system. Oh, wow. And I mean, I can remember that clearest day now. I hardly remember other things. I'm not sure that had a whole lot to do with my career path, but it really was a very cool experience. So you are a math professor now, and you are looking for new clinic projects. Right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So that, by the way, thank you all for bringing me on the chat about this cool thing.

So every year Harvey Mudd tries to get about half of the clinic projects to come from returning sponsors and have to be from new ones. So we're always, always looking for new organizations to work with. And by the way, in recent years, we've been increasing the number of pro bono projects that we take on in cooperation with nonprofit organizations and governmental organizations. And we also have one or two global clinics now each year that involve some sort of

overseas partner. So those are pretty cool too. What makes for a good clinic project? I mean, you're going to get, the sponsor is going to get four to six students over a year. Right. But how do you define a good project? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I think the most important thing that we're looking for is that the project has to bring value to the organization. And it has to be some meaty problem for students to work on. So it can't be some, you know, sort of like grunt work that wouldn't be interesting for either party, really. But we want the project to have

some real value to the sponsoring organization because that's what drives the team to be enthusiastic because when they see the company liaison's enthusiasm for the idea, they get infected with that enthusiasm too, hopefully. And that's what motivates them to work hard and do a good job.

But at the same time, we don't want projects that are along the critical path for the company or the organization. Clearly, you wouldn't want a team of undergraduates doing something critical path. But something kind of subcritical, those are the sweet spots for us when we're looking for projects. Things that are of value to, let's say, the company, but not quite critical path.

So things, for example, when we talk to engineers at many companies, we ask them, what are the things that people in your group have always wanted to do, but just never had the time to do? You know, things that would really help out in some way, but you never quite seem to find the resources to devote a whole person or something to that thing. So what is that? What are those things? What are the unerased whiteboard ideas that you keep leaving there because someday you think you're going to get to them, but you never quite get to them?

Those often are good projects to work on for our clinic projects. Can you give us an example of what's been interesting or good lately? Yeah, that's a great question. So being in the math and computer science side of the house more, I don't know as much about what's happening in the engineering field. But I would say... Yeah, they can take care of themselves. We all do recruit for each other, by the way. So I'm happy to chat more about that if that's helpful. I would say, you know, in the last few years, it's been a lot of machine learning, as you might imagine.

So much machine learning. Wait a minute, can I have a couple of students to grade my data? Didn't you have some stuff for me to train on this morning that you were supposed to give me? Is anybody not doing machine learning? That's the question. Please raise your hand. Please raise your hand if you are. Yeah.

So there was a whole lot of that. And students were very excited to do these things. So all kinds of applications of machine learning that were really cool. For example, I remember one project, Steelcase, the furniture manufacturer, they have veneers that they apply on their furniture to give them their look. And they were using – all of the matching of the veneers was done by humans because that that was you know that's how you achieve if you buy like a whole set of furniture you want them to all look roughly the same so i think the students devised some sort of machine learning tools and image analysis to to approximate the human matching of veneers. That was kind of a cool project. Another machine learning project was, I think, American Express,

maybe a year or two ago, wanted us to help them improve their hotel recommendation engine. And I think that project resulted in a 6% lift for their hotel sales, I think. So that was a pretty cool project. That was worth it to them. Yeah, really worth it for them. So there've been a lot of machine learning projects in recent years. I would say, though, that the trend seems to be that we've hit the peak, I think, and we're starting to see fewer of those than before. I think partly because machine learning has become pretty commoditized.

So you don't need an exploratory team now to go figure out maybe these different solution strategies. You can probably just pay someone and get a turnkey solution pretty easily these days. Going back to the co-op idea, this is different because the students meet with the liaisons and may go to the location, but they don't work on location. Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So that could be, you know, sometimes an issue because if there's some sort of fancy equipment or, you know, something that they're supposed to work on, we have to figure out how to make that work. These days, at least for software projects, most of the sponsoring companies are not having students touch their internal code base. And so they sort of play in the sandbox and then ship some product to the company,

then the company would have to somehow incorporate back into the code base at some point. And since the projects are talked about, I mean, there's Clinic Day and all of these times when the students present the work to their other students, they can't be secrets. Well, you would be surprised that there's so many companies these days who are asking for NDAs. And so students have to sign these NDAs. Well, I mean, they don't have to. If they don't want to, we would move them to a different project. But we are pretty comfortable with signing different levels of NDAs. There have been a few projects where we can't even say who the sponsor is. And so the students would just say, we're working with company X, so you know.

At the end of the program, students give presentations, right? So how does that work if you can't say anything? Yeah, no, they just say, well, we're working for company X and we're doing this thing and they can talk about it in very, very general terms, but they can't say any of the details.

Interesting. Yeah. Wow. That would be harder. Cause I mean, we just, we talked about clinic all the time. Yeah. I'm thinking about mine, which was aerospace, which was, you know, going to the, that place was a lot like going to, I don't know,

some secret government facility. There were multiple fences. It was very, you know, brutalist architecture and multiple fences and doors, and you go into this completely unremarkable building with thousands and thousands of rooms and conference rooms. That seemed like a project that they would say, hey, don't talk about this anywhere. But I guess that one was okay.

Apparently, they knew that we only talked to each other anyway. It was really quite expensive, wasn't it, clinic? I mean, not that this— For the companies to pay for it. The companies pay for it, and the students don't get paid. That's right. But what is the range for what the companies pay for it? Right. I guess, you know, I would say it's really not that expensive if you think about the team of four to five students putting in about 1,200 to 1,500 hours from September to May.

The price tag for a clinic is, I would say, on the same order of magnitude as what you might pay an intern in a tech firm working for that many hours. Because the difference here is that you get not one person, but you get a team and you get a faculty advisor. Yeah, I think it's comparable. It's maybe better actually, because at least interns in San Francisco, they're starting to get paid a lot. Yeah, they're starting to get paid a lot, yeah.

And you do get half returning clients. So that indicates that people are getting value. We hope so. Yeah. And when we survey the sponsoring organizations, they do tell us that they're overwhelmingly very positive and happy with the results of the clinic projects. And I think I remember one of the surveys that we sent out recently had 60% of the sponsoring organizations estimating that the value of the clinic to them was something over $100,000. So that's really positive, too. And that's great for us. We are happy to hear those things.

One of our listeners, Bailey, when we talked about sort of the outline of clinic, wanted to know if there were ethical pitfalls on either side and what to look out for. Yeah, that's such a great question. I'm glad you asked. And also, okay, let's see. A quick pop quiz for Alicia and Chris. Can you recite Hariamud College mission statement, go? And we'll be back after these messages and technology and h-a-r-v-e-y-n-d-a-b-l-e-t-s

that's right right i only know this because i'm obviously a lot closer to it than you are. Let me remind you. Harvey Mudd's mission is to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well-versed in all of those areas and in the humanities and social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society. Has it always been that? I sometimes manage the impact of their work on society. Has it always been that? I sometimes manage the impact, the work on society. I do sometimes remember that part. Yeah, yeah.

I know the general outline. Yes, I'm sure you did. Yeah, and you're right, Alicia. It's that last phrase that, frankly, we often struggle with at Harvey Mudd. I mean, I love that part of the mission statement. We don't always fulfill that as much as we should. But this is one of those places where at least I'm trying company wants to make guns? I mean, I don't have a great answer for that, but if they approached us, how would I react to that kind of a project? I don't know. And then on the other side, how do students think about, let's say, machine learning algorithms to recommend hotels or any other kind of machine learning application?

Are they thinking about the ethical implications of those things? And are they conducting their work ethically? Those are all questions that we hope their students are thinking about. Has there been much of a push in increasing ethics education? Yes, there has been. I would say it's slow going. Partly because, as you probably remember, the Harvey Mudd curriculum is just so packed with things. This is what happens when you have to take all of these engineering classes and all the humanities.

And all the humanities. And also, uh, newsflash, we keep learning new things in the world. And so we stack on top of each other. Yep. We just add things and we never take things away.

So it just gets more and more and more. And, uh, so at some point it just becomes unsustainable. Well, other colleges allow you to specialize, you know, you can maybe do electrical

engineering instead of just engineering. Instead of just engineering. Yep. But as far as I can tell, we're going to keep going with this broad. Hey, I just took math. Here you go. Here's math. Yeah. Do students end up going from clinic to working for these companies later proposition is that a lot of companies are excited to recruit Harvey Mudd students. And so this is a nice way to get in front of all of the students. I would say it's not typical that students working on a clinic project will go work for their specific sponsor. But what is more common is that students hear about all these companies because, as you just mentioned, we talk about them constantly with

each other. And so you hear about maybe a startup company that you might never have heard of otherwise, and you actually get to know what the company is up to. And so we have quite a few students who end up working for a clinic sponsor, but not necessarily the one that they worked for. That makes sense. Back to the ethics question. Sorry. Are there specific courses now? I mean, is there an ethics in engineering or ethics and technology courses now? Yeah, there's ethics, there's a leadership too. It's not required though. That's the part that I'm still thinking about a lot. And also, I would like to see it integrated. I don't want it to just be something that lives in a course.

I want it to be interwoven all the way through. So even in the math class, in core differential equations, I would love for us to be thinking more about how to intertwine those ethical concerns all the way through. You do a lot more than just teach math at Harvey Mudd and work on clinics. You take this interweaving of ethics and consideration into different areas. One of the ways you've been doing it recently is a number theory class. Could you tell us about Inside Out? Thanks for asking about that. Yeah, so I think in the last few years, I've really become very interested in this huge prison industrial complex that remains largely invisible to many of us in our daily lives. And thinking about people who are incarcerated and what kinds of opportunities they have while incarcerated and when they leave.

So anyway, this past semester, I taught a number theory course at the California Rehabilitation Center. That's the men's prison that's about half an hour, 45 minutes away from Harvey Mudd College in Norco. And the Inside Out program is a really cool program started by Temple University about 20 years ago. And they have started all of these higher ed prison collaborations across the country and across the world now. So we're starting an inside out program at the Claremont Colleges. What does that mean? Do prisoners come and take classes on campus or is it video? How does that work? Right. So the way that this works is we travel to the prison every week. So last semester, I believe there were six different courses offered at CRC.

And we drive ourselves there. The students too? The students, right. So I and my students, and we call them the outside students because they're the ones who are not in the prison. We all go to the prison. We process through the security gates and all of that. And then we enter the classroom in the prison. And we all take the class together, both the outside students and the inside students. We take the class together and then we all leave.

The outside students and I leave, and then we just repeat that every week. And the outside students, they sign up for this or this is just something that happens if they get this class? Yeah, that's a good question. So we try to be very, very clear with them that it isn't a very special kind of class. So we don't want to surprise anyone by that. And in fact, there's quite a bit of paperwork that students have to do in order to participate. They have to get a TB test and blah, blah, blah. So there's a lot of things. You really do have to know what you're signing up for in advance. And how is that class? I mean, okay. So now you're, you're teaching at the prison with, uh,

incarcerated men and students and you're teaching number theory, which I don't remember that being an easy class. I don't think I took it, but I'm looking over at the math major. Well, I, I tried my best to really think about how to create a space in which we can learn mathematics together and learn from one another in a way that feels humanizing. And I don't know about you all. You're all experienced with mathematics. But I think maybe we're the exceptions in the world. I think for many people, at least in America, math is a pretty discouraging, daunting subject that frankly dehumanizes a lot of people. And so I was trying to figure out a way to do something very different. So I picked number theory in particular because it's typically something that we don't have a lot of experience with through school mathematics. And so all of my outside students and the inside

students would be relatively on the same footing, sort of approaching it with fresh eyes. So we were really all learning it together for the first time. I mean, Mudd classes are non-trivial. They're usually, you know, you try to kill us with the homework, I remember. Yeah. Was this a lighter class, or was it as hard as all of the others? Well, I would say maybe the mathematical depth that we got to in this class was not quite the same as in a standard Harvey-Mudd class. But that's also because the prerequisites, there were none really. All you really had to know before taking this class was some high school algebra, basically.

But that said, we did do quite a lot. I mean, we got all the way to the point where we could understand the RSA crypto system and send messages to each other, small ones, at the end of the class. So I think we did quite a lot. Who got more out of it, the inside students or the outside students? Oh, for sure, the outside and me, definitely. Because it's not only do you learn, everyone learned the math, right? But then all of us on the outside learned what it's like in a prison and what people's lives are in incarcerated situations. This isn't the first time you have done something that seems unprofessorial, unstandard before i'm not even going to try that

word again um you went on sabbatical fairly early in your career it seems like early i don't know uh where you you went on sabbatical to teach in the la school district one of the difficult districts. Right. Yeah. Thank you for knowing about that too. What, I mean, what possessed you, Daryl? Well, that relates to the nonprofit organization development support organization for secondary school teachers. And then the sabbatical opportunity came up around 2009. And I really just wanted to use that experience that year to get the experience of what it's like to be a high school teacher. I mean, I had been working with high school teachers for several years prior to that, but I had never had my own experience teaching high school.

So I just really wanted to have that experience of my own. And so that's why I did that. You know, you could have gone to like a private school where it'd be super easy and they would pay you a lot. Right. It's true but i think i like i wanted to have that that genuine experience teaching in los angeles unified um and also not getting paid i think i take home that year was maybe like 16 000 it was ridiculously yeah and also because i was was teaching a um slightly lower load, and so I wasn't getting the standard salary.

It was pretty sad. But one of the things I remember from that time is that they didn't pay you for quite a while. Right, right. Thanks for remembering that. Yeah, there was this payroll snafu that year. I mean, people should know, if people aren't familiar, Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest school district in the United States, second to New York public schools. And we have, I think, right now around 650,000 or maybe 700,000 students. I mean, it's just a ginormous organization, tens of thousands of teachers. And so there was a payroll issue that year. I mean, it's just a ginormous organization, tens of thousands of teachers.

And so there was a payroll issue that year. And I think like thousands of teachers were affected by this payroll thing where we got all these demand letters sent to us saying that we had to repay parts of our salary. It was really stressful. But eventually it got worked out. But for a while, yeah, they were asking us to pay back our salaries. So you, you teach prisoners, you teach, uh, lower income high school students. How is it different teaching, you know, the average Harvey Mudd student?

Yeah. I mean, the spoiled Harvey Mudd students. Yeah, no, you're right. Don't worry The spoiled Harvey Mudd students. Yeah, no, you're right. Don't worry, no Harvey Mudd students are listening. Yeah. The Claremont Colleges are a pretty special place. Many of our students come with a lot of privileges. Not all, but a lot of them still do. People come with having a lot of experience in mathematics you know and very clear direction for what they want to do with their

lives and that's not always true of other people we ask the same question slightly differently has have those experiences teaching in l unified and. Unified and in the prisons, have they altered how you teach normally? Yeah, completely. Here's one example. I think that experience teaching high school really gave me an appreciation for formative assessment. So I am sorry, I'm using a slightly jargony word, but most of the time when you're a college professor,

you typically lecture in a math class. And in that situation, you have no idea whether students understand what you're saying or not. The only time you would know is maybe when they turn in their homework assignment. And if you looked at their grade, maybe you might know whether they understood or not. But by that point, it's almost too late to make a change because students have already sort of solidified their understanding or maybe solidified some misconception about something. And it's hard to change those things so it it would be so much better if you taught in a way where you could

get information in the moment of the teaching about whether students are learning what you think they're learning and that that formative assessment that i learned to do while teaching high school has has been so so important for my own teaching at the college level. So this goes beyond whether they're nodding along and raising their hand or falling asleep. Yes, that's right. We talked with Jay Carlson a little bit about formative assessment, but maybe we should redefine it. Sure. So think of assessment generally as just measuring what students know. And in general, we divide that into two categories, summative assessment. So things like exams, how do they perform on these measured instruments of their learning, typically at the end of the

class? And then formative, how do you measure what students are learning in a way that informs your teaching and helps you improve and make changes along the way? How do you do formative assessment in a high school classroom? So, you know, there's so many more contact hours in the high school day compared to a typical college class. And so you have students doing mathematics in the classroom all the time. And the act of having them do mathematics in front of you helps you know whether they are able to do it or not. And that's something that we don't do as much at the college level. Is this having someone from the class come up and write the answer on the board?

It could be that, but it could be something like, you know, having students go up to the board in groups of twos and threes and working on problems. It could be, I have these little whiteboard slates, you know, that I give out to students. So they're, they're writing on these little whiteboards and I'm walking around and I can see how they're doing or they're talking to each other or maybe they're coding something, you know, on a laptop and I can see what they're doing. How, I mean, this sounds like, like the flipped classroom thing. Are you doing that at the college level? Yeah. So a couple of years ago, some colleagues and I did a four-year study of flipped classrooms at Harvey Mudd. So maybe that's saved it for another day. But you're right in that flipped classrooms typically involve students in doing something much more active in the

classroom but that doesn't have to be the case you can still uh without the use of videos or whatever you know you don't have to flip in that way you can still make the class a more active experience and i think a lot of it it seems like at least when I was in school, that happened naturally when the class sizes got really small. So, for some of my math classes... Tell us about topology, yes. Topology in particular was definitely that. There were only three of us in the class. Wow.

And so, you know, every day we'd do stuff on the board, just round robin between the three of us and do our homework, you know, present what we've done for the homework and then learn new concepts. But that was definitely, you know, there's only three of us. Is the professor going to stand up there and lecture to, you know, a couple of people? And that was true of grad school, too. The smaller the class it got, the more interactive it felt, which was definitely better. Is it harder to do that kind of thing when the classes get big? the class it got, the more interactive it felt, which was definitely better. Is it harder to do that kind of thing when the classes get big? I mean, an intro to calculus, how do you handle that many people?

Mud, you know, a big class is 20. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I think right now we're averaging around 36 per section in the core classes. So it's a little bit big, not nearly as big as some giant lecture courses. It does get harder. You have to get rid of this idea that you're going to be the one to get around to every single student. So maybe you might have a TA helping you in the class, or maybe there might be some other way for you to gather information besides you actually laying eyes on everyone. So these clickers are popular these days. Have you all chatted with people who use them or have you seen them? No. Yeah, at least they call them personal

response systems or it could just even be your cell phone. There's a little quiz applet or something. And so you might put up a question on the board, have everybody work on it, and then you all have to vote on what you think the correct answer is. So you can do that in a class of 200 or a thousand even. And then you'll have a distribution of answers. Maybe half the class chooses answer A, half the class chooses B, and then you'll understand that, oh, okay, this is the common misunderstanding that people are having about this problem. Let me explain it this way. So it's pub trivia applied to calculus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Are you going to do more of these adventures in teaching? I hope so. I love my job. I'm so lucky to be able to do what I do. I think every day is an adventure because it's always a new thing to work on, some new challenge, a new group of students. Do you have specific plans? Are you going to do another Inside Out next semester? Are you going to teach? I'm trying to think of some place I wouldn't want to teach. Nothing quite like that right now. At the moment, my big challenge is in teaching scientific computing. I haven't taught that class in about nine years. Fortran. Well, yeah. Thank you for remembering that, Chris, because I historically have included a module on Fortran with students kicking and screaming along the way.

And I think finally this year I'm going to let that go. Probably time to stop. You think? Embrace Python. Punch cards, punch cards. Hey, that Python module got me a job. What's that? That Python module got me a job.

What are you talking about? The Fortran on Vax adventure with hydrophobicity of chemicals. You said Python. Oh, the Fortran on Vax adventure with hydrophobicity of chemicals. Oh, the Fortran part got me a job. It was before Python. Well, before Python. Yeah, are you going to use Python? What are you going to use for?

So I finally took the dive and I learned Jupyter Notebooks. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Are you familiar with Colab? I have such a huge crush on Colab right now with collab? I'm such a huge collab right now. Yeah. I, I'm really amazed at how things are quite amazing these days.

Wow. Yes. Yes. I recently started, uh, a client shop, which is primarily primarily in Python. I'd done some Python before,

but only for little scripts and things. okay. Um, but before I was doing regular embedded work with C. Yeah. The amount you can do with just, you know, a line. Right. I'll spend an hour like, well, I wrote two lines of code.

It does everything. Yeah. But, you know, it's not like pounding out a thousand lines to try to do a matrix multiply or something. It stays days. Exactly. It's so easy. It's so easy.

How come Lisette isn't teaching the Oh, the scientific computing class? Yeah. I know. I don't know if you had that experience, but I took scientific computing from Lisette DePillis. We were probably in the same class. Yeah, I think we were.

We were. Wow, cool. I think, I think we were. We were. Wow, cool. I think, I don't know what she's teaching at the moment. You know, we're all pretty stretched thin, having to cover all kinds of different courses. Yeah, you're looking for a new math professor, aren't you? I know. We're having a search right at this moment.

And fingers crossed, we'll hire somebody amazing and wonderful. I remember the math department when I was there was like five professors yeah how big is it now for 14 yeah and a lot more diverse yes so much more diverse i mean we i wish we could be more diverse um i think we're about more than a third, not quite a half though, women. So we have a ways to go still. You have been, I think one of your titles is something about Dean of Faculty something, something? Right, diversity. Diversity.

Faculty Development. Yes. What does that mean? So in that role, I have two main sets of responsibilities. One is to help the community grapple with issues of inclusivity, of equity, of justice, to build institutional capacity for us to do that kind of work. And then the faculty development side is providing faculty with the resources and the training, whatever that they need to be successful. But particularly focusing my energy on the pre-tenured junior faculty. How has the inclusivity and diversity and justice issues changed since we went there? I mean, I don't remember an associate dean of diversity.

Yeah, yeah, I think we did have someone in that role. I don't remember what they did either. I'm sure they were doing something. But you're right. Things are just so different now. I mean, you all probably know that maybe about eight years ago, the college admitted its first gender balanced class. Yes. That was a really big deal. And now Harvey Mudd first gender balanced class yeah yes that was a really big deal and now harvey mud is is um gender balanced it's amazing and we're we're trying to increase our ethnic and

racial diversity too yeah it's just a different world um i don't mean to be too too cheeky about it but um it's you you just feel the the effects of a gender-balanced class in all kinds of ways. Like, for example, it smells better. I mean, do you both remember? Sometimes class would be so stinky because boys don't shower. For the record, I showered. I showered too. But yeah, no, I mean, there's a lot of things like that.

And it's just, I have no idea what it would have been like to be in it. Yeah, it was all male, pretty much. I mean, most of my classes were all male. Most of my classes were all male, not the student body. Well, most of the student body too. Most of my classes were all male except for me too so that's got to be a huge change for the whole culture

I feel like the college is the times we visited a while ago but it still seemed way different do you think mud has changed more than other universities? Do you think other universities are more kind of static or has the whole culture changed everywhere?

I think the whole culture has changed everywhere. But I think in particular for science-y schools like ours, where the gender disparity was so palpable, that change really had a huge effect on us. You know, like a Stanford or something, that probably doesn't make a huge difference for them. Although in certain us, you know, like a Stanford or something that probably doesn't make a huge difference for them. Although in certain fields, you would probably still see a pretty big gender disparity. Was there a shift in the faculty as well as the students? Yeah. I mean, we started hiring a lot more women faculty, faculty of color. That's really made a big difference too. And we have to keep working on that aspect too.

So we're not done. It's a constant battle to be mindful, to be thoughtful about the way that we do those things. And the student body has changed a lot. Kids are better these days. They're so amazing. They are so amazing, yeah. But tuition keeps going up and up and up. Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I think Harvey Mudd might be... I think it was the most expensive. Most expensive, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, something like $78,000 78 something like that thousand a year room and board it's so expensive i mean that that said a lot of students do receive financial aid and uh i was recently told that the average uh debt student loan debt that a Harvey Mudd graduate walks out with is averaging around 20, 20-ish

thousand a year, something like that, which to me felt manageable, hopefully, the kind of job that you would get. Yeah. The kind of job that you might get coming out of Harvey Mudd, that seemed like a manageable amount of debt. Is it hard for you personally to go from students who can come from families that can handle that level of tuition and then go to the LA school district and see kids who come to school hungry? Yeah, it's really hard for me personally. And frankly, it makes me question sometimes whether I'm in the right place. Because, you know, to be honest, a lot of the Harvey Mudd kids are just so brilliant. If I, you know, if I showed up on the first day of class and just said, hey, everyone, here's this book, read it. I'll see you in three months.

They probably would be just fine. I would not have been fine. They would have been fine as long as you say the test is going to be very hard. I would not have been fine. I'll tell you what I would have done. I would have put the book on the shelf. I would have played video games for the entire semester. Remembered I had this class the day before the final, picked up the book and leafed through it and then failed.

That is not true. I did that, so it is true. But you also wrote like a 25-page paper with footnotes on tanks the day before it was due. Which I recently unearthed from a hard disk, but yes. Wow. It wasn't a good paper. It wasn't. You passed. It wasn't taking it past. It is hard to deal with the situation of personal wealth and environments that need more help and trying to figure out where to go and trying to do just personally is to not always associate a ton of things that they have in their lives, assets, maybe ones that we might not traditionally value, like being bilingual, for example.

Those are amazing, wonderful skills, being resilient. And so it's a mind shift to be able to see a person and all of their skills and abilities and talents and gifts and to not fall into the trap of thinking that just because a person comes from a poor family that they might not have certain things or they're lacking certain things. They could think of it the other way. The students who come from these privileged families, they're lacking certain things. You could think of it the other way. The students who come from these privileged families, they're lacking certain things. You know what I mean? So it's just a different way of thinking about these issues. When I've gotten it all serious again, so do you still have that Popsicle business? Thanks for asking about that.

No, sadly. We applied for a patent, didn't get it, and I kind of just lost steam on that project. It got iced out. Sorry. I do want to bring it back to Klinik for a minute. I want to make sure that he has an opportunity to do his pitch to anybody listening at companies that might be interested. Go. Thank you for that.

I would just say the clinic program is an amazing chance to work with talented students, to get something of value, and maybe even to recruit some of our wonderful graduates. And if you're interested, you can always contact me or any other clinic director at Harvey Mudd. We're happy to talk with you. I think a typical kind of flow is that we reach out and we brainstorm together

about potential projects. And if something happens, it happens. If it doesn't, we just maintain a relationship and maybe at some point it does happen. We're happy to hear from anyone. And then for the non-profit clinic, how does that work? Is that different? I try to do some cold calling and reaching out to different organizations, but it's also great if people reach out to us.

Yeah, sorry, I'm trying to remember exactly who I should email because there are at least one. Yes, exactly. Christopher's doing hand motions that indicate things. Okay, and you have a nonprofit. Yes, the Math for America Los Angeles organization supports, right now we're supporting about 80 teachers a year in the Los Angeles area. So if anyone knows of a math teacher, a middle school or high school math teacher in the greater Los Angeles area, please send them our way, mfala.org. And you'll help get them better curriculum? We provide a five-year fellowship that includes extra salary.

We buy out a period of their class day so that they have time to collaborate with their colleagues. We send them to conferences. We provide monthly professional development and a community of other like-minded teachers to be with. So it's sort of a package deal that you're getting into. That sounds awesome. That sounds really awesome.

How long have you been doing that? Since 2007. So we're in our maybe 12th year. Definitely successful. I mean, yes. Where do you find time to do all of these things? He doesn't sleep. Do you remember that? I don't remember him sleeping at all. I thought he slept.

And still watch a lot of anime. Yeah. I think that we should ask you what your final thought is, and then we should turn off the microphones and still chat. That sounds great. I was thinking about what to say, and I think I'll leave you all with a statistic. So according to the OECD, the average middle school teacher in the U.S. spends 27 hours a week in front of students in the classroom. And that far exceeds the average around the world, which is closer to about 19 hours a week. Teachers in other countries have so much more time for professional development and collaboration.

Just imagine what your life would be like if you had, on average, like two extra hours a day to collaborate with people. I think you would have a very different professional experience. And that's just a larger symptom of many things in our society, our disinvestment in public education and lack of professional standards for teaching. So I'll just leave that for people to ponder. They spend 27 hours in front of students, and they spend something like that same amount preparing and grading? Yeah, I think the average is something like 40 to 45 hours a week. So outside of the 27, it would be grading and preparing for class.

Yeah. Our guest has been Daryl Young, Professor of Mathematics, Mathematics Clinic Program Director, Associate Dean for Diversity and Faculty Development at Harvey Mudd College. If you'd like to know more about Inside Out, the clinic program, the Mathematics for America, or Daryl in general, check out the show notes. We will have links for you. Thanks, Daryl.

This was great. I had so much fun. Thank you both. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our patrons for Daryl. This was great. I had so much fun. Thank you both. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our patrons for Daryl's mic. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. I'm not going to leave you with a quote.

I just want you to go out and say thank you to a teacher, whether it's your kid's teacher, whether it's your teacher, whether it's a professor from days gone by. Teachers are important. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.