The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Jo Boaler

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Dr Jo Boaler is a Stanford Professor. Former roles have included being a maths teacher in London schools. She is author of 18 books, numerous articles and a White House presenter on women and girls. Her latest book is called: Limitless Mind: Learn, Lead and Live without Barriers. She co-founded www.youcubed.org, is currently one of the writing team creating a new Mathematics Framework for the state of California, co-leading a K-12 Data Science Initiative and was named as one of the 8 educators “changing the face of education” by the BBC.

heard. This is live from the table recording today via zoom but normally recorded at the world famous comedy cellar. This is Dan Adam and recovering from the dreaded norovirus, a short lived self resolving but very disagreeable virus that uh inflammation of the intestine of the upper low and lower gi tract nausea vomiting and diarrhea have been my lot the past couple of days but yet here i am with noam dorman owner of the world famous comedy seller perry alashan brand our producer we have a guest that is that we've been trying to get i guess for several weeks now um joe bowler a stanford professor former roles have included being a math teacher maths they say plural in for several weeks now. Jo Bowler, a Stanford professor, former roles have included being a math teacher,

maths, they say plural, in her part of the world, in London. She's the author of 18 books, numerous articles, and a White House presenter on women and girls. Her latest book is called Limitless Mind, Learn, Lead, and Live Without Barriers. And she co-founded ucubed.org, currently one of the writing team creating a new mathematics framework for the state of California.

Welcome, Jo Bowler, to our podcast. Good to have you with us. Thank you. Good to be here. But just as apropos of nothing but that, this camera angle that you have there, it reminds me of some shot from Clockwork Orange for some reason. Something kind of symmetrical

and the bookshelf is really, and the color even is very Kubrick the color even it's very kubrick anyway um that's that's ominous um so yeah this is a very interesting uh um uh topic for me for a number of reasons um and for perry l2 i imagine first of all i have young children in school i had one daughter who was having trouble with math, although she seems to be doing better now. I also, you write a lot about equity. I raised a black stepchild who was having trouble in school. And I went through- He's more biracial. Well, yeah, but you don't say biracial, do you? I mean, Obama's black president, he's biracial. Bob Marley is half white. You don't say biracial, do you? I mean, Obama's black president. He's biracial.

Bob Marley is half white. You don't say biracial. Well, your stepson looks very Puerto Rican to me. That's why I say that. Well, okay, Dan, but I'm just saying by all the acceptable ways that you talk about these things, I wasn't trying to slip him in. He's half black, half Puerto Rican. Anyway, Dan's a stickler

for details. What an obligation to our listenership to present these as they are. He's actually half black, one quarter Puerto Rican, one quarter Indian. To be precise. So he's tri-racial or something. In any case um and um

now i lost my train of thought so and and he he went through a whole series of difficulties through the public schools and private school and then back to public school that i feel i learned something about perry all has a child in the third grade excuse me drink of water you know what it is i i played a gig very late last night and sometimes when i don't sleep this happens to me very rarely it may be a problem actually right i may need to get some water yeah Do you mind if I get some water? Hold on. No, come on. You're going to be coughing the whole time.

Is this being recorded visually or just sound? Visually, yes. Oh, okay. I assume you're okay with that. Well, while Snowm is getting water, I just want to say that math scares the living shit out of me, almost as much as norovirus. I'm glad we're talking then, because I can help you with that.

But I don't need it. I'm a comedian. Oh, you'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. But I have always thought that math really separates the men, or shall we say men and women, from the boys and girls, because we can all memorize a date in history. We can all read a book and discuss it.

But you come face to face with a differential equation and we can't all do that. Well, there's a reason for that. We can chat about it. So before you judge me, I saw Anderson Cooper last night do exactly the same thing. He was in the middle of an interview. I think it was Zelensky

and he had to run off and get a glass of water. It was just dead air for about a minute. So I had a tickle in my throat. Luckily I was on my last joke anyway. No harm, no foul. Go ahead. No. It's interesting because as soon as I left to get the water, I guess because my mind was, I stopped coughing anyway, but before, so, so I originally, you originally came on my radar about what you've written about equity, but let's start with this column that you just wrote, because it's very interesting.

Your op-ed in Los Angeles Times from a few days ago, March 14th. How can we make more students fall in love with math? And this is a question, right? Because I had a lot of trouble getting my daughter to take an interest in math. And she said, I just don't care, which is what people say when they're having trouble. Yeah, understandable. So, but actually,

so I started reading it just before we came on now. And the first paragraph actually, I'll tell you the first question that came to my mind. That'd be a good jumping in. Companies like Google, Apple, and Intel offer some of California's most cutting edge and highest paying jobs. Last year, those three companies alone brought in more than 10,000 people from other countries to take those jobs. Those are the H-1B visas. I looked it up. Those are

overwhelmingly from India, and then China is next, and then Canada is far below those two so so the first question that would come to my mind before getting what to you right after that is well how are they teaching math in those countries so let's start there a lot better so um unlike what many people think the countries that are very successful in maths, we could list China, Japan, Singapore. What's different about them is they don't focus on memorization, as people think. They teach a lot less and they teach it in depth. One of the things that we do in the US that's so crazy is we set out all the maths, say, in third grade. We look at fractions. We math say in third grade we look at fractions we teach it in

third grade and then we teach it all again in fourth grade and all again in fifth grade and sixth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade so there's this mass of content that's taught every year nobody gets the depth they need on anything in China in Japan they teach fractions once and they teach it in a lot of depth so students really understand it and their textbooks are this thin because they don't teach much each year but they go into depth and they're very conceptual so um people think that those countries drill kids the drilling and memorization that's so harmful is done more in the u.s than anywhere else well let me ask a question and this is this is a this is done more in the U.S. than anywhere else?

Well, let me ask a question. And this is a broader question. And you probably deal with this too. And I don't mean it to be argumentative because it's really something I'm grappling with. We would think, well, the internet would make things easier because now everybody has the facts at their disposal. But I'm noticing that with the internet, you can look something up and you just don't know what's true and what's not true. So I looked up, how do they teach math in India? Right. And so I'm reading just from this P I N O Y B I X.org. I have no idea if it's reliable, not reliable. It's the first wire Indians good at math and they describe it.

Kids learn multiplication from early childhood. Every evening you recite multiplication tables this practice makes kids good at mental math later on somewhere it talks about all the homework they have as they grow older they start learning so this this contradicts what you're saying and i'm not i'm not like i don't know like so how do we don't have a lot of knowledge about how they teach maths in india i'm talking about japan and China and the highest achieving countries in the world, more on the eastern side of the globe. I'd love to learn more about what they do in China,

but I would be very sceptical of articles like that. There is so much misinformation out there. The people who are campaigning to have math stay as memorization and reciting times tables are very active, very powerful and pushing their agenda the whole time. So, you know, so the numbers on those visas, just for the for the listeners, according again, according to Google, India had 276 000 h1b visas in 2017 mainland china had 34 000 already like uh you know uh but i don't know my math eight times eight or nine times nine times between eight and nine times less um then canada is down to three thousand only ten percent of that so it's's, and then the Philippines is 3000. I don't even know where Japan comes in.

So we're really talking about India here. When we talk about your first paragraph. Who takes those visas and comes here. There's a lot of factors underlying that, not just who's good at math, such as connections and how people know about jobs and bringing in people. So, I mean, it's complicated. I think the big message that I'm trying to send with that is we're not drawing from people in California very much. And it's hard to do that when only a third of kids in California are proficient in maths.

That's what we're trying to uh change right so and i want you so maybe you should tell us how you how you think children should be learning math and let me just only to say that the reason i started here is because my thinking was that if we're comparing it to all these people who are taking i don't want to say taking the job, but we're coming here and whatever the phrase, you know, I'm not I just I'm not trying to sound like, you know, anti-immigrant or something. But that the first question would be, well, maybe we should do what they're doing. But you're suggesting, I think, not doing what they're doing, but an alternate way to get the same results. So what's that? We can certainly learn from these other countries that are doing well. And PISA, an international group that looks at assessment across lots of countries every few years,

highlights those countries that are doing really well. They also analyze what are they doing differently and um you'll see that one of the things that the u.s stands out for the most tracking in the world we decide and put kids into low-level pathways that other countries just don't do what does that mean tell people what is like you probably talk about this stuff so much you think everybody knows what you're referring to but i don't think yeah well so here's a really big problem. This will get to the tracking question. A big national survey was just done that found something like 85% of parents and teachers believe that you're good at math or you're not.

I think Dan was saying something similar. There's a math brain and you have it or you don't. That has been absolutely disproven. And yet i cling what we know for sure is that every time anyone learns something they're they're strengthening and developing pathways in the brain those are the pathways we want that lead to mathematical understanding certainly by the time you're an adult there may be a huge gap between people who've developed all those mathematical pathways and those who haven't mathematical understanding certainly by the time you're an adult there may be a huge gap between people who've developed all those mathematical pathways and those who haven't but you're not

born with them and every moment we're learning we're developing and strengthening those pathways so isaac newton had no natural talents they have really studied people like Newton and others, and they can point in every single case to these very rich environments that they grew up in. I'm not saying that all brains are the same. I'm not saying that everybody's born with exactly the same brain. Probably some people are born with advantages, but they are those advantages are eclipsed by all of the time that we have to develop brain pathways. And the reason I'm saying this is so people think you've got a maths brain and you're not or you haven't. So they start to look at kids in school and think they've got the maths brain. They haven't. We'll put them on different pathways. Those pathways cement what kids can do. So most districts in the US decide that they will put kids into different

pathways at the beginning middle school what they don't communicate to parents is if you're in the lower level pathway you are not getting to the highest level course in 12th grade and you're not going to get to lots of colleges so that's six years later and that's the sort of thing we're trying to change. That has resulted in huge racial inequities in this country. And it's really based on myths about what kids can do. So let me ask you a few questions about that. So, OK, I have I have four kids altogether. But let me just take my young son and young daughter. My observation of them was that they were drastically different in terms of their natural

ability to do math. I mean, I had to get my daughter a tutor and really work with her and things which seemed like you'd think, well, anybody would get that, you know, she was having trouble with it. Now she's doing way better now, but she's having a lot of trouble with it. As opposed to my son, who in the first grade, like once he knew that nine plus nine was 18, I would say, what's nine plus seven? He'd go, oh, it must be two less. And he would count, he'd go 17, 16. He immediately, without immediately whatever being taught could manipulate those kind of things it's hard for me to believe that that's not somehow the difference i would say to that i have had this exact conversation but i cannot tell you how many parents and it's always the son

gets it the daughter doesn't now do you think there are differences in what girls can do because there aren't yet those patterns play out over and over again i would also tell you that kids can get the idea they're not good at maths maybe a teacher said something to your daughter and they will go on a downhill pathway from that point their brains actually start functioning differently well i mean so it may be that your son is much quicker better but what has happened in all of the years leading up to those points i i would need to know that to really understand it well i mean obviously we're in the realm of things that are not proved. I can say my, the oldest one, the stepchild was,

was more like my daughter than, than my other son. I think, I mean, all right, this is, we're getting a little off topic here, but so with all my kids, the three of them, certain things like, let's take something very early, the ability to carry a tune. Very clear differences in, in their ability to carry a tune. Very clear differences in their ability to carry a tune at two years old. I'm a musician with similar exposure to music and all that stuff. And I just imagine that that's neurological. But I would take your point. I mean, I'm a novice, but I would say that let's just, you know, as they do in school,

sometimes take off the highest grade, take off the lowest grade. Let's just, you know, take off the top 15% and the bottom 15% and say, well, yeah, the top 15% are probably just brighter at math and the bottom 15% are really like dullards at math, whatever it is. But I think I agree with you that within that meaty part of the curve, we do see drastic, drastically different performances across populations that we could not possibly attribute to differences in their brains. And we want to know why is that right without, I don't think I would agree with you that it, that there's not a math brain, but I would also, but I would agree with you just my gut that what we see is usually not evidence of a math brain or lack of it it's

really something else going on so maybe let me ask you this do you think we have an english brain and a history brain and a pottery brain and everything else we learn yeah i do i won't i mean i don't know how fine gradations i think we have a memory brain and then we have a logic brain i think that so i mean our kids speak at drastically different times and those are set when we're born well i know that the um we had uh nancy siegel i think was the name from nyu who does minnesota identical twins separated birth studies and if you believe her science then i would have to say yes because the the correlations they show of identical twin separated birth are um almost identical and and they are they they all even more interesting than their correlation they are more correlated to their

birth parents who they've never met than they are to the people who adopted them or their oh yeah there's some genetics yes yeah play but let me tell you about somebody um his name is Nicholas he grew up in Australia and was told by the school when he was four and five that he was the worst child that had at the school severe special needs um couldn't read right couldn't communicate with other kids very well graduated in 2018 with a doctorate in applied mathematics from oxford university and um how is that happening yeah twin studies as you tell me i can show you people who've gone into the school system way behind other kids who are now leading their field well i mean i i don't i don't know um everything there's a certain amount of everything right so

so what you're saying now actually hits home because my father described to me who who turned out to be maybe a genius extremely bright he taught himself computer programming as an and was considered to be a brilliant programmer he's brilliant at everything he did but as a child um he thought he was stupid he never did well in school yeah his parents used to say what's going to become of him yeah many now people like that there could be various explanations one could be something in his experience which led to such a lack of self-esteem that it it it it it kept him down you know i can i mean i i've experienced in my own life where the stress of something just crowded out my ability to focus on it it could also be that it could also be that um

he developed at a different neurological pace because there there there is that you know not everybody like so let me offer you a different let me because there is that, you know, not everybody. Let me offer you a different hypothesis. So for instance, some kids are quite tall when they're young. And usually those tall kids do end up being taller as adults. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes, usually the short kids do end up being short as adults. Sometimes they turn out to be very tall.

So, you know, and you can take any one of those kids and say, well, how do you explain this? How do you explain that? So overall, I think these things do make sense. You are talking a lot about genetics. It seems like that's a big part of how you think about people and their development. But what I would say is my theory would be this. We have a school system that rewards kids who fit inside a very small box memorize well reproduce what teachers teachers give to them if you are a creative out of the

box thinker you will be made to feel quite probably that you're not very good at school we have top mathematicians la Lauren Schwartz won the Fields Medal, which is the highest honor you can win in mathematics, and wrote an autobiography about his life and how he felt stupid in school, because he was one of the slowest in his school, in his class. So that's one of these other myths that's very present in schools. You have to memorize well. You have to be speedy. None of these things actually make great thinkers. And unfortunately, a lot of our greatest thinkers are made to feel that they're not good enough in school. And so that could also be, you know, a big part of your grandfathers. My father. No, I agree with you and you know listen there are learning disabilities and learning disabilities can be very specific you know like i have little ones um

and they might they might they might be specific but carry a big punch and having you fall behind or whatever now in this world of neuroscience and neuroscientific evidence and and treatments i can tell you that even kids with specific learning disabilities brain areas that aren't developed 10 week interventions can have them performing at the same level as everybody else yeah because we can do this with brains we can change them we can rewire them so i i my take on the genetics thing is it doesn't really matter how much of its genetics what we know is if we give kids the right messages and the right teaching they will excel so i don't think i think that idea that kids are genetically somehow programmed has really been damaging because it's led to many people thinking i know this child won't do well it's that fixed thinking that's being what about difference i

agree with you by the way that that i'm sorry it's right after you go i i agree with you i struggle with it because one part of me feels like you should look at the truth straight in the teeth, even if it's difficult in certain ways. But on the other hand, you can end up passing over all these things that you're speaking about. And we do, and I've seen them in my- And adding racism to that. Well, let's get to racism after this. Go ahead, Dan, what do you want to say? Well, my question is, do you see a difference, and i think it's harder to quarrel with this in innate passion noam is passionate about guitar he started learning guitar he never stopped i started learning guitar in six months i'm like eh you know what i'd rather just listen to other people play guitar

so um what about mathematics some people just love genetic love it. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is, but can anybody love and be as passionate about music as these great musicians who practice 10 hours a day? And in mathematics, some kids I remember loved math. Some kids didn't love math. Can we make anybody love anything anything i think you can make anybody love maths because what we haven't really talked about but i'd love to get out there is we teach it in a terrible way we teach it in a way that will make kids not like it and it's not the fault of teachers you can look at the huge amount of content they're given and the really awful textbooks that they're given with these little uninspiring questions. We held a camp at Stanford a few years ago, and these have gone all over the country now,

where we taught kids for four weeks. We gave them all these mindset messages. There's no such thing as a math grade. You can do anything. It's not about speed. And we taught them with creative visual content. They were tested before and after that camp. They improved their achievement by the equivalent of 2.8 years. Standardized tests in four weeks. So we showed the kids a whole different way of approaching maths. Now people have taken that camp, that four week camp and taught it all across the country.

We've followed the kids. We've even followed them back into school afterwards. And the kids who attend that she wasn't on that pathway to be a Stanford undergrad until she came and saw a different way to approach learning. And I feel this is so important to do this in maths with kids because many kids really judge their whole like worth and intelligence by how well they do in maths. And if they're failing failing they really feel badly about themselves and it impacts them across all of school so um we're really passionate about getting this different approach out to maths you would probably love it it's creative it's visual

kids are looking at patterns and understanding concepts in those ways. And the other thing I should mention for you, Perrielle, especially probably, I have an online class. It's six 15-minute sessions. It's free. We've had about half a million people take it. That when kids take it, they go on to achieve more highly in school afterwards. We've studied it in randomized experiments. Again, gives kids this different approach to maths what do you think about this real quickly presh tall walker i believe his name

is he's like an online math guru and i've stumbled on his videos i don't know if you know anything about him but there's several his name is presh tall walker he's got these online math but there's a lot of these online math guys i don't know if you know any of them at all fresh talk but he he's uh you know he does these on youtube you can uh you know he discusses math problems a lot of its geometry not all but there's a lot of these videos there's a lot yeah but most of them teach maths in the same way we taught it at school maybe a bit better maybe a clearer presenter but there i i worked with neuroscientists at stanford as you probably gathered one of the things they've found is every time people work on a maths problem there's five different brain

pathways that light up two of them are visual so we want to be thinking visually about maths and when we have a multi-dimensional experience of maths when we're like creating things and drawing and making things and moving and writing with words not just with numbers when we're like creating things and drawing and making things and moving and writing with words not just with numbers when we're engaged in these different ways our brain starts connecting between these pathways and the highest achieving people in the world the trailblazers in the world are those with more connected pathways so we've done a great disservice in maths over the years by making it all about numbers first of all how old like are the youngest kids that you start this with like is it better to start much younger i would imagine so yeah i mean the youngest you can the youngest you can start

better we know that kids by the age of three have got a fixed or a growth mindset and have different beliefs about what they can do often from the way parents have praised them. So yeah, as soon as you can, my online class, I have kindergarten teachers use it, but they do it with the whole class together or parents take it with their kids together when they're younger. But as soon as you can giving kids these different messages is really important so i want to say something something you said i i i think i i really agree with you on on something which is that um something that's good yeah well but i mean i really like profoundly agree with you is is that uh a lack of interest in something can really uh

be be imagined as a lack of intelligence so like so for instance my wife has absolutely no interest in world affairs of politics like none whatsoever and she could come out with the like most ridiculous statements about like she just has no interest in it. Nevertheless, if we watch can't even begin to and it's it is no more challenging intellectually than following the events of the world it's just that she's interested and she's a freaking genius all of a sudden when she does that so i imagine it's true with math with a big hurdle it's just getting kids to not my father had a phobia of math for some reason and that led him to scary as hell that's the reason he would seize up and you could tell his bandwidth was being taken up by being scared rather

than figuring it out and i can tell you that when we fear maths which many many people do not just low achievers many people a fear center lights up in our brain. It's the same fear center that lights up when you see snakes and spiders. So this is real when kids are afraid of it. Now, we do a lot of things that make kids afraid of it. And such small things can put kids on a negative path. Unfortunately, I've had kids at Stanford who loved maths their whole lives, went into calculus as high school students. Their calculus teacher told them they weren't good enough. shouldn't be there and that's it yeah they're gone i think for me if i could speak for myself what scared me is that i was being graded and if i took a history test i read the question i either knew it or i didn't but math test i got this problem and i don't know if i can

solve it uh it's a problem let the problem. Let's keep it crazy. I failed this test. In later life, I started watching those videos that I mentioned to you and I don't love it but some of the geometry problems I thought were pretty cool and pretty interesting, like puzzles. I wasn't being great and I wasn't making time so all of a sudden

it wasn't quite so scary anymore. Good point, Dan. The way I talk about it is maths in our current school system is a performance subject. It's all about performing. It's all about getting the grade, doing well on the tests. Kids don't do maths because they love it. They do it because they think they're performing. And until we change it into a learning subject where kids enjoy it for learning, we're going to have problems. So that's

part of the problem. It's over-tested, it's over-graded. Look at those other countries we talked about at the beginning. They're not grading and testing kids in the way we are in the United States. How important is our grades just overall in education? Because, I mean, we do need to motivate. We can't just, you know, we have to give kids a carrot and a stick. We have to say, look, if you study, you're going to get a good grade. There has to be some reward. And also we have to have some way of evaluating them. But grading can be counterproductive in that it makes the whole thing more scary.

A grade is a summative measure. It's actually meant to be there to summarize your learning. So having a grade at the end of the year, fine. It's like your overall summary of how well you've done. In the US, we grade kids every day or every week or every piece of work they give in. So they're constantly in this fixed, this state of thinking they have to perform.

And technology has not been my friend. I have my daughters in high school. Well, one's in college now but that they can check their grade every minute of the day and it's changing constantly on this platform so they're living in this like I've got to perform that's what I'm here for none of this is good for learning kids only have to think they're getting a grade on something for their achievement to go down. So, you know, there's a lot to change in our system. It's why we're without kids. I just think I'm going to go out and play because we're not getting. So you get a grade at the end of the course, but we can give kids we can give kids feedback in a lot better way.

So the really great teachers out there are using what is known as a rubric. I don't know how well you know these, but it basically sets out, this is the maths we're learning. And I'm going to check off when you've got this concept. So kids have like a roadmap in front of them. This is what I'm supposed to be learning. Great for parents as well. And it tells them when they've achieved it. You don't have to turn that into a number or a letter for kids to be motivated by that it's much better information a grade really tells you nothing about what you need to improve on basically tells you how well you're doing compared to other kids in the class so we can give kids feedback we can boost their achievement we can keep them motivated without reducing it to these very crude measures yeah

well i mean i grew up i grew up in the New York City public schools and I was taught by the open corridor system. Are you familiar with that? And it was one of these various, you know, in my lifetime in New York, they just go from one new idea to another new idea to another new idea and nothing ever really changes in terms of the underlying performance of the school kids

but um in in that open corridor system we were given a lot of freedom this is like third fourth fifth and sixth grade and I basically we would get books and I taught myself math and I and I would you know and I I don't think I ever got graded and when I got to then I moved to Westchester which had a more traditional school I was way ahead of the the class there because because I kind of thrived in that particular and you were self-motivated yeah I absolutely was but other kids weren't that's the thing but I remember other kids they were done a disservice by this amount of freedom because they didn't have it in them anyway so this so you say you want to get rid of tracking now i i wouldn't say it that uh i we need to change the system

maybe there's some place where kids get you know go into different pathways but it's not what we're doing now there is like tricks close to me where they decide on the kids different pathways at the end of third grade and they don't change after that they go on these completely different routes i don't know anyone who can justify and tell me that we know what a kid can do at the end of third grade so yeah i mean okay i'll start where i would i agree with you i think that what goes on in new york where they're giving these tests to kindergarten kids or whatever it is and putting them on track of kindergarten that is absolutely almost inhumane that is just crazy even even if you're a troglodyte

like me who who puts a lot of faith in in genetics um it's not at all clear in it with that short a life it's terrible whether you could even have enough time to judge even those things. So that's crazy. So what you're deciding on is their home life. Yeah. Separating them on what they've done at home. It could be their home life.

But this is the other flip side. Do you want to eliminate gifted programs? Yes. Okay. That's where I think I would disagree with you. Why do you want to eliminate gifted programs? Yes. Okay. That's where I think I would disagree with you. Why do you want to eliminate gifted programs? You should look, and I'd recommend this to anyone watching this, at a video on our website called Rethinking Giftedness,

where you'll hear from a lot of Stanford students who've been told they were gifted. And what they'll share with you is that the ways it held them up, how they stopped asking questions when they slipped up on something they thought they weren't gifted anymore. And they went into a downhill spiral. It's a very fixed message. I'm not against celebrating high achievement. I'm not against giving kids who are high achieving very rich, complicated work. I am against saying some people have this thing inside them. That's different from other people. There's some cutoff that I can decide you have it and you don't, I don't believe in. I don't believe.

But Dan, let me, Dan, Dan, let me just follow. So, so I understand what you're saying. And I, and I think I agree with that, but here's the but here's my problem if you have a kid who a particular subject comes just very very easy to them whether it's math or music or sports

whatever it is it seems to me to be a big disservice to not allow him and others like him to move at their own pace why should i agree i agree so that's a gifted program message is let's have kids move at their own pace absolutely best thing we can do for kids that is very different to a district saying you kids are going to work at this slow pace and you are not yes we have we are at this point in

learning and technology that we can totally offer to kids a program where they work at their own pace and kids can who you know who love it and are studying a lot can go way ahead and that's absolutely fine right ahead no one would just say that's just another word for gifted because if you have have a teacher teaching all the kids that are way ahead and another teacher teaching all the kids that are not way ahead, you're basically calling it a gifted program by another name. Or high achieving, which is a totally different message because anybody can be high achieving. The whole idea of giftedness is that only some kids have it. And let's look at the racial representation in gifted programs.

Oh, let's get to race now. But just to say that in my school experience, it wasn't called gifted. It was called honors math. I don't know, like- Right, that's still going on, yeah. I mean, it's just a word, but whatever it is, kids are pretty smart.

Whatever word you call it. At least honors math is something you can work towards your whole school life it's not you're not told in kindergarten that you can get to honest maths in high school there's also like the implication is is if you're not gifted then i mean that's has like an inherently negative yeah absolutely i'll buy that it is a loaded word in the film we have on our website it starts off with stanford students talking about being given that message and then you hear from fourth graders who've been given the opposite message and the words of those fourth graders their horror i put the link in the chat their horror that

some kids are told they are gifted and others are not i mean it's just you have to hear it from the words of you have to hear from the mouths of fourth graders it's what about the the like the irony of the fact that these kids who are lamenting being called gifted are at stanford right but there's a lot of kids who are at Stanford. I teach them. I teach undergrads at Stanford. They come in with completely fixed mindsets. They've been told they're smart their whole lives, which gives kids a fixed mindset. They get to Stanford. They take their first math class, for example, and they really struggle. Some of them get C's or whatever grades and they fall apart because they've been told that they were special.

And here they are failing. So have they lost it? Where did it go? So they weren't just they weren't just they weren't just told they were special. They got SAT scores, right? That that. Well, as they talk about in this film, they were pulled out of their classes when they were five years of age and given really great teaching. When I've had international visitors come and work with us in the US, they have been open mouthed that the policy is to find out who's high achieving when they're five or six, pull them out and give them more, more money, more resources, better teaching. They don't believe it. They're honestly just stunned by that. I don't recall that from my, that it was quite that. We did take this test

called the Iowa test as young people, but we still kind of were all in one class with everybody else yeah it's varied across the country some some places do it a lot and others not so much but also you and noam were in school like a hundred years ago well but noam that is true it was quite some time ago i mean you aren't that far but you aren't that far behind as i I might say. That's true. Although I also really, what really resonates with me, what you're saying, Joe, is that I think that we are wired to excel in the things that we're told we're good at, right? Especially from a young age. I've been told, I mean, I don't even know if explicitly but like don't don't let her do math like even now don't worry about math just just don't let her do that and that really resonated with me I think on like a very deep level that like right I'm mad at math I don't

know maybe I'm not mad maybe I'm not not bad at math let me tell you now you're not bad at math even that obnoxious expression on his face she can't do simple arithmetic of course she's bad at math maybe she could be good maybe she could change but she's bad at math but okay I'm not going to comment on whatever she needs to learn. And I can tell you that when mothers tell their daughters, I was bad at math in school, their daughter's achievement goes down. That's how strong and impactful those messages are. You don't even have to say it to a kid about them.

You can just imply it and their achievement goes down. Can I go back to a point I made about a half hour ago about passion we gotta get to race we gotta get to race go ahead but i i you know i i hate to think of a world where everybody is kind of can be molded i'd like to think there's there's people that are there's diversity not in the racial sense but in in in the sense that some people will love math and some people will love music and some people love it will always be the case but we don't have to decide that for kids we should be letting them decide that because when we do decide it for your kids we get a very inequitable uh set of practices and who's going forward in maths it's horrible look at who is in those stem jobs it's it's awful to

look at the statistics there's hardly any women there's hardly any people of color it's stacked against people east indian uh derivation if i indians are people of color no yeah it's particular racial groups are very lowly represented if you're black if you're like latinx those are the kids who are not going forward my wife is uh latina and she doesn't like the phrase latinx yeah i don't know people people are very solicitous of not wanting to use phrases that other groups don't like unless it's latinx in which case the white world has decided we're going to call you latinx we don't care what i've heard there's mixed feelings on it um okay so let's talk so without without even um setting it up why don't you tell us whatever it is that you feel is most important for us to know

about how race is implicated in all these things that you are concerned with? Well, I can tell you that a while ago in the Bay Area, they were noticing that a lot of kids were proficient in algebra and then being put back into algebra in high school. So they were on a lower pathway. And when they looked at that algebra in high school so they were on a lower pathway and when they looked at that data they found that they were overwhelmingly latino latina you say what you want i don't want to get you in trouble go ahead and what was happening was teachers administrators were deciding oh these these kids are maybe passing algebra but they're not ready in some other way so there's a lot and they ended up on these low-level pathways

so whether people are aware of it or not there is racial racist thinking going on in the decisions that are made about kids and in fact lawyers got onto that and because of the civil rights movements they were able to say look whether you are aware of it or not you're sorting by race and that's illegal so you need to stop that or we're going to come in and sue you and the districts had to change their practices really fast but I mean what it shows is if you believe kids are fixed and you're going to sort them into these different ways people unfortunately have these racist views about what a good student looks like also gendered we also don't see women going forward in high numbers

well let me tell you where I agree with you, a little bit of my experience on this. I agree with you. You may not agree with me, but I feel like I'm agreeing with you that the performance of children in grammar school is the most important issue we face as a country vis-a-vis race in the following sense if you look at the huge disparities in reading and math and stuff like testing of kids black versus asian let's say black versus white in the sixth grade um you would not expect to see anything other than the huge disparities we're seeing at these high level jobs as adults as a matter of fact you would not expect to see anything other than the huge disparities we're seeing at these high level jobs as adults. As a matter of fact, you would need a, like a huge explanation to explain why, well,

there was a, there was a 30 point difference in the sixth grade and, and they were totally equal in the, so, and I feel like if we could, if we could equalize them in the sixth grade, yeah. Maybe everything else would probably take care of itself to a large extent. So I think this is urgent. So I had a child, my stepson, who was having, I hope he doesn't mind me talking about it. I don't think he minds. He was having trouble in school, a lot of behavior problems too. And he had ADD, ADHD, whatever.

And in New York city public schools, and they recommended that he go to this school called the Lowell School. And you should look at it. And this Lowell School is a private school that's supposed to be expert at teaching kids like him. And he was there for a few years. And I felt he was learning nothing, just nothing. And they kept saying he was going to take the New York State Regents. And he just wasn't moving forward. And I had a meeting with the principal there and I felt I was hearing double talk. And I even got a little testy. And I said to my wife, that's it. I said, I'm going to move. I want to move back to our, where we used to live, where I grew up in Ardsley. And let's just send them to that old-fashioned school in Westchester. And it was a ballsy thing to do do you know that they turn just with old-fashioned traditional

methods that you would probably think should be tweaked a great deal this kid got above a 90 in the geometry regions this kid started to get good scores they were so programmed in that other school to expect these kids not to do anything it was clear they weren't even trying and but they were holding themselves out to be the people the good people who were going to help these kids the whole the whole raison raison d'etre of this school was to focus on these kids who need extra help but in reality kind of just went there to to to to i don't know to die like know, to just deteriorate. Yeah. And I was really, really, now, I didn't see any of this as racist in the sense that

you could put sodium pentothal to these teachers, and you would not, I think, find racist views that they were harboring. But maybe call it systemic racism, call it whatever you want. But this is the path that a lot of children of color find themselves on. And I, well, I may not agree with the specifics on you. It's a real problem. And I totally agree with you.

And this goes back to what I said in the beginning, that even if you want to disagree at the tails of the curve about what's just, you know, better brain power, these kids that we're talking about of color are indistinguishable from the non-kids of color who are doing very well indistinguishable by any measure any any you could you could not distinguish their brains and you never will because they're the same they're the same natural ability and yet

somehow we're failing them so i i mean it's not too surprising in a country and system that has so much systemic racism. And a lot of that has been identified as coming through tracking decisions. There was a really important study done across the district of New York a few years ago. They used to put kids into different maths tracks in eighth grade and give higher level maths to some of them and kids were followed over three years all the way to the end of high school and then the next three years they gave all the kids the higher level math and what happened was they they were a year ahead on passing the regents exam kids did better at the highest levels and the lowest levels.

So, you know, we there's so much evidence of this. It's sometimes, you know, it's frustrating to see how little progress we've made when we have so much data on what works. But is it is it is it is it also possible that so, for instance, charter schools, there's some charter schools in there. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think you come from a wing that probably is not keen on charter schools in some way. But they, and that may be unfair, but some of these charter schools have remarkable results. And they probably teach things in a different way. So it is also just part of it, this method that method but sometimes it's just the attention and of course well and the messages you give kids you believe in kids you give them

opportunities you keep making sure they are achieving at the highest levels and they will achieve at the highest levels yeah and and and the the and some schools do a great job of that and we probably have to wrap it up but the the thing that um progressives don't talk about enough in my opinion is how um deficiencies or if man's a too harsh a word but how the how the way the type of the atmosphere in the home yeah which the government really has never shown itself to be able to um really make a dent in i believe in certain in many instances this is an insurmountable disadvantage that some of these kids have and we blame the schools but it's really not about the schools and i just so when i went to new york public schools, I went to PS 75 and which was a kind of unique public school because a very, very mixed

neighborhood in the Upper West side of Manhattan, 96th street. And it was, and I, and this is in the late sixties and early seventies, but we had a lot of black kids, Spanish kids, white kids, Jewish kids. And there were, and the differences in the way these kids were doing in school was evident and obvious even then even to me as a third grader and yet we all had the same teachers the same books the same schools so i can remember being very young and and even thinking like well that you know what's going on here like like like there's something going on it wasn't it wasn't the school system at all it was the home what we have and what's so great is specific brain evidence of ways to get kids caught up there's an area of the brain that's so important

just around visualizing that actually impacts kids maths achievement hugely and when researchers have done 10 sessions 10 friday afternoons with kids they've completely equalized it they've taken away even though kids were five years behind in that ability they make they take that away and I can't remember how many sessions five ten sessions right but you have all the time now but there's no control to build those brains but there's no control at least you're not you're not telling me the control. Like I would five, 10 sessions of almost any approach. It's like, you know, therapy.

If you'll say, well, psychoanalysis work. Well, actually, if you send somebody this kind of therapy, that guy, they all. There are good things you can do in 10 sessions, but the remarkable increase in maths achievement when researchers know which part of the brain is underperforming and targeted with actual activities that are made for that is a lot higher than other great things like a therapy session exit question uh my question you guys Is the math SAT unfair, culturally biased? Yes. In what way? In the way that it's all based on finances.

So if you can pay for SAT prep, SAT tutors, you'll do better. It's a test of finances. And of course, that intersects with other things yeah that's that's fair enough i meant the actual questions themselves because there was a time when the wording of questions was i mean there can be cultural bias you can see that in questions that ask about you know dividing a quiche uh fairly or you know you can see that inside the questions but the bigger problem with the sat is the links with who has money are they still doing on the sat where they have one uh as perry i pointed out i come from a

long time ago but i remember that it was one section of the test where it was uh not it didn't count but they were just using it as a um to test new questions and just you know what i mean like they would like to you take two math tests and one of them you know they were using it just to um to see if you know they've been taken out as far as i'm concerned there are no sats uh being used anymore in any of the university of california or the california state universities they're. And they're not bringing them back. My point was, remember that, Noam?

It was like one of them was just, it didn't count. It was just for their own research. Quite possibly. But I remember that being a total mindfuck because you're taking, you don't know if it's like, does this count or not? I thought it was a complete mindfuck. I think it's a terrible idea to get rid of the SATs, but that's a whole nother matter.

I think this is- What are they measuring? Are they really measuring 21st century knowledge that kids need? No, they're measuring how, if you can afford an SAT tutor who can teach you to memorize the questions on the SAT. No, no, no, they're not.

Okay, let me say, yes. Well, it's not that simple. They are, there's no question that people who can afford an SAT tutor or people who don't have access to an SAT tutor, because many school systems, New York City, I think offers SAT tutoring to people who want to take it for free or for very little money. But that will definitely impact the results.

That's not to say that you could take someone who was averaging a 400. I mean, these courses average, advertise, they can raise your points by 80 points, a hundred points. It's a speed test of memorized facts. That's one of my biggest issues with it. It is not what people need to do well in the world.

It has zero predictability of how well kids do in college or in the workplace. Well, no, it does correlate. I've ditched it. I believe it does correlate to how well kids do in college. Hold on. I believe any test, any test would correlate to how kids do in college because these things just correlate. But let me just make my point. I think that's think very poor correlation i i

think that to the extent that they get rid of testing i don't know like you know i don't know where this stops at some point they are sweeping under the rug the knowledge that we need in order to know that we have a problem like We need tests that measure something important. Well, yeah, then the SAT should be revised to be a smarter test. But the idea of no longer... But I think places are looking at other tests. I think the ACT, I don't know if that's any... I'm not married to the SAT.

I'm married to the idea of you can't know if that's any, you know. I'm not married to the SAT. I'm married to the idea of you can't just compare an A or a B plus at every school district in the country. So in England. And you can't take an essay because you're worried about an SAT course. Parents will write these essays for these kids. Oh, absolutely. In England, there's no SATs. You take an exam at the end of your courses and that tells you how well kids are doing in that subject and that's used for university admissions it's a standard standardized exam yeah it's a national exam but it's on the content you've learned in the course

it's not some test that really is measuring something you've been you've memorized in a SAT workshop it's then we then we do agree mean, in California, they haven't replaced it with any other. They're just going to fly by. They're working on that, though. They're working on finding what will replace it. I'd be comfortable with any test or the SAT. And I will go on a limb and tell you that I predict that when they do finally come up with that test as as you're as you are contemplating it will correlate very well to the scores that these kids would have gotten on their

sats that's what i think well i don't agree with that that's what we're calling sat using a test of memorized knowledge yeah pushing ahead some kids so i don't think they'll correlate well if they come up with a good assessment. Oh, my God. Can you see this? This is my wife. She just she just texted me. She finished her LASIK surgery. She's that's got tape on her in the glass or whatever. I have to go pick her up. I'm going to finish early. Oh, my God. Poor thing. All right. I'm'm gonna go listen we'll all go then because uh to go i think we've discussed what we need to discuss i just want to tell joe that it was really a pleasure to meet you i think it was such a good conversation yeah maybe come on again when

you write another column or something like that um and like I said, having all these kids that I do, it's... Yeah. Check out YouCubed. There's a lot of resources on there. I'm going to keep that for my son. Great. Maybe you should take it

for your own math skills. Your son is pretty good. Yeah, lots of adults take it too, actually. That's what I just said. I mean, see that snarky comment is lowering my self-esteem. You stick out for yourself very well bye everybody bye thank you joe yeah take care dan where can everybody reach us well you first

of all youcubed.org for joe's uh online uh student course and lots more and lots more podcast at comedySeller.com for questions, comments, and suggestions about what you enjoy, what you don't enjoy, what you want to see more of on the podcast. And at Dan Natterman.com for all of my social media.

And Periel, if you want to add something. Periel Ashenbrand on Instagram. Okay, we'll see you next time. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Bye.