The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Math-ish: Finding Creativity, Diversity, and Meaning in Mathematics By Jo Boaler

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Math-ish: Finding Creativity, Diversity, and Meaning in Mathematics By Jo Boaler https://amzn.to/3QyFjeP From Stanford professor, author of Limitless Mind, youcubed.org founder, and leading expert in the field of mathematics education Jo Boaler comes a groundbreaking guide to finding joy and understanding by adopting a diverse approach to learning math. “Every once in a while, someone revolutionizes an approach to a difficult subject and changes it forever. That is what Jo Boaler has done for math. Fresh, smart, and inclusive, Jo Boaler's strategy eschews the one-size-fits-a-few approach and instead allows math to be seen and solved by everyone. A huge achievement. Math-ish is the only math book I’ve ever enjoyed reading in my entire life. Honestly.” -Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry Mathematics is a fundamental part of life, yet every one of us has a unique relationship with learning and understanding the subject. Working with numbers may inspire confidence in our abilities or provoke anxiety and trepidation. Stanford researcher, mathematics education professor, and the leading expert on math learning Dr. Jo Boaler argues that our differences are the key to unlocking our greatest mathematics potential. In Math-ish, Boaler shares new neuroscientific research on how embracing the concept of “math-ish”—a theory of mathematics as it exists in the real world—changes the way we think about mathematics, data, and ourselves. When we can see the value of diversity among people and multi-faceted approaches to learning math, we are free to truly flourish. Utilizing the latest research on math education, Jo guides us through seven principles that can radically reframe our relationship with the subject: • The power of mindset on learning • Utilizing a visual approach to math • The impact of physical movement and communication on understanding • Understanding the value of an "ish" perspective - in mathematics and beyond • The importance of connected and flexible knowledge • New data on diverse teaching modes that work with different learning styles, not against them • The value of diversity in learning mathematics—and beyond When mathematics is approached more broadly, inclusively, and with a greater sense of wonder and play—when we value the different ways people see, approach, and understand it—we empower ourselves and gain a beneficial understanding of its value in our lives. About the author Dr Jo Boaler is the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education at Stanford University and co-founder of youcubed and Struggly. Formerly the Marie Curie Professor of Mathematics Education for England, a mathematics teacher in London comprehensive schools and a researcher at King’s College, London. She is the author of eighteen books, the most recent being: Math-ish:Finding Creativity, Diversity and Meaning in Mathematics, published by Harper Collins. She was listed as one of 8 educators changing the face of education by the BBC

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

The Chris Voss Show. There you go, Lizzie. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, you're bringing the most smartest people, the most brilliant minds, the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the astronauts, the, uh, what else has been on the show? The rock stars.

You name it. Everyone's been on the show except for, I don't know. I don't know. Everyone's been on the show. I'm just, whatever. There's not been everyone. We don't have enough. We don't have room or bandwidth for that.

We'd have to pay extra. So we kind of cut. We don't have enough, we don't have room or bandwidth for that. We'd have to pay extra, so we kind of cut some people off on the show, and we don't invite them. So that's kind of funny in my head. I just roll with it. Anyway, we have an amazing young lady on the show with us today. She'll be talking to us about her newest book that will be coming out May 7th,

2024. It's called Mathish, Finding Creativity, Diversity diversity and meaning in mathematics joe bowler is on the show with us today she'll be talking to us about her insights in her new book she is a stanford university professor and co-founder of u-cubed and struggly she's formerly the madam curie professor of mathematicsematics Education for England, I've heard of that place, a mathematics teacher in London, comprehensive schools, and a researcher at King's College in London.

She's the author of 18 books, and the most recent being the latest one we're talking about today. And she was listed as one of the eight educators changing the face of education by the BBC. Welcome to the show, Jo. How are you? Great, thanks, Chris, and thanks for having me on the show. Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate it. 18 books under your belt. That's awesome. Actually, this is number 19. Oh, 19. It's not technically out yet.

Ah, maybe that's why they have that number. And numbers are important. That's why you're counting them, because you're all about math. So give us any dot coms. Where do you want people to look you up on the interwebs yeah ucubed.org is our website with lots and lots and lots of resources for educators parents children my new book is on a website called mathish.org there you go both of those places are good. There you go. Give us a 30,000 overview of your new book. My new book is a passionate plea to stop what I call narrow maths in classrooms, where kids are sitting, watching teachers go through methods and then going through lots of methods in their books.

We can do a lot better than that. We know ways of really engaging kids and making them really in their books. We can do a lot better than that. We know ways of really engaging kids and making them really enjoy their learning. So in the book, I do a few things. One is I share the neuroscience. I work with neuroscientists at Stanford about how important it is for us to struggle and how good that is for our brains. And then I talk about how maths can be this beautiful, visual, creative subject with lots of examples. And I introduce the concept of ish, which is a new idea, math-ish. So I can tell you more about that if you want. Please do. I was going to ask you, what is the origin of the title?

Yeah, math-ish. So this came to me actually when I was swimming, I love to swim in the mornings, but I make an argument in the book that in, in the world, when we answer questions, they're nearly always ish numbers that we use. So for example, we might say how much of the moon can we see, or how long is it till we get to the airport or how much did it rain last night or how much paint do I need to paint the wall or I could go on and on and on and they're ish answers but in maths classrooms it's all about precision all precision and precise is good it's important but we're really out of balance and so what I'm suggesting to teachers a lot of people will say

to me oh kids get lost inside the calculations they come up with these wild answers and what i suggest is before you ever do a calculation and this is true for us in the world too you should come up with an ish answer now when that happens when you're thinking in an ish way your brain is staying at the bigger concept of the number. You're not getting lost in further details. You're really thinking conceptually. So I'm very excited because some teachers have been trying it in classrooms and telling me that it's been really amazing. Wow.

So it's not like you're trying to guess the exact number. You're kind of like trying to get somewhere in the vicinity. Yeah. So what would be a reasonable answer? What would be your ish answer? There's an example I give in the book. I could share it maybe where in a big national assessment, kids were asked to ish to come up with an approximate answer to 12 13ths plus 7 8ths so that's two fractions 12 13ths 7 8ths but they're both close to one and they were given a choice of answers 1 2 19 or 21 so the majority

of 17 year olds in the u. US chose 19. Now, that's so far out of what those two fractions are. And I know why they choose 19. They jump in and think, oh, I have to add the numerators and add the denominators and they're in their heads. And they're not thinking, you know, about what the ish answer would be. And probably they've never had any experience of thinking what the ish answer should be. That sounds like American kids for sure, yeah. And lots of others, but it's true.

I was hoping you were going to tell me the British kids did better in London there. I think we do do it a little bit better, but not enough better. Shots fired, folks. It's the new revolution. Yeah, it's, I don't know what to say about what the kids thought. So can I start walking around going two plus two is five? Can I start doing that now? Five-ish?

If I ish it, it becomes. There are situations in life where coming up with five would work for you, but it's more, you know, maybe you have to multiply 125 times eight and it would help you to think you know what's the ish kind of answer that would be and maybe you think of 120 times 10 instead because that's an easier calculation yeah what i just did it's a thousand isn't it around around ish i just basically took 125 times two times four that's great so you worked out a precise that's a precise answer yeah and that's good and that probably means you have pretty good number sense but a lot of our

kids don't have good number sense and they'll say oh 125 times eight and they'll say maybe it's 1,600 200 you know and 26 so having them think about the ish answer first just as it's a little safety mechanism as well it stops them as well as having them think conceptually anyway in the book I also talk about how you can ish a lot of things in life, actually. It's not just numbers. And when you take an ish perspective, you know, maybe you don't have to be perfect all the time. Maybe your efforts are good enough. It can be pretty liberating, I think. There you go. Can you give us an example of that in life?

I think a lot of time in life, people strive towards perfection, and there are people who think they have to do things perfectly when actually we didn't think we had to do things perfectly. So what would be a good example of that?

I don't know. Maybe I run a business and I'm trying to get people in a company to all interact in a certain way. Maybe I'm putting out some new policies. And then I really beat myself up because I didn't explain it really well. And three of the people aren't doing it really well. But instead, I could think, you know, it was good enough. I can sort of get an ish result from this you get close you know i

i like the idea because you you see the the game i just played in my head which i think is fits with what your format is in the book i when i was taught math it was there were beatings and and gnashing of teeth and yeah of fingers and if you didn't get the the thing right it was there were beatings and and gnashing of teeth and yeah of fingers and if you didn't get the the thing right it was a very exact science it was it was you know there was a very i don't know if linear is the right word but there was a very you had to solve the math in this way yeah yeah it's answer in this way yeah and they would teach they would teach you like for multiplication you know there was a there's a way to do that and then for addition there's but you know when you start

getting additions not too bad you know until you start carrying stuff one or two over there and then you're gonna go again but the the multiplication usually would you know gets a little funky on you because it resonates. And then you get to division. Yeah, and division too. And so I was always crammed that down my throat from that age, and I flunked most of my math. I mean, I was horrible at math. I hated math.

And I flunked a lot of it. What's interesting is somewhere I developed a pattern just out of I don't know necessity and running companies because I had to do math of doing that little game that I just played in my head then in recent decades I noticed people I noticed math teachers teaching this this other variation of ways to package the math mm-hmm and what you've talked about where you know like what i did in my head i went 125 if i still just try and do 125 times eight my brain kind of starts hitting breaking gears and i was like but if i if i break it down to something i'm simple at exponating 250

i can i can go okay cut that in half go four go 250 that's a thousand times four perfect yeah and I did it pretty fast in my head but it is one of the methods we teach kids and I talk about in the book yeah and so I saw a lot of math people over recent decades and sadly they weren't there when I get where aren't you guys in my high school sadly they weren't there but you know different ways of of learning to package these things and and learn them and i don't know if maybe i have a different brain because i i package things that way or if i've just figured out you know a side way of doing things or what you would call mathish but it's always worked for me in being able to kind of create a bite size element or something you know 250 is really easy because you can you can break it down into stuff 125 if i still try

and do 825 times eight i can feel my brain just go what the hell are you doing dude i don't know write it down yeah yeah i mean one of the other big messages in the book, aside of math-ish, is valuing the different ways kids think. So we do something that I talk about in the book that's called number talks. And you just sort of did a number talk right there where we would say to kids, 125 times 8. And in your head, think about how you would do that. And what you find is kids use all sorts of different ways of doing it. So somebody might say, I thought about 250 times 4, fantastic. Or they might have thought, I'll do 120 times 8 plus 5 times 8.

So what you do is you collect in kids different ways. And then, really importantly, visualize them so I can draw a picture of what 125 times 8 could be and what 250 times 4 would look like. Because multiplication is always just area. So 125 times 8 could be a rectangle. And we could look at that rectangle and the 250 times four rectangle they would be the same they would have the same area so it becomes this very it becomes kind of a beautiful visual display different ways of thinking about it different visuals and we really acknowledge the different ways kids think super valuable instead of it being you, there's one way and you must follow that one way.

And so thinking is not a part of it. A lot of people, you know, I mean, that was the way they forced on us when we were young where they just crammed in our brain like, you have to do it this way. And you get it wrong if you don't do it the same way as the teacher. And for some people, you know, like we're talking about, it just doesn't, we have different ways where it can be repackaged. Differently, yeah.

And you have people that is, I don't know, does math affect people that are dyslexic? It can do. And my daughter has dyslexia, and with dyslexia, I mean, the whole approach that we recommend that's on our YouTube website is to see math visually and to experience it in different ways through building things, drawing things, writing words. So that multidimensional approach helps kids with all types of special needs because they often need different ways to grab onto ideas. And I think what is hard for kids with dyslexia is that one procedural method

that you have to follow. Yeah. It's in, and if you're dyslexic, you're switching the two and the six or whatever the, I don't, I'm assuming that's how it works, but I know that there's number switching.

Sometimes I wonder if I have a model because I'll do that. I'll, I'll read lines and mix stuff. So I, you know, I'm not sure but the visual approach to math makes much better difference one of the challenges that I had with math in high school was why should I care you know they give you a bunch of numbers on a page and it's just

I'm just like I feel like I'm just jumping through some hoops or some stupid numbers like why does this apply now when I started my first when I started my first company at 18 math became really important because you have to do accounting you have to do taxes and you have to figure out if you're making a profit or a loss and you know then you know numbers and math became really important to me and then you're motivated then you're motivated to think about that. I was in a high school just last week, Chris, and the teacher said, today we're going to do systems of equations and then gave the kids all these abstract systems of equations. And they were doing them, they were standing up, which is a new thing in education, they were standing up which is you know a new thing in education they're standing up at boards but they had in front of them things like x plus 6y equals 4 re x plus 7y equals 10 and so i walk

around the room and these kids are all just staring at these systems of equations and i'm i was talking to them saying what do you think what you know how do you think you can approach it and they're like don't know don't know and i thought to myself why should these 13 14 year olds care about the answer to that question now what you could do and i talk about this in the book is give them a data set of ospreys and fish they actually exist in the universe in systems of equations like you have too many fish you know one dies out if you have too many osprey the fish die out and then the osprey anyway it's a really interesting kind of data investigation they would have cared about that but unfortunately you know that i mean there are great teachers who are giving those kind of investigations but still too many classrooms are just kids working through abstract algebra

abstract number problems no visuals no modeling maybe you need to go to where they're at so basically just say how many instagram followers do you have to have to where they're at so basically just say how many instagram followers do you have to have to get a certain number of likes and dms exactly exactly i worked with a great teacher actually her name's diara busso and she did exactly that she said to the kids where do you hang out on social media and instagram was the place and she said okay i'm going to start sending you math so much through instagram and you're gonna I'm gonna send you choices of problems and you can which ones you want to do and of course the kids were instantly into this again a very rare teacher though yeah if you

take all the songs by crapper name just slipped my thing who's the who's the big famous Taylor Swift Taylor Swift if you take all the songs by, crap, her name just slipped my thing. Who's the big famous? Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift, there you go. If you take all the songs by Taylor Swift and divide by number of albums and, you know, something like that. How many words are in each song? Well, actually, we have a data science course on our website. And one of the units is investigating how Spotify recommends music to to you what does it use to figure out what music to recommend to you and kids love that investigation too so it's not hard really to

make maths exciting and engaging for kids but it's still pretty rarely done yeah you could you could be like if a kard a Kardashian gets a butt lift, what's the circumference of... Never mind, I'm just doing jokes. I could be very dodgy. There's a lot of people watching the show. If you're watching The Bachelor, what are the odds that he's going to go with a blonde one?

I don't know. But, yeah. Yeah, pretty soon, yep. I see. If someone can figure that out, they can probably make some money in Vegas. That's true, too. Yes.

What is the chance of, I don't know, the Browns ever winning a Super Bowl in the next 100 years? There you go. You can take that to the Vegas. Loads of sport. Oh, my gosh. The amount of data inside sports these days. Oh, yeah. Is incredible.

And kids would be really fascinated by looking into into that more yeah we've had people on the show that are now using ai to to to take all that data in and then and then the spit out you know different answers and they're using ai to do the sports betting and apparently they're doing really well they claim yeah i haven't seen firsthand, but we have people on the show talking about it. So what are some other aspects of your book that can help us become more math-ish? I start the book with a chapter that's called Learning to Learn. And there's a lot in there that I think is good, not just for students, but for people in life. Because, you know, in classrooms, math teachers think they're there to teach maths

and they don't stop to think maybe these kids don't know how to learn maths, like how to approach it. I teach a course at Stanford to undergrads called How to Learn Maths and it's super popular and I teach them how to approach problems. So in my book, I talk about how we have to help people

learn to learn and this is you know really good for us in life as well. So there's a lot of research that says being metacognitive will help you in life, in learning and a lot of people think metacognition is thinking about your own thinking but it's a lot more than that it's actually also being able to strategize when you're given a problem and having some different strategies to use and it's about the ways you think about approaching your learning all of these it happens in a certain part of the brain and metacognitive people they tend to be better problem solvers they also tend to be people

who are open to more diverse perspectives something that's kind of important for our world right now so teaching people to take control of their own brain teaching them how to think turns out to be super important. Yeah. You know, I spend time on that in the book. How would we help kids know what they should do when a maths problem is placed in front of them? A lot of people think you're successful if you know how to do the maths. But actually, what's more important is that you know kind of strategies

and approaches to the problem yeah how to how to do it one thing i always find interesting is i'm i like averages i like i i i have a weird brain that i actually i actually count stuff it's part of in my adhd disease where i count and categorize things. And evidently, I was told by a psychologist once that if I wasn't doing it for a business application, they'd have me committed when my ADHD was really bad. But I do it mostly for business, so I count things. I count marketing billboards for advertising or ads for advertising and monitor whether, oh, I wonder if those are successful,

if that's working. And sometimes I'll look at, you know, if there's a lot of them, clearly that ad's working for them. They're actually doing data science right there. Yeah. Is that what it is? Yeah.

So I'll count those and I'll track things. And I always did. I'll try and track trends. That's important. Sometimes I'm kind of following them without really following them i'm watching stuff and i'm like wow i've seen it's how i got into twitter when it first came out back when launch i just i just kept hearing about twitter right i started i was keeping a number in

my head where i'm like hearing about this everywhere and then oprah started talking about and i'm like jesus oprah started talking about i guess where we are and that's how i've caught a lot of trends is just kind of keeping the thing and it used to be that way with my office I could literally walk around my office in a month and know where my sales were and just by listening looking at the board but also listening to what my sales people were doing how they were doing touching touching base with them, I would know. But one thing that's been interesting to me is I'll take averages.

So I'll be like, the average of where we should be is right about here. A lot of people don't seem to understand averages nowadays. If I ask somebody the average of something, they just lose all ability to function. Yeah, it's true. Same as many people can't use fractions or work out percentages. And, you know, I love your approach, by the way. It's definitely something that's very mathematical. And seeking patterns is one of the things we teach kids that maths is really all about.

That is finding patterns in the ways things work. But I think there's way too much in the maths curriculum in schools. So teachers end up giving kids a very shallow experience of lots and lots of things, and they come away not remembering any of it. So really important concepts like finding an average or finding a percentage, any sort of proportion, fractions of proportions too, are important in the world.

And a lot of people run away from them and feel they can't do them. If we could slim out what was in the curriculum and really go in more depth, which is what they do in more successful countries like Japan and China, we would be much more successful, I think. Yeah. I mean, the visual aspect of what you talk about in your book is really important. And why does this apply to me? You know, what is the use case here? You know, one thing I felt when I was in the prison of high school, I just felt like, I was feeling, why do I need to care about algebra, really?

Why? And it was so hurtful. Honestly, and I don't want to sound like a victim here, but it was so hurtful and honestly and i i don't want to sound like a victim here but it was so hurtful to my self-esteem it made me hurt because i couldn't master algebra and i i think i kind of could but i just didn't care yeah and then the fact that i was forced to take it in school it was so destructive to my self-esteem my confidence my desire to learn like i'm just like just all this stuff in the trash is how i felt nice this you know maths has this power to really crush kids self-confidence because we really give the idea that it you know math is really important

and if that's what it means to be intelligent is to do all this maths and then if you don't then that must mean there's something wrong with you and kids really do end up feeling well the way you describe really kind of crushed by it and we that's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about getting the ideas for change out yeah a lot of people see that I that I really get attacked by the traditional math people who want to keep everything the same. And they say to me,

how can you keep going? And I say, I keep going because it's so important. There are so many kids out there who are exactly like you, who just don't see the point of doing what they're doing. And it makes them feel lesser as people and if someone had sat down with me and said you know if a ceo would come into the classroom or you know accountants are kind of boring sorry accounts but if a if a ceo would come

into the classroom and said hey let me tell you about why math's important and how i became elon musk or and to me like i said i started my first company at 18 and so i had to kind of learn why math's important and how I became Elon Musk or whatever. And to me, like I said, I started my first company at 18. And so I had to kind of learn math. And fortunately, I learned the basics. I didn't, you know, you don't use algebra much in business unless you're doing engineering and I'm not an engineer. I'm just an idiot CEO who tells engineers what to do. But, you know, if I would have seen that, I would have been like, oh, okay.

So this is why this is important, you know, and, and I could see that math was important to people who are like engineers or science sort of people, but I could see that I was never going to be an engineer. Number one, I didn't like pocket protectors. Number two, I really liked women and dating women. No, I'm just kidding. Engineers, you guys are wonderful. But serious, get out more.

And so I just didn't see a future for me. I'm like, I'm not sending rockets into space. I mean, I chewed on way too many paint chips when I was a kid. We lived near power lines too. So there was that. And we, I'm just doing jokes. But I think. We have that in our system too.

We've sort of, the way maths is organized in schools, it's sort of saying, let's assume that you're going to be an engineer and you need calculus. And then go down from there, making all the courses fit in that pathway. So like in school now, we have all students must take Algebra 2, which is a course a very complex algebra.

And most kids will never use that in their lives. And they tried forcing that on us, too, in my age. You had to do Algebra 1 and Algebra 2. Right. And I just flunked the F out of it. But, you know, one of our proposals, and we've been working on as a sort of national group that's going on across the country now, is that kids can take a course in data science instead of algebra 2. And kids are loving the course in data science. It's real things in the world.

They're learning how to model and develop functions. And it's important maths. It's not that it's an easy low-level course. It's not that it's like an easy low-level course. It's just it's applied. It's a math modeling course. And lots of districts have said now kids can do that, but we're experiencing a big pushback of traditional maths people saying, no, everybody must go through Algebra 2.

We're not having data science as an alternative. So these battles have raged you know in the u.s for decades but that's the current one that's going can kids should it be okay for kids to take data science instead of algebra two and then maybe they take statistics after that so they don't go that calculus route they take more of a statsy route i think, to take statistics and learn averages. But not, you know, it's people are saying they don't want that. Yeah, they have the old world thinking.

I like the idea of doing statistics because I've always studied statistics. I love those types of numbers. You know, voting or polling or, you know, I'll do polling of stuff on ideas I have with staff or something. Yeah. I'll be like...

There's a lot of uses of statistics in the world. I think we'd have done a lot better in COVID if people understood more about statistics. So... The data collection is huge. I mean, we've had a lot of Silicon Valley types on the show where the

data collection and analyzing data is so important and valuable. Every company now. Yeah. Every company. We should be teaching kids to be data literate. They will need it in their lives, whatever they go into,

but they also need it. I think to sort of protect them from what sent to them on social media and the misinformation they get. And, you know, it helps them if they can interrogate a data visual and say, where does this come from? Who sent it? What data is not included? They will be better protected. So this is something we're really trying to bring to the United States. And every other country in the world has been teaching data for quite a long time so it's really a U.S. problem that we've only taught algebra and geometry in high school and shifting it is hard but it's really important I think.

Yeah American you know my mom's a teacher 20 plus years and i've heard teachers talk about this you know over in europe your guys is into the woods you know you guys you guys kind of figure out early on what people are good at in trades or or whatever and you kind of start steering to them to them we try and force everybody to try and see if they're interested in everything even if they're not and we're like we're just going to shove it down your throat and force you to take it as a credit. Yeah. And you're probably going to hate it,

but we just want to see if you decide you're going to turn into an engineer, I guess. We do that also in England. I think Germany is one of the places where they decide on pathways early on. But what's different about England is when i was a teacher in london which was many years ago now i was you know like 20s and data was a fifth of the curriculum and we all the way through school learn what's called maths every year you learn maths and

it has all the maths together combined so you encounter real problems like they have in the world and you maybe bring in a bit of geometry or a bit of algebra or a bit of stats it's not like here where you do a whole year of algebra and then a whole year of geometry and then a whole another year of algebra that that's really a distinctly American phenomenon, and I think it definitely makes the problem worse. It's probably because we have to charge $100,000 a year for college now. That was a game I figured out 40 years ago, whenever I turned 18, almost 40 years,

was that there was a game being played, that shit was being forced on us. In fact, I wrote about this in my book. i figured out in high school that i needed 26 credits passing classes to graduate but if i took all the classes that they were throwing at me i i would have to take i think it was like 56 credits that i would have and my brain went why do i it was doing math my brain went why do i need to take all these other classes? I only need 26 to graduate. I'm a dumb kid who comes from a poor family. I was smart enough to know that. I'm going to have a Pell Grant if I go to college.

I'm not going to Harvard or Stanford or any place else, and that's just it, and so I literally went to my teachers, and I figured out which classes I had to pass to get into high school. And I literally went to my teachers and said, I'm not going to pass your class. I'm just going to, I'm just going to sleep through it and sit there. And they were, they were quite offended, but they, they said, you know what? If you're going to be that way about it, I just don't want you in the class. So don't come and we'll mark you as here. And all my teachers did that with me because i went and told the other ones i'm like

this teacher is doing this with me you should do this with me and so literally i was taking half my classes for my senior year and the rest of them i was going out to lunch with my friends and and and others but i learned what i needed to and then there were some classes that i really enjoyed because the teacher was so great but i flunked the class anyway because i really wasn't doing the curriculum but i enjoyed what the teacher was teaching and how they taught it it's kind of it's kind of like the same principal steve job used where he flunked out of college but he still went back to classes that he really enjoyed one of them was type setting or or fonts and stuff like that and forget the

proper term of it. But that's what he used to build the thing. That's what I've always done because I never did go to college. I collect the data that I want and need and I utilize it. That's a good approach. People who can help me. There's way too much pressure in this country to get to college, to get to the top colleges. Everybody thinks you have to be at Stanford or Harvard

when there are loads and loads of really good colleges kids can go to. Or maybe you don't go to college. And now there's lots of things you can do. There are courses you can take without going through colleges to do what you want to do in life. I wish we didn't have that pressure on kids in the U.S. Well, we've got to make money to pay for colleges and sell them courses. Yeah, colleges are expensive.

We have an interesting way here. I think somehow America really needs to turn to what other countries do, where the college and education is given away for free. And there's more opportunity there. You know, I didn't go to college. I, I need to make this caveat because anytime I do that, I get kids coming up to me. I'm not going to go to college either. I did order all the, like all sorts of instruction from Harvard business review, which is a great magazine. I don't know if they still do the magazine part,

but I would order the Harvard business review Magazine and and also some of their packages that they would have on how to be a CEO how to build companies and all that and then I read just about every business program I get my hands on yeah and I focused on what I needed to know and then you know if I need to if I need to you know do engineering and business I just hire somebody to do that yeah you can totally do that and these days I just hire somebody to do that. Yeah, you can totally do that. And these days, now there's stacks of online classes you can take. You don't have to go the college route.

And now it's probably a great social learning experience for kids. I want my kids to go to college so they get that social learning of growing up with these other young people but and learning to function without college these days yeah that's true the only thing i did miss out of college is the frat

parties oh you found other ways to have parties i'm sure yeah i used to go attend them breaking them so there you go so this all adds up in my mind see what i did there yeah give us your final thoughts as we go out tell people where to order the book and any dot coms you want people to check out yeah math ish is the name of the book finding creativity diversity and meaning in mathematics and it comes out on may 7th and you can find it in all the bookstores. I have also mathish.org where you can watch a video of kids ishing in the classroom and see how great it was for them and also see all the places you can get the book, other things, some fun handouts that I didn't get to put in the book. And then ucubed.org like you and a cube. Cubed.org is the website where we just have millions of resources for people to teach

maths and learn maths better so yeah those two places you cubed.org math oh and i have a new maths app called struggly that gives kids this visual creative experience online and encourages them to struggle that's one of our big messages. It's really good to struggle. That's why we call it Struggly. And you can find that at Struggly.com. Those are the places. There you go.

Thank you very much, Joe, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. I love your book library that you have behind you. Yeah, I'm in my Stanford office at the moment. Ah, there you go.

We love books. So thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks, Ron, for tuning in. Go to Goodread moment. Ah, there you go. We love books. So thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, FortressCrispVoss, LinkedIn.com, FortressCrispVoss, CrispVoss,

one of the TikTok, and all those crazy places on the internet. We'll see you next time. Be good to each other. Stay safe.