Craig Hane, also known as Dr. Del, passionately advocates for a revolutionary approach to mathematics education, emphasizing the necessity of practical application over traditional teaching methods.

His initiative, Triad Math, seeks to transform the outdated paradigms of math education in the United States by integrating contemporary tools and techniques that align with the demands of the 21st century.

His mission is to empower students with the tools necessary to navigate modern challenges, thereby addressing the pervasive inadequacies within the current educational framework. Our conversation not only sheds light on the failings of existing systems but also presents a compelling vision for a more effective and engaging mathematical education.

Takeaways:

• Craig Hane, also known as Dr. Del, emphasizes the need for a practical approach to mathematics education that transcends outdated traditional methods and focuses on real-world applications.
• The Triad Math program aims to revolutionize math education by integrating modern tools and pedagogical strategies that cater to individual learning paces and preferences.
• A significant portion of students in the United States are failing to grasp essential mathematical concepts due to ineffective teaching methods prevalent in the current educational system.
• Dr. Del's mission is to empower one million individuals through practical math education, thereby enhancing their prospects in technical fields and addressing the skills gap in the workforce.

Website

https://craighane.com/

https://triadmathinc.com/

https://www.wolframalpha.com/tour

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Hello, my name is Mark Taylor and welcome to the Education on Far podcast.

The place for creative and inspiring learning from around the world.

Listen to teachers, parents and mentors share how they are supporting children to live their best, authentic life and are proving to be a guiding light to us all.

Hello, welcome back to the Education on Far podcast.

Great to be back with you as always.

And I'm going to be chatting to Craig Haine today, also known as Dr.

Dell.

Now, his life's mission is to show you how to give your child an optimal 21st century maths education.

He has a program and a course called Triad Math and he starts to explain the difference between maybe the maths that you get taught in school compared to practical maths and how it can be applied in the world at large for a greater good.

It's a fascinating conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My conversation with Craig Hayne, also known as Dr.

Dell.

Hi, Craig, thank you so much for joining us here on the Education on Far podcast.

Great to talk about maths.

Great to talk to someone who is doing this in America, not just here in the uk.

It's nice to share all of these things from around the world.

And also someone who's got that kind of idea of education doesn't have to be just what the school system says.

It's about practical awareness and practical use and how that's going to support people going forward in their lives.

Certainly is this century developed.

So thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

I guess we should probably start with the fact that where did the Dr.

Dell come from?

And we'll go from there.

My father's first name was Delbert.

My first name is Delt, my son's first name, they call my dad Dell.

And so I do that as an honor to my father.

But also Dell is a symbol in mathematics that has a meaning in math.

So it's a double entendre.

Just so Dr.

Dale.

I don't like to be called Dr.

Hayne, which is when I was a professor.

That's all I got called for many years with Dr.

Hayne, Dr.

Hayne.

And I, I prefer, you can call me Craig, my friends call me Craig and then my students can call me Dr.

Dell.

Makes perfect sense.

And so take me into Triad Math first in terms of where you are now, how you're helping and supporting people, and then we'll sort of, we'll work back into like say that sort of educational career and everything which has got you to here.

Well, where we are today, Brian, Math is, I started it over a decade ago.

The most recent thing is called the Triad Math army.

And you go there and if you spend a couple hours, you learn all about it.

I have a math education program starting post elementary, say seventh or eighth grade in the United States, all the way through high school.

And thanks to the English people, I can now teach all the way through calculus and differential equations in ways that are never done today in high school, thanks to the English, you had two, you have two great mathematicians from England that had had a profound impact on the world we live in today.

Isaac Newton, he was the founder of modern science, right?

Newton's Principia.

Now unfortunately, the way he did calculus is not the way it went forward.

Godfrey Leibniz, who was a contemporary of Newton's, is the guy that really brought math forward and the Leibniz rule and all that and the way he did it.

But the most recent thing, in this 20th century, you had a great mathematician, more than a mathematician, named Stephen Wolfram.

And Wolfram has revolutionized how you teach modern math to, to scientists and engineers.

And I explain all that in the Triad Math army and how much of.

That is related to what people learn in school.

And, and how do you kind of sort of make sense of that sort of two things together?

Unfortunately, in the United States, I'm not, I'm only going to talk about math educated in the United States.

Almost zero math education in the United States is horrible.

It's outdated, it's ineffective.

Most of our students are failing.

Even the ones that are getting a good grade are not doing well.

And my mission in life for tried math is to revolutionize math education in the United States.

And I've explained all that in a book that I wrote recently called how and why Public School Math is destroying the USA.

And you can get a free copy of PDF copy of this on my website@craighane.com but you can buy it at Amazon for less than $5.

And this really explains what's wrong with math education and the solution to it, which we have with triad math.

Well, I think that's always the really interesting thing, isn't it?

Is the fact that so many people talk about the problems and how things are not working out and how it could be different.

It's another thing to complete that circle by giving the solution and explaining what those things are.

That's right.

So just take us into the beginning of that.

What, what is the problem with the, the system now?

Is it just purely that it's outdated?

Is it that we actually, we need to sort of make sure that it's fit for current purpose.

What are your thoughts on that?

Well, let me give you an example.

All right, I'll explain it very quickly.

Let's suppose that you are post elementary.

Let's say you're in the seventh or the eighth grade in the United States.

What you should first learn is what I call priority practical math.

Now the first thing is you're no longer going to do your arithmetic calculations manually.

That's old fashioned, it's obsolete.

No one will pay to do it.

Well, the first thing I do is I teach you how to use a scientific calculator, the TI30XA.

This is a very inexpensive calculator.

It's a great calculator though of all the ones out there and it's less than $20.

Okay.

Now most students, even the ones that are afraid of math and don't like math, learn to use this calculator in a couple of weeks.

Now there's only about less than 20 things on this calculator you need to learn.

There's a whole bunch of stuff you'll never use.

I don't teach that, teach what they're going to use.

Then.

What I do is I teach the students.

This is a beginners now.

Practical algebra and practical geometry and practical trigonometry.

All three subjects in about one semester, four months.

If you're doing that in England, then you're, you're doing what I'm doing.

If you're not, then you're like the United States now.

Why aren't they doing that in our schools?

In our schools, the math education has developed over the last century and they'll start out like with an Algebra 1 book.

My practical algebra is only 10 lessons in the Algebra 1 book.

They got a lot of manual techniques that are obsolete, difficult to learn, you'll never use them, and a lot of theory you'll never use that shouldn't be taught to the beginners.

What's important about math is the content, what you teach them and the pedagogy the way you teach them.

And then what I do for pedagogy, and I can only been able to do this now in recent years is I use tutorial videos.

So I'm the teacher with a tutorial video and that's far better.

You can't do it in a classroom.

I explain in my book why you cannot teach math to a group of students in a classroom.

Some are slow, some are fast, some have different backgrounds.

And every student has to learn at their own pace, and they have to learn the proper content and the proper order that they need.

And I can do that with the technology that I use.

You can't do it in a classroom.

And that's just the beginning of it.

In fact, in this book, in part four, I explain what is wrong with high school math education in four chapters.

And you read that and take you about an hour, maybe less than that, 30 minutes, you'll know.

Then in part five, I explain what can be done today, what we're doing.

And I thought by now some other schools would be doing it, but no one's doing it yet.

Then after the practical algebra, after the practical math students want to go on, then we go deeper into it.

And when we get into science and engineering, we now use a new, modern tool.

Maybe you've heard of it.

Thanks to England.

The tool is called Wolfram Alpha.

Steve Wolfram was an English young man, and he used a system from MIT called Maxima back in the 60s as a teenager and was able to use that tool to do physics problems.

And he got so good at it, he published them, that they took him to Caltech, which was the number one physics school in the world.

And he got a PhD in theoretical physics when he was 21 years old.

Wow.

Then he got a MacArthur genius award.

Over the next 10 years, he developed a programming language called Mathematica, which is a phenomenal programming language.

There's nothing like it out there.

And Steve Jobs.

You've heard of Steve Jobs with Apple Computer, of course.

Well, he and Steve Wolfram knew each other.

They really helped each other.

They bundled it on the Next Computer, and that became then the most powerful computer for scientists and engineers to use.

And it was expensive, but they all bought them.

Churn had 12 of them.

And a guy named Tim Berners Lee used Mathematica and the Next Computer to develop something that everybody's heard of called the World Wide Web.

Now, I was living through all that.

I knew all that.

And then Mathematica got more powerful.

And Steve Wolfram, 30 years later, decided that he could actually create a mathematical program that was so powerful that you could ask it a question in math and it will solve it for you and tell you how it did it, if it was possible to do it manually.

And that was called War from Alpha.

And when that came out, that's when I was starting trying math.

And I go, my God, this just changes everything.

This transforms the way you learn math and the way you do math.

And that's what I teach in my program.

And it's not in any math textbooks.

All high school math textbooks are obsolete in the United States.

And I guess while the system is still such in, the exams you have to take are still the same thing.

And it's all embedded, like say in all that historical setup that the system has.

That's right.

It's horrible.

The SAT and the ACT are horrible exams.

I explain it in my book.

They're terrible exams.

And what they do is.

And what the math educators have done is they grade on a curve called the Gaussian distribution.

And that's how they do grading.

I call it the horrible curve.

And I explain why it's horrible.

And in the United States, all of our students are suffering.

80% of them don't learn any math at all.

They may pass math, but they don't learn anything.

The few that do learn something don't learn the right math.

If a student has gone through my program and they go to a good school like MIT or Caltech or wherever, they're so far ahead of a regular high school graduate that it's just unbelievable.

Not because they're smarter, they've just been trained better.

And so is what happens that those people that do enjoy maths through school and they do want to go on to MIT or somewhere like that, do they then just get retaught essentially when they sort of essentially hit the point where right now we need to tell you what's needed in order to take you into the next part of your life?

Sadly enough, as far as I know, even the good skills are still teaching the old fashioned way of doing it, as a matter of fact, integral calculus.

First you study functions, trig functions, polynomials and all that.

Then you have to learn how to analyze a function.

And to analyze a function, you have to use what's called differential calculus.

That's not terribly difficult to do manually.

Much easier with WolframAlpha, but you can do it manually.

Then you get into integral calculus.

Now in integral calculus, which is what Isaac Newton and Leibniz discovered, you have what is called the fundamental theorem of calculus.

But you know, okay, here's what the fundamental theorem of calculus is.

If you take a function and look at this graph, you Want to be able to calculate the area under the function.

Now, back in the old day, they didn't have computers and calculators and stuff.

Manually is just impossible.

So they found out that if you could find another function whose derivative was the given one, they call it the antiderivative.

Then all you had to do is evaluate it at two endpoints and you had the answer.

That's called the fundamental theorem of calculus.

Now it's easy to understand.

The problem is if I give you a function, finding the antiderivative is extremely difficult.

That flunks more students out of science and engineering than anything else.

Integral calculus, the fundamental theorem of calculus, that's the most important theorem in the history of mathematics.

That's the reason we have modern science and technology, the fundamental theorem.

Mathematicians struggle with science for centuries and couldn't solve that problem.

And Newton used it to create Newtonian physics.

He was able to take the law of gravity and say, if this law is true, I can use calculus to calculate the orbits of the planets, which Kepler had already verified.

And he was able to derive Kepler's laws because of the fundamental theorem of calculus.

So it seems to me that that's a very different way into maths, isn't it?

Because for someone who's not a mathematician, as it were, you know, I did maths through school, like say, in that traditional way that you had to do it.

What it suddenly becomes is practical in as much as I can understand that concept.

I can understand what you're trying to explain.

I can understand why it's important, and I can understand why I would step into that world if it something I was interested in doing, as opposed to, like I say, in the abstract, which is so much what happens at school these days.

Understanding calculus conceptually is easy.

And on my website, craighane.com I have a whole bunch of videos on magic.

They're not training, they're just interesting videos on a lot of different things.

Three of them are the concepts of calculus, which I can.

You can learn that in an hour.

The concepts.

Now, how do you solve the problems?

Well, the old manual way I just explained to you is very difficult.

With the modern tool war from alpha, it's trivial.

So what's your kind of aim for people?

If, because we can't change the school system as it is, can people sort of get involved in.

In triad math and sort of succeed and understand and really get supported in that way, and that just then helps them do the School stuff because that's what you have do when you're in school or does it need separating out?

What's your experience with that?

Because I guess that makes a difference if you're going to be homeschooling or not and that kind of thing.

Well, good question.

My students, I've got a couple thousand of them, have all been homeschool students because the homeschoolers can do this.

And we have a thing called homeschooler today.

And you can go look at the website and if you're homeschooler, but any student could do it.

I've had students going to regular schools to study my program on their own.

And then it really helps them with their regular school.

They know more math than their teachers do.

Most high school math teachers are victims of this system too, by the way.

If a high school math teacher, they can take my program and then it'll help them.

Now it doesn't solve their problem if you're teaching in a regular school.

My goal is, by the way, my mission is to see high school math education totally revolutionized.

It's kind of like the analogy I use.

Do you remember the old landline phones?

Yeah, yeah.

Do you have a smartphone?

I do.

High school math is like landline phones.

Triad math is like a smartphone.

The other analogy, if you don't understand that, is you got two choices to go 500 miles, got a horse and buggy, or you got an automobile.

Which one are you going to choose?

I'd like to say that really sort of separates out the timeline, doesn't it?

Because of course, years ago, of course I would have the buggy because that's what I'm going to do, you know, now I can use whatever.

Exactly.

And the math we're still teaching.

Now why is that?

Why are they still doing it?

It's money, honey.

They got billions of dollars invested in their textbooks.

And I tell the story.

When I got my PhD in math in theoretical math, I was hired by a teacher's college in Indiana that trained high school math teachers to come and teach their math majors.

Theoretical math, topology, functional analysis, all the stuff you need for quantum theory.

Theoretical stuff, okay?

And I thought, well, it's a teacher's college, maybe I can help him improve teachers education.

So I started trying.

Now this is a long time ago, this was before we had the modern things, but I still was trying to show them things they could do to improve it.

And in particular the horrible curve needed to be gotten rid of.

And I try.

I explained that to them and do you know my reward from the math educators for trying to help them improve math education for high school math teachers?

Do you know my reward?

I tell it in the book.

They fired me.

I was a troublemaker.

So then I went and taught at an engineering school for four years, and then I started going into business.

And then I've done all sorts of businesses with math.

I was a professor of math for seven years after I got my PhD.

And the thing that I've never quite got my head around, and this comes up occasionally on the podcast, is the fact that businesses, the world as we know it from a, you know, a global business standpoint, needs people that are using these skills to support the businesses, to help growth, for new initiatives, to new understandings, new developments in the world, which the world is going to need moving forward.

So there's a whole part of the world crying out for people who are using maths in this way and thinking in this way.

And yet you would think that would benefit the country and it would benefit the education system to be able to support that.

But like you say, we're still sort of light years apart in kind of how that happens.

And I don't know why.

What isn't changing for the other.

I told you why already.

What did I say?

Money.

Money.

The Hewlett Packard 35 HP35.

In today's dollars, it was $2,500.

But we've had inflation, okay, yeah, yeah.

Some of the students where I was going to school had money.

They bought them.

None of the professors did because too much money for the professors.

I looked at one from one of the students and I saw, oh, my God, this revolutionized this.

So I told the math department, I said, what are you going to do now that the stuff you're teaching with slide rules and log tables and trig tables is obsolete?

What are you talking about, Hane?

What do you mean it's obsolete?

That's how we earn our living.

I said, well, forget it, baby.

This calculator is going to replace it.

Now, it took them 10 years before they dumped it, but they finally did, and the calculators took over.

And then, of course, Texas Systems came out with better calculators, cheaper, the prices came down in calculators and so on.

Today this calculator used to be $10.

It's about $16 now on Amazon TI30XA.

This would have been worth a million dollars during the Manhattan Project.

This calculator does all the arithmetic calculations that you can't even think of doing manually.

And the ones you could do manually, it does them immediately.

The fantastic calculator, it's less than $10.

You made a very good point.

Today in this country, in the United States, there are literally a million technical jobs going unfilled because they can't find people that can learn the technology.

To learn the technology, you need practical math.

And that's what I told you.

I could teach them about one lesson a year.

I had a company, after I got out of being a professor, I started a lot of different companies, but one was called Hane Training.

Our company trained thousands of technicians all around the United States.

Military, pulp and paper, steel, automotive and so on.

The key to teaching them any technology subject, hydraulics, pneumatics, electrical, whatever is practical math.

If they didn't know that, they couldn't learn it.

But once you taught them a little practical math, they could learn it.

And this made me millions and millions of dollars.

This made me financially independent.

I don't do this today because of money, by the way.

I'm not in this for money.

I don't need money.

I love helping people.

Now my mission is to, is to get a million people through practical math so they can go get technical jobs and that will improve the economy dramatically.

And I explain all that in this book.

Public school Mass destroy in the usa.

What should we do?

What can we do?

You would think now, because I take on board that, like you said, you know, the publishing side and the amount of money that's invested in that.

But you would think a government, and again this often goes down to the fact that you've got such quick turnover, like four years where you in the US and five years here, that they would realize the amount of growth or you would think the amount of growth, the amount of benefit that's going into the economy, into business, which could then be put back into education to make it modern and fit for this world, would outstrip maybe like you say, the restraints that are there for what the sort of systems that they're using.

But I guess that needs sort of long term vision.

It needs someone who's prepared to upset the apple cart enough to kind of go, this is actually what we need and why we're trying to do it and be able to bring everyone along with them.

That's right.

And again, it gets back to money if you, you know, if you're in the book publishing business, you donate to, you donate to senators and representatives in Congress and you control it.

We see this in the pharmaceutical industry, we see it in the food industry, as a matter of fact, in this country.

And I don't want to get into polit, but Donald Trump is the first president of my lifetime that's trying to upset the system.

Now, whether he'll succeed or not, who knows, but boy, is it being upset big time.

It's interesting, isn't it?

Because I think what you do notice from that, and like I said, we won't get into the political world, but the sense is when you hear something like that happen, you realize how often everyone's trying to keep a middle ground and trying to appease everybody without making any real difference.

Education in the United States historically has been very, very bad and uneven, but it depend on the teachers.

I was lucky.

And I tell the story in my book in the first three parts, I tell my story and I was very lucky.

When I was a young man, I had an uncle who was a barber and a builder and he taught me math, practical math at home before I went to public school.

And then when I went to public school, I knew more math than the teachers did.

So then I could teach my fellow students and the teachers.

And that happened all the way through until I was in the ninth grade.

Then I had a bad algebra teacher and I didn't do well in algebra in the ninth grade and was told that I was going to never go to college.

I tell the story.

And then in my sophomore year I had a great geometry teacher, just lucky, wonderful geometry teacher, missile hair, an Irish woman.

And I could do geometry.

And then I.

And then my junior year I had algebra again.

Didn't do well, didn't like it, but I, I grew up in a, in a town in Indiana called Greencastle, Indiana.

And there's a school there called DePaul University.

In my senior year, Ms.

O'Hare recommended I go to DePaul and take college algebra.

And I did.

And I had a great teacher called Dr.

Clint Gass.

And then I learned algebra and so went from being told I was never going to go to college, he got me into the best number one liberal arts college in the United States at that time, Oberlin College.

Then I taught high school for a year and then I came back and taught at DePaul.

So at age 22, I was teaching the most advanced theory at DePaul from a kid that had been told that he was never going to go to college.

So I was lucky.

I was just so fortunate to have those three good teachers.

If I hadn't had any one of those three teachers, you'd never heard of me.

And most kids weren't that lucky.

Yeah, and that's.

That's really sad, isn't it?

But I think so many people could identify with that, because if you get asked, you know, is there a teacher or an education thing that you know, there's usually one or two or three that across your entire sort of learning experience that.

That struck you, whether it was because they gave you the opportunity, they understood you, they.

They supported you in a way that you weren't getting any other ways.

And in some ways, it should be the other way around.

It should be.

Everything was fantastic.

There was one or two teachers, maybe not quite so good, but that would be the optimum if it was possible.

That's right.

In the United States.

That's right.

It is the opposite.

And my brother's an example.

He's five years younger than me.

He looks just like me.

Very smart kid.

I'm not a genius.

I'm just considering myself an average guy.

I'm not stupid, but I'm not, you know, I'm just, okay, I'm average.

He's average.

He didn't have the teachers I did.

He didn't even go to college.

He went to work immediately out of high school, which is what I'd been told I was going to do because he didn't have the teachers I had.

And he's just as smart as I am.

Now.

He's very good at other things, but he never learned math.

He never learned science.

He's very good at mechanical stuff.

Very bright guy.

In fact, he could do a lot of things I can't do.

So I was just fortunate.

Now, the point is, with technology today, we can give any student an optimal math education for that student.

And if you go to triadmatharmy triadmathinc.com tma triadmatharmyou'll learn how you can do it for your students and your family for $30 a month.

If you hired me as a private tutor, let's say you were a rich person and you want me to come in and tutor your child or your children, it would cause.

Assuming I would do it, which I wouldn't, but let's say I would, it would cost you thousands of dollars per month to get me as a tutor.

You can get me for $30 a month.

And it's better than me as a tutor because it's tutorial videos.

They control them, they can pass them up, back them up, come back, review, they're in control.

Everything has to be done with spike pedagogy, self pacing, proper content, interactivity, keeping score and empathy.

And I do all that.

And so today, a student today can get an optimal math education.

Now, some students only want to go through practical math and then go out and go into, not even go to college.

That's fine.

There's only a few students going to go into science, engineering.

Those can go into my more advanced tiers.

But try and math.

And by the way, in the triad math army you mentioned earlier when we were talking, I have what I call wisdom tools.

These are things that I learned from other people or on my own that helped me improve my life over the years.

And I've had a very wonderful life.

People that know me can't believe the life I've had.

And it's because of the wisdom tools that I had them.

And so now I'm sharing those in the triad math army.

So if you join the triad math army, not only get all the math training, you get access to all the wisdom tools that have helped me have a great life that can help you.

Well, it's been a fascinating story and conversation and great to be able to share what you're doing and for people to really hear the voice and the personality and the experience that you have behind child math.

Because I think that's the greatest thing about the podcast is to be able to sort of see behind the initial website and all of those things.

So I, um, we've got links to all these things.

I know you've mentioned it before.

In terms of how to do that.

We'll have those in the descriptions too.

But Craig, thank you so much.

I really do appreciate you sharing, sharing those stories and all that wisdom.

And let's hope we can, we can get to that million member Mark and make as much difference as we possibly can.

Well, you and your audience can help us do that.

So thanks a lot, Mark.

Thanks for listening to the Education on Far podcast.

For more information of each episode and to get in touch, go to educationonfire.com Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.