In volume 22, we engage with Karim Ani, the founder of Citizen Math, who shares profound insights into the realm of mathematics education and its implications for democratic discourse. Central to our conversation is Karim's candid reflection on his personal journey, culminating in his decision to retire from American education, a choice influenced by both creative fulfillment and the formidable inertia within the educational system. Throughout our dialogue, we explore the necessity of reforming math education to better connect with real-world issues, emphasizing the importance of utilizing mathematics as a lens through which students can engage with contemporary societal challenges. Karim's narrative is not merely an account of his professional transitions; it is a clarion call for reimagining educational practices to foster a more engaged and rational citizenry. Ultimately, this episode serves as both a farewell to Karim's contributions and an invitation to rethink the foundational principles that guide our approach to teaching mathematics in today's rapidly evolving landscape.

Takeaways:

• The podcast features a profound dialogue with Karim Ani, who shares his insights on the evolution of math education and its impact on society.
• Karim Ani reflects on his personal journey through math education and the importance of using mathematics to foster rational discourse in democratic contexts.
• Listeners are encouraged to ponder the disconnect between traditional math education and its real-world applications, emphasizing the need for a transformative approach.
• The discussion highlights the necessity of supporting teachers with effective resources, thus enhancing the learning experience for students in mathematics.
• Karim Ani advocates for a shift from abstract math problems to real-world scenarios that engage students in meaningful ways through mathematics.
• The podcast concludes with a vision for a collaborative classroom environment, where students work together on community-driven projects to apply their mathematical knowledge.

Mentions in this episode:

• Karim's book, "Dear Citizen Math"
• Citizen Math
• Wheat and Chessboard problem
• Karim on Instagram

Hi.

What you're going to listen to or watch here in a moment is a pretty unique wonky folk discussion with Karim Ani, who's the founder of Mathalicious, a company that became Citizen Math and has. Has been a leader in conversations around math and math education in the country.

It's sort of an exit interview and it points he gets very personal about his own experience and what he thinks about math education and it means for our democracy. It's a fantastic discussion. But Karim came to us from the Moroccan desert where he's spending some time on something of a trip, sabbatical.

He is somebody with a deep, adventurous spirit and he is out adventuring right now.

So there will be points where the audio cuts out and we come back or a couple of places where the edits won't be as smooth as what you're probably used to.

Just given the nature of the conversation, we ask that you bear with us and understand that we felt it was important to bring it to you as authentically as we could with a minimum editing. Hey, Jed.

Hey, Andy. How you doing?

I'm good, I'm good. We got a special guest today. Is anybody who's. Who's. I guess most people.

It's inexplicable given that at least you, Jed, you get better looking every day. But most people listen to this podcast instead of watching. But if you're watching, you can see we have a special guest. We have Karim Ani with us.

Yeah. Excited about this conversation. A great moment to check in with Karim, given his. His change in plans or what he's doing next in life.

So that, that'll be great to get to.

Yeah. And he's coming to us. It's going to be great. We got a fantastic remote. Remote interview.

Before we get to that, real quick, couple of housekeeping things. This is the Wonky Folk podcast with Jed Wallace and Andy Roham. And our next episode will be a live one. We're doing it in D.C.

will be putting out the words you can get on the list for that. It's going to be at a bar in downtown D.C.

there'll be food and drink and a live discussion of all things education and federal policy, particularly involving charter schools. We're going to talk about on that episode. We'll get into the Supreme Court case on religious charter schools out of Oklahoma. Yeah.

This will be the first true combination of beer drinking and wonky folk recording, so we'll see how it goes. But excited about that. It's a key moment to be in D.C. with all the changes happening right now.

And I think we're going to do it at a whiskey bar. We're finalizing that. So. Details, details.

Even worse.

It will be, it will be, it'll be great. We're looking forward to. We've done one other live one. It was, it was a lot of fun. So we're looking forward to this one. If you're in D.C.

again, that's going to be late in the afternoon on the 18th and we hope you, we hope you can join us.

So we got a three continent aspect to this recording today. We've got Graham in Africa, we're in North America, and our tech guy Daniel is in London. So we got Europe as well here.

But Daniel is constantly reminding me you don't remind your listeners to subscribe to the various channels, whether it's YouTube or Spotify or whatever it is. And these things actually do matter. So if listeners wouldn't mind liking and subscribing it actually would help us a great deal.

Yeah, so go ahead. I mean, we posted in various places. You can listen to it, but if you're getting it from Apple, Spotify, other place to get your podcasts and you.

And you sign up there, that is a big, that is a big help. As Jed said, someone who is not in Washington or on the continent is rather in North Africa. Is Karim. Karim, welcome.

Why don't you say just a little bit about where you are and how you got there and then we'll get more into who you are and what you've done in the sector.

So I am in, I'm in Morocco outside of Marrakesh.

I retired from American education from Citizen Math in August and then promptly got on the Queen Mary 2 and headed over to the UK and I was traveling around Europe for a bit, doing a road trip in a vehicle that I'd shipped over until I was hit by a bus in Scotland and the vehicle was destroyed. But I can.

That is not a metaphor. Like you were actually hit by a bus.

I was literally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I was the guy in the. You never know when you can get hit by a bus. I was like, actually September 29th. But I continued on and I am in Morocco.

And my motivation for being out of the country, out of the United States, I should say, is, you know, for 15 years, all I thought about was math education. All I thought about was citizen math. And having kind of finished what I felt like I had to contribute. I was ready for whatever the next chapter Was.

And I, I just, I needed to travel, kind of clear my head, get into the desert and just, you know, begin to learn to think about something else.

Well, you're in a beautiful spot and we appreciate you taking. Taking time to be here. Talk a little bit about your journey though, how you got to citizen math. I think I may be the one person I thought.

I loved the name Mathalicious. So this is Math Scrape. I like the old name. I think I first got to know you when you were at Curry. You were a bit of a maverick in grad school.

That, with Curry, is the ed school at uva. It's now called the School of Education Human Development at the University of Virginia. Talk about your path even from, like, where.

Where you grew up, your own educational background, and sort of how you got to math and ultimately to citizen math.

Yeah, so I grew up in. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. And then I, you know, child of a single mom, I went to boarding school in Massachusetts for high school.

I went to Groton, which may actually come up later, because I had an insight while I was at an alum a couple years ago that may play into our conversation about kind of education and how we teach and some of the trends that we're seeing in education now. But I went to Groton, and then after that I went out to California. I went to Stanford for undergrad and studied economics.

And I was interviewing like lots of Stanford econ grads. I was interviewing to become a management consultant, which is not my style. Like props to people who. That's their thing.

It was not my thing, but it was just kind of what one did. It was that or investment banking. And my mom observing this sort of staged a pre graduation intervention.

And she said for my graduation gift, she was going to give me $3,000 and I had to leave the country and I couldn't come back for a year. And any money on top of that that I needed, I was just gonna have to figure out.

And so, you know, that began sort of my penchant for global travel across China by train with a friend. Went into the Stans, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan. Lived on a deer farm. I was abroad for September 11 and then was down in Africa for a while.

Climbed Kilimanjaro with a buddy of mine, and like, we had the mountain to ourselves because nobody was traveling. Then came back to the States and taught for a little while, moved abroad again, moved to Syria, moved back, got back in education.

Long story short, basically traveled for a lot of my 20s and then was teaching kind of in, interspersed in between that. End of my twenties, I decided education was what I love and I went to Curry and then was a math teacher in Virginia.

And then New York City, came down to D.C. and became a math coach, a middle school math coach in Alexandria. And then that led into, you know, starting. Andy, good memory.

Starting what used to be called Mathalicious and then that became Citizen Math. But basically the, the insight that resulted in the creation of Mathalicious, I'll just, I'm going to call it Citizen Math from now on.

Is all that. All that money on and I just won't even use the right name. I'm sorry.

Yeah, well, actually, do you know why we were called Mathalicious?

Tell the story.

Okay, so the story was when I was a math coach, one of the.

I had this realization that if we want to help teachers teach math differently, the best, the most kind of efficacious way to do that is to provide them something better to teach. You know, when you look at textbooks, oftentimes people succeed as math teachers almost in spite of the thing that they're teaching. It's super dry.

It's really irrelevant. You know, it's the like centuries old a train is.

Trains aren't centuries old, but like A train is 100 miles from the station and it's traveling at X speed. How long will it take until it reaches the station? Right. And it's just problem like that after that, just so many of those.

And of course kids eyes glaze over and they ask the very natural and totally in my opinion, reasonable question of like, why are we learning this? And so as a math coach, I started to try to write lessons around like real issues and to provide those to teachers in the district.

And I needed a website, I needed a URL to share these. And I was, I was just really into Blackalicious, that hip hop duo. At the time Mathalicious was available.

And so thus was born what I would argue is the worst named math organization in the history of math organizations.

Right up there with wonky folk.

Well, the reason, the reason I say it's so badly named is because as we'll probably get to Citizen Math, the reason we changed the name Citizen Math is fundamentally about using mathematics as a lens for talking about real issues in the world.

And this was when I was a math coach, Congress debating the Affordable Care act and you may remember the, like the town hall meetings around the country and just how vitriolic and completely divorced from any kind of rational thinking, any kind of respectful argumentation. It was like CNN every night was. It was almost like in real time the destruction of rational discourse and with it, like the evaporation of democracy.

Thank God we're past that.

So, so I went to a town hall meeting in Reston. Reston, of course, is close to central, the CIA.

And I thought, you know, those bozos in Iowa or North Dakota or whatever, they may not be able to have a rational conversation, but we Virginians, like, we're going to have a great conversation about health insurance. And as soon, hand to God, like, as soon as the meeting started, it devolved into exactly the kind of chaos that I was seeing everywhere else.

In fact, I went back and watched when I was writing the book Dear Citizen Math, I went back and I found the transcript from C span and there was a rabbi who was giving an opening prayer. And literally the opening prayer was for just respect and a reasonable debate. And he couldn't even get through the prayer.

People were like shouting at each other, obama is Hitler and you hate the poor. And it was just.

And I'm sitting in the middle of this on a basketball court, having studied economics undergrad, and I was looking around and I was thinking, you know, health insurance is fundamentally about expected value, right? It's the likelihood of getting sick or getting injured and the cost to fix you.

And so the higher risk you are, if you have a heart condition, right, you have a higher probability, you value health insurance more. And if you are low risk, if you're 20, you value it less. And, and this discussion fund should, you know, individual mandate.

This discussion fundamentally comes down to percents, which sixth graders are learning.

And I thought I was in the middle of this thinking, you know, if we could just have this conversation about health insurance through the prism of what is effectively middle school math, this conversation would sound a lot different. Like we wouldn't necessarily agree, but at least our disagreements would be rooted in some kind of logical analysis, something rational.

And so then that is when I decided, like, I'm going to commit myself to this full time, really using mathematics as a lens for learning how to talk about issues in the country. Some of these are socially important issues, like using percents to look at, you know, the individual mandate.

Some are just thought provoking, like using quadratics, for instance, using a parabola to analyze which major League baseball stadium is the hardest to hit. Home runs out of WRIGLEY is the answer.

But the difference was really using mathematics as a lens for looking at the world and using math class as this forum for learning, relearning how to have a rational conversation with ourselves. And I say ourselves because, you know, this is, the idea here was like, we as a country, we as a national community need to get better at this.

And that, by the way, is what got us into many years later, renaming ourselves as citizen math.

This idea that mathematical thinking is central to, to being, I don't want to say a responsible citizen because there's a certain amount of judgment in there, but certainly like a constructive citizenry is one that I think can exist without mathematics and that kind of logical reasoning.

And we've got the book. We'll stick it in the show notes and encourage people to go ahead and check it out. It's a great, it's a fantastic book.

I will, I think something, I'll say a semi unique and a very unique thing about you. I think the semi unique is also, you're a fantastic letter writer.

You said you actually send long form letters that are fantastic and because you're, you're a good writer and they're, they're great to read and they're fun to get. And then I think the unique one, as far as I know, you're the only person in the education world to ever be in the Patagonia catalog. Is that correct?

That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, that was before they hired professional photographers.

Well, you're a very accomplished, you're being modest, you're very accomplished photographer. Your work on the Syrian refugee crisis was amazing and you're a very accomplished photographer as well.

It looks like just an entry point that seems so similar to things that I've come across and certainly thinking about things from a high tech, high perspective, which is, you know, before advocacy came along.

And just yours is a little bit more specific, which is definitely math, but I'm just thinking of conversation after conversation with Larry Rosenstock, just trying to situate learning within real world problems and trying to make permeable the wall between adolescence and adulthood. And it being primarily a question of pedagogy, our pedagogy is wrong and how do we get to something else? So, I mean, just talk further.

I mean, I got all sorts of leading questions I'm ready to jump to, but you know, you start developing these, you know, and we've reviewed these resources, you know, in preparation for this call. I'm impressed by a lot of them, but I've also Seen all sorts of impressive things that just don't get the adoption that we want.

Keep going with your story.

Yeah. So, you know, I agree with you that there is a disconnect between school and real life.

And I think that, I mean, certainly the disconnect that I've been focused on and my colleagues and I have been focused on for the past decade and a half is math education.

I think mathematics and math instruction is a pretty glaring example, I think, of the disconnect between learning something and using something, right? Our desire to teach and then a reason to want to learn it in the first place.

And, you know, I think all of us, certainly lots of us, any, anybody who's taught math has fielded the question, why am I learning this? When am I ever going to use this? And I think the reason for that is it. It's.

It's not that we teach math wrong, but I think the math education experience that we've prioritized for generations, and not just Americans, I think, excuse me, in other countries as well, is fundamentally incomplete. I mean, here's what I mean by that. Let me analogize mathematics to a telescope.

That's the analogy I used in the book, which is you can look at a telescope as this beautiful object, right? And it is like if you go to the Galileo Museum in Florence, for instance, like, the telescopes are stunning, they are works of art.

And so you can take a telescope and learn how to manipulate the dials, right? And in math, that would be kind of mathematical muscle memory, let's say you need to know your times tables, right?

You need to be able to do it quickly. And then there's kind of how light refracts through these lenses, right?

And so you can use the lenses to illustrate this concept of refraction and reflection, right? That in math class would be, you know, understanding the concept of multiplication or the concept of exponential growth, right?

And so in that sense, the telescope acts as something to look at. And that is where math class sort of leaves it, right? So all of the workbook problems do 1 through 47 odd, right?

Kind of to build that mathematical muscle memory. Like those are fundamentally adjusting the dials.

And then all of these word problems, you know, the train, how long will it take to reach the station? Or how many marbles are in a jar, right? Those are fundamentally about illustrating the underlying mathematics, right?

Like how long will it take for the train to reach the station? You don't walk out of that with a better understanding of trains.

It's that trains are being used to illustrate linear functions or A constant rate of change in this case. And so the telescope is being used as something to look at. And that's where math class leaves it. Right?

And so it makes sense then that students are like, but why, why do we care about learning the telescope in the first place? Right? And this.

So the, the math education, I, I think that the experience that so many of us have experienced ourselves and what I think largely defines kind of what it means to teach math, is almost.

It's akin to an astronomy class where kids walk into school and they say, the teacher's like, we're going to learn how to adjust the telescope, we're going to learn how lenses bend light, but we're never actually going to use the telescope to look at something real. And that would be. I think, I think we could all agree that that would be a fundamentally incomplete asymptotic to pointless astronomy class.

But that is math class. And so the difference then, and the work that we've been doing at Citizen Math is to essentially fill in that. That third missing piece, right?

By all means, like, learn how to manipulate the dials, by all means, understand how light reflect refracts, understand the concept of exponential growth or constant rate of change. But let's also use these mathematical concepts and skills to talk about real things in the world.

So again, like using quadratics to analyze baseball stadiums or using unit rates. This was the last one that I participated in writing before I left.

Using unit rates to see how quickly the TikTok algorithm essentially pegs your interests, right? So what is the ratio?

The more videos you watch, what is the ratio from become between, like, things you're not interested in and what you are interested in. And just as an aside, like when I was making that lesson, it's shocking how quickly it goes to almost 100%, right?

It's like within the first hundred posts it was, I think it was like 76%. And so now having used unit rates, you can have a conversation about, like, so what are the consequences of these personalization algorithms?

You know, what do these, what do these portend for a citizenry when it's not just dancing video, it's not just entertainment, but also, is the planet flat, right? Or do vi. Do vaccines work? And what are some of the consequences of that? And that conversation, of course, is.

Is empowered by using mathematics as a lens for looking at the world, right? So using the telescope for what it was designed for.

So you did that, you built this great company and you've decided to leave the sector. I mean, you're not just you're. You're out.

You're out of the country right now at the US but you've also just decided to leave the sector and move on to something else. Why? Because when you talk about this, you sound still very full of energy, passion, and conviction about it. So. So what's going on?

Yeah, I. I do, and I am, and I want to not be. Because, you know, there are two reasons why I left.

I mean, Andy, you have known me for a long part of that road, and I have griped to you any number of times about kind of the way that American education works and just how hard it is to make change in education. You know, for me, there. There are two reasons why ultimately I decided in August to. To leave math education. One, and I think the.

The most important one is I just. I felt like I was done creatively, and I mean that in the best possible way, right? I.

I was able to participate in the creation of what I had to offer, and my tank was empty. And I look back on that library of lessons and I'm really proud of it. I think some of the conversations in there are.

I mean, they're super interesting. And I think what we've offered to teachers and to students and to society at large is something I'm really proud of.

And so, you know, I could have continued, but my marginal contribution would have been diminishing, like by the day. And, you know, personally, I'm just. I'm ready to do something different, and I want to discover what that is.

And for me, the way to do that is to travel, kind of clear my head, and then, you know, hopefully discover whatever the next thing is for me professionally.

But then the second reason, and I imagine we'll probably want to talk a lot about this, is I just, at some point I was fatigued by what felt like a Sisyphusian endeavor. Educate American education, and maybe math education especially is so resistant to change. And I want to clarify what I mean by that.

In my experience, people in math education, teachers, principals, superintendents, curriculum coordinators of a district, governors, potentially parents, for sure, like anybody, pretty much everybody in math education will to some extent say, like, I wish this were better. I wish this felt better. I wish this were more real, right? And yet the.

The institution, right, like aggregation of centuries of teaching math in such a way has, has become almost this, like, inertial force that exists and continues independent of the people within it. And so the efforts to, you know, try to improve it, for me, they just, they became really taxing and it was.

I mean, there were days when I was just, like, becoming a person I didn't want to be. I was so angry and frustrated, and a lot of that is on me. But I also think it wasn't a totally irrational response to.

I think what is a thoroughly difficult is a nice way to put it, like, educational environment.

What makes math different than reading, though? We're seeing real progress on reading now. Big asterisks. The pendulum could swing back the other way.

But as of right now, like, one of the real bipartisan things in education is a focus on literacy and reading and using evidence and stuff that was really controversial 10, 15 years ago and is now being embedded in policy. So why is math like, what make. What makes math distinct? Because it does seem harder.

Well, I think the. I'm not. I'm certainly not a reading expert, but let me. Let me try to answer using writing instead.

And maybe, Andy, maybe this will answer your question or get to it. And it does kind of go back to the telescope analogy. You know, if you said, what does it mean to. To be a good reader slash writer, right?

To be a good ELA student, I imagine most people would say, like, you need to have. You need to know the mechanics of grammar, right? So you have to be able to distinguish between an adjective and an adverb.

You need to maybe be able to diagram sentences, but ultimately you're doing this because you need to be able to make a sentence. You need to be able to have a conversation that's cogent.

And I would imagine pretty much everybody would agree that all of those components are necessary, but that there isn't that consensus. I don't even think there's that really imagination around math education, right?

And so, you know, I think certainly as it relates to citizen math and using mathematics as a lens for looking at the world, that distinction between using the world to look at math word problems and using math to look at the world like real problems, that distinction is still pretty new, right?

And math education, I think a lot of teachers, textbook publishers, parents, all of us who studied math, like, we had that incomplete experience of mathematics. And so I think largely that is how we've defined its totality. And so I think where.

To answer your question, I think where mathematics is different or math instruction is different, is it to fix it, I would say, or to really expand the experience such that it felt deeply meaningful and I would argue is like, societally beneficial involves incorporating and conceptualizing a component that historically has. Has been not even deprioritized, but like We've been largely unaware of.

Now I think we feel the consequence of that because we do ask like, but why are we learning this? Like this just, this is so soul crushing. Like mathematics is dispiriting for a lot of people. A lot of teachers are leaving, A lot of kids hate it.

And so I think a lot of us, I mean I, I didn't know why I was learning when I was a student. I did really well in it, right?

But, but it wasn't until I was at Stanford study in economics that I fully, like, I actually understood why, like the practicality of math.

But even if we can't put our finger on what the underlying issue is, like what the missing piece is or that there even is a missing piece, I think a lot of people, like, we know something's off because we do continue to ask why are we learning this? I think it looks like my camera might have just frozen, but can you guys still hear me?

We can hear you. Yeah. Yeah. So keep going.

Andy, I'm glad to hear of your optimism regarding reading and separating something out that we think is working better than the rest. I remain the pessimist saying I don't see any of it evolving better. And Karim, just hear your story generally about math again.

I come back to High Tech High and when I was there, it's still this way to some degree now. But then we would have thousands, thousands of people coming to High Tech High through the school year, thousands there for the summer institute.

Generally the only people that came, everybody was impressed, everybody wanted to do this stuff.

And then the only people that would leave actually implementing it would be people from very high cost private schools and international schools and then basically all of the public schools in the United States. The comments would be, we can't do it. And then people were just like, it's so inspiring and so inspiring.

But I can't do it for this reason, for that reason, for that reason. So I'm just wondering, can you help us deconstruct what, what are the aspects of stasis here that are most, most limiting us? Is it culture?

Is it the regulation that our schools are in? Is it having misconceived of ways to compartmentalize learning? I don't know. What do you see as the elements of stasis here?

So it's interesting, the audio was cutting out a little bit, but I heard you were talking about high tech high.

And if I, if I heard you correctly, I think a point you made is that schools that are kind of affluent were able to take a lot of the PBL lessons from high tech high and implement them, but other places were not. Did I hear that correctly?

It was that the barriers and.

Yeah, what are, what, what are the barriers? Yeah.

Cultural, structural, philanthropic, economic. Like, take your pick. And since you're blurred out, you're kind of like one of those people on 60 Minutes years ago. You could be like, totally candid.

Yeah. You're like the math whistleblower.

God that put that on my tombstone. The, the, the, the. I would say, and this is. I don't mean to be too philosophical about it, I'll try to get into the weeds.

But I would say that the biggest obstacle to really improving math education is I don't think, I do not think that we as a math education community have a clear understanding of why we're doing this in the first place. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of people in math education who take offense to that, take offense at that.

But what I mean by it is it just seems like for decades we've been saying we need kids to know their times tables. We want them to understand the concept of, of mathematics.

And if somebody says, in fact, when students say why or but why are we learning those things? The answers that we as math educators. And I'm going to, I include myself in this. When I was a teacher, I said the same thing.

Consider the answers that we give. One answer is, you're going to need it next year. Right?

So what you learn in seventh grade, you're going to need an eighth grade grade that is literally true. Right. You learn ratios in, in sixth grade and then proportions in seventh grade and then linear functions in eighth grade.

And there are algebra one and then quadratics. Right. So it does build on itself. You're going to need this next year.

That's a, that's a literally true answer, but it's not a good answer because at some point students get to the end of the line, right? Let's say it's, let's say it's calculus or senior year of math. The 12th grade math teacher can't say that. So it's kind of an empty answer.

Another answer that we give is, you're going to need it one day. That's sometimes true, but there are plenty of math standards for which that is absolutely not true. Pythagorean theorem, Right. This is.

A lot of people in math education love the Pythagorean theorem. Eighth graders spend weeks learning this kind of interesting tidbit about right triangles.

I have put together Ikea furniture more times in my life than I have used the Pythagorean theorem. And I do math for a living. And so that answer, it's not an argument against teaching it, but the answer is not a good answer.

You're going to need this one day. Like, I. Pardon. I don't know if I'm allowed to cuss on this, but I call bullshit on a lot of that, okay? And I think ultimately, if you really push.

If my 8th grade students, when I was teaching in Greene county or in Harlem, if they had really pushed me and said, why are we learning this? Really, ultimately, my answer would have been like, I don't know. I don't know.

I just know that the state, Virginia or New York tells me that I have to teach this to you. And as a result, like, this is why you have to learn it, because.

And the reason that I have to teach it to you is because my teachers had to teach it to me, and their teachers had to teach it to them, and their teachers had to teach it to them.

Which is to say, like, I think math education is largely propelled by inertia, but we haven't, at least I haven't seen an instance where we as a community, like, step back and said, actually, what is the point of all of this? And so what are some of the results of that?

Because, Jed, I think this will then get into the mechanics of why it's so hard to kind of change education or math education. And so then what we're Left with is 8th grade math ends up being 29 standards, which is impossible for any math teacher to get through.

Through, right? Really? Well, just anybody who, anybody who's taught math knows it's like you teach one thing one week, and then you got to move on to the next thing.

You got to move on to the next thing, by the way. Like, that is not how they do it in other countries, right? We've got this whole mile y inch deep.

If you look at math instruction in Japan, for instance, it's exactly the opposite, right? It's much narrower in terms of the things that they require students to learn, but they just have a lot more time to do it.

Another issue in American math education is like, we don't. We do not support teachers well at all. And I'm not saying this is like trying to, you know, kiss up to teachers. Like, we don't.

We pay them super poorly. We throw them into often the most challenging teaching environments with. With no support, right? We're like, here's your textbook.

Maybe with no support.

And so it's just, it's if, if you're in a situation like that, and if you as a teacher don't have a lot of mathematical content knowledge yourself, which a lot of math teachers do struggle, especially at the middle school level, in your math knowledge, then the easiest way to teach, like oftentimes your best response is just to do kind of the drill and kill. I'm going to put a problem on the board, I'm going to show you how to do it, you're going to copy it. I'm going to give you 40 of those. Right.

And we don't have a lot of professional development to help those teachers learn math better or teach it differently. And so it's just, it's. There's so many things, many of which are not unique to math instruction.

Some are, I think, the definition of kind of how we define mathematics. I think obviously that is unique to math.

But, you know, I think at the end of the day, I think we're just, we're all caught up in this, in this inertia and there are all of these pieces to it and everybody feels super stressed and everybody's really busy. And so every, it's like this system that's super frenetic, but I think again, without a clear idea of what it exists for.

And the last thing I'll say on that is, again, and this I think is the paradox of American math education, or maybe just global math education is at the end of the day, I do think a lot of teachers say you are going to need to know this. Even if I can't identify when in real life you would use quadratics, you are going to need to use it.

And yet using it is the one thing that doesn't happen in math class. Right. And, and that we, it's like people don't even have the breathing room to recognize that the, like, being a teacher today is so, it's so hectic.

Being a principal, so hectic.

Being a superintendent, I think is so hectic that you almost, you don't even have the breathing room to look at this like this preposterous situation that we've created for ourselves.

And for those of you watching, you'll see there's been a little bit where we are at the, we are reliant on, on infrastructure in the desert. Give us the, the telecom there in, in Morocco. So a couple, couple interruptions. It is kind of fun having Karim blurred out. It's.

Jed and I are saying it's as Though it is like one of those old 60 Minutes things where he's going to reveal stuff about math that's so dangerous that we had to shield his identity. So crank talk about funders and the role they play. I mean, you know, in this sector, capitalizing a business can happen in the private markets.

It can happen philanthropically occasionally, sometimes both funders sometimes end up playing in those markets. And that can have various effects, including, I think, market distorting effects. A lot of people would argue.

So talk about like, you know, math seems to be having its moment right now with some funders. And so just talk a little bit about the role that, the role that funders play or the.

And the markets and so forth play in the, in the work that you tried to do.

And, you know, so I'm, I'm really proud that we've been able to create what we've created basically as a bootstrapped organization. But you're absolutely right. I mean, there are two.

For anybody who's thinking about starting, let's say, a curriculum company, a supplemental organization like ours, you need money to do it. It takes a while until you can make money. And you really have two primary mechanisms.

One is private funders, and then the other is a foundation like Gates or Schusterman or somebody like that. Government doesn't really play much of a role in the funding of create. Creating resources.

There are research projects, but that you need to be pretty far along to, to get that. So private funders.

I'll tell you an interesting story actually, because somebody asked me once, Andy, it might have been you, what I thought about foundations and philanthropies and sort of, you know, giving money and that kind of distorting the market seems like the.

Kind of thing I'd ask.

Yeah, and. And I thought. I think you did. And I've thought about it, and I actually think that distorting the market is exactly what we need to happen.

And I'll give you an interesting story or a story that I think is interesting. So there was. There's a woman who runs.

She's the founder of one of the most influential ed tech, educational technology investment firms in the country. They're based in California. And for years she put on a math camp, a summer math camp for her kids and their friends. Right.

And this is like a Super Tony. I mean this is Palo Alto. I mean they live caddy corner to Steve Jobs. And the resource that they used was, was Mathalicious.

Well, one day I asked, I said, would you guys be interested in investing in us? And they said no. Now I imagine a lot of people would hear that and conclude and be really angry. Like that's hypocrisy.

Why would you, you know, use for your kids? Why wouldn't you be willing to fund like the thing that you say is good enough for your kids and, but not funded for other kids.

But I don't think it is hypocritical. The reason is, I imagine, I mean, I don't know why they said no, but I would imagine.

And what I could understand would be they would say, you know what, let's look. Our job as investors is to make as much money as possible possible. We look at the math ed landscape of the United States.

Schools are not performing well on standardized tests. That is the thing that schools and teachers are held accountable to. You've got principals who are super desperate.

You've got all of these to improve their scores. You've got all of these standards. So teachers are overwhelmed.

We've got a nation that is moving more and more towards the technologization of everything. And when you have a desperate educational landscape, like, you know what's a really good solution to that? Tech.

And look how quickly Chromebooks and iPads and personalized learning sort of infiltrated schooling.

Even if that ultimately, and I think it will, even if that will ultimately result in a generation of kids that not only aren't learning but are just like profoundly lonely because now sixth grade is just putting on headphones, like that is an extraordinarily profitable thing to do. Right. And so if your job is literally to maximize returns for your investors, that actually is a really, that's a really smart decision. Right.

And so, and that is a market based decision. You look at the market, you're like, I'm going to aim at the mean.

The mean still thinks of math education as being a bunch of procedural fluency a la Khan Academy. That's what I'm going to invest in. And so you actually need a foundation like Gates or Schusterman to serve as kind of the alternative to that.

Someone who does look and say we can play by different rules and distort the market. And presumably that is the role that they should be playing.

Unfortunately, in my experience, organizations like Gates and like Schusterman, they're still kind of bound by the same limited definition of math education. That all of us are. And so even these charitable organizations that could be playing the role of Medici right to.

And inspiring a renaissance are they're essentially funding. And more often than not, from what I've seen, they're funding resources that are just different versions of what we've always been doing.

And I'll give you a. I'll give you an example that will really bring this home.

It's 800 years old. Old or more. And the problem is you've got a chessboard. You have one grain of wheat on the first square, and A chessboard has 64 squares.

If the number of grains of wheat doubles every square, right? So 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16, how many grains of wheat are going to be at the end of it? And it's some. It's a riddle.

And, you know, the answer is like, oh, my God, there's more grains than there are, like, you know, stars in the sky. Like, oh, my. Exponential growth is incredible, right? I mean, this problem is so old that it actually had. It has a Wikipedia page, right?

Wheat and chessboard problem. You can Google it, okay?

800 and something years later, Gates Foundation, Schusterman, other organizations after Common Core, right, put a whole bunch of money into writing curriculum that were going to be aligned to the new Common Core standards. One of them, the first one, was called Engage New York and their exponential growth problem. Hand to God.

It's an equipment manufacturer, an equipment rental company charges you a late fee. On the first day, your late fee is a penny. On the second day, it's two pennies. On the third day, it's four cents, doubling every day.

What's your penalty going to be after 30 days? Another.

This is the.

This maybe is the, like, the most popular curriculum in the country these days. Another one's called Illustrative Math. I think they've gotten a ton of money from Gates Foundation.

Their problem is a woman has a magic purse and it has a penny in it on day one. And on day two, it has two pennies doubling every day. How much money is going to be in this after 30 days? As you can tell, it's the same problem.

It's the same problem from 800 years ago. But this is exactly the kind of stuff that a lot of these foundations are supporting. Because it's not because they're dumb.

I think it's because their imagination is bound right by the way that we've defined the purpose of math education in the same way that it has been for so long. And so they, you know, they invest in things that just, they can't, they don't move the needle. They can't move the needle, right?

I mean, they're, they're, or rather they, they don't represent fundamental change. I mean, Khan Academy, great resource if you're, if you need to bone up on SAT prep, great resource.

If you watch Khan Academy video, he literally says, first do this, then do this, then do this, then do this, then do this. Right? It is the guy basically just copying a textbook into YouTube with like some adaptive practice. Again, great resource, helpful anyway.

But I think that demonstrates, you know, foundations they could play this role in really sparking something profoundly different, right. A mathematical version of a renaissance. But we just don't see that happening.

And so they end up aiming in the kind of at the market in the same way that a private, that a private investor does, just with slightly different incentives.

So if you were going to go about it differently, how would you have tackled it, having hindsight as benefit right now?

Well, you mean if I were working at a foundation?

Oh, if you were, if you were back in the early days of Mathalicious and you were going to chart out a different 15 to 20 year path, what would you do differently? Where were the moments where you feel like a personal decision from you might have set things in a different trajectory?

You know, I think me personally, hopefully less so now, but certainly when I started, like, I was the kind of prototypical, like intense artist, I believed so strongly in what we were doing and I believed in the rightness of what we were doing. And anybody who said otherwise was a fool.

And I believe that what we identified about math education and the product that we created, I think that was the right thing to identify.

But I certainly came across oftentimes including two people at these foundations in a way that honestly was just a lot less mature than if I could do it now. I would do it differently. When I was 30, I don't know that the 30 year old Karim, who was just in the thick of kind of the artistic Creation process.

I don't know that 30 year old me could, could have done it any differently. But if I could go back and advise him, that's what I would say.

That being said, when it comes to the thing that we created and the way that we created it, I wouldn't change anything. And I don't say that out of hubris, although, I mean, it is hubristic. But what I mean is I think the lessons that we created are great.

We redid them a couple times, we redid them like I think three or four times, rewrote the entire library from scratch because we learned things along the way, but we needed to have learned those things in order to refine the product. But what's interesting is from day one to now, like the, the vision was always the vision and we didn't have to pivot right?

In Silicon Valley, pivoting is, I feel like that's, that's kind of admitting like we didn't actually know what we were doing in the first place. And we're going to make a 90 degree turn.

I mean that's, that means you were driving in the wrong direction, you know, but I think we were driving in the right direction. I also think that the way.

One thing I'm really proud about, the way that we built citizen math is it creates a different type of learning experience in math class. Right? We're going to use unit rates to talk about the TikTok algorithm. We're going to use quadratics to analyze baseball stadiums.

We're going to use expected value to debate health insurance from a variety of perspectives. But we did it in a way that still played by the rules of, that respected the constraints of people who work in math education.

So for instance, we are not a core curriculum. We considered writing a core curriculum, but we're not a core curriculum. For us it's like one to two lessons per unit.

So that's six to 12 lessons a year. Why would, I mean, are there many more issues out there to discuss?

Would we love for students to spend even more time than like 12 to 18 days of instruction in a school year having these conversations? Of course. But we recognize that a lot of math teachers like a lot of schools and districts. That's the, that is a lot. Right.

And so we pared down like the size of the library in order to make it easier for people to, to incorporate into their experience. Our teacher support resources, I think are very good.

They do a good job of supporting exactly the kind of content knowledge that I was talking about earlier. Pedagogical content knowledge, like how to actually teach these. We've built out some really good teacher support resources and so some.

So from a product perspective, I think we've been able to create something that is usable, is realistically usable by schools and districts and by teachers, but still is different, is legitimately different and creates a different experience and of anything. I think, like, I'm really proud of how my colleagues and I were sort of able to thread those various needles.

Do you think that.

I'm just wondering also just about how these observations connect to what's, what's next, what's coming and maybe this is the wrong box, maybe this wrong frame. Reject it if you, if you so choose.

But it seems to me that different technologies, private schooling, all sorts, micro schooling, there's a lot of more direct to parent, direct to family, direct to student approaches that bypasses a lot of the locus of stasis, our schools, our school systems and all that.

Is this a wrong way to think about it or do you think that the accelerated child change and improvement is going to be through something more direct to students and parents?

It's interesting. So there's a chapter in the book about where I'm like, we have to be careful about personalized learning.

I think there, there are, there are many aspects of one's learning that are right for personalization, for individualization, learning, the mechanics of, you know, solving, proportion, right, the kind of drill and kill, but with us.

And so I can only speak for citizen Math, but again, like the name citizen math, the premise of that is most of the issues that we as a national community have a hard time discussing are fundamentally mathematical, which is to say better understood and debated through the prism of mathematics. But we, to have those conversations, we need to have them as a group.

And so to do something like citizen math in a one on like one to one like environment, it doesn't make sense, right? So let me tie back though to. And this is something I realized a number of years ago. Let me tie back to.

We were talking about where I went to high school and I said, oh, I went to Groton. It's like really fancy boarding school in Massachusetts. And what it says, I think about education.

I was there with one of my classmates, we were there for I think her 20 or 25th reunion. And it turned out that she had been a teacher in San Francisco and used Mathalicious. Didn't realize that I was the founder of it.

And so when we made that connection, we were all in on talking about education and ed Reform. And so we're walking around the building Groton, all of the classes take place in one building called the schoolhouse.

And this is a pretty, this is a pretty fancy high school. And it's exactly the kind of high school, Exeter, Andover, Groton, Show, Deerfield, right.

It's like it's the Eaton of the US and it's exactly the kind of high school that I think most people would kill for their kids to go to.

In fact, I bet you a lot of the people who were funding these like personalization put kids on an iPad and have them headphones like they're probably applying for their kids to go to those schools. So she and I are walking around the schoolhouse and we're looking in the rooms and you know what we don't see?

Computers, the biggest technology at schools like Groton, Exeter, Andover, in a classroom, just a big ass table sit around a table. You sit around a table and you have a conversation, you have a thoughtful conversation about something interesting.

That is kind of the definition that so many people have of what a really high quality education looks like. And that doesn't require personalization, it doesn't require an algorithm, it doesn't require necessarily like computers.

I mean bring them in if you need them. But it essentially is hearkening back to Socrates.

And I think often what I think one of the things that I've observed in American ed reform, and this is not unique to mathematics, is we've convinced ourselves that this is really complicated and that we need to do something newfangled and we need to incorporate all of this technology and play that out. Right. If you play that out, what we're going to be left with is a bunch of kids who cannot interact with one another. Right?

Because what is happening is people are looking at students as like individual nodes, but we're neglecting the connections between them. And look at what's happened to our democracy. Like that is why we're largely in the mess that we're in, right?

Because we've all been atomized by these algorithms. And Andy like, you get what Andy likes and Karim's going to get what Karim likes and Jed's going to get what Jed like.

And, and look at us as a country.

Like people are super lonely and we have lost the ability to kind of interact with one another in a way that democracy needs to basically port that experience onto score. School is a recipe for disaster. Now, but a lot of people say, but we need to do it because our educational outcomes are so bad.

And I would say but look at the schools that charge $60,000 a year. Look at what they're doing. Let's make that right. Let's support teachers. Let's give them something really good to teach.

Let's help them teach it really well. Right? Let's stop being, let's not be distracted by all the newfangled students stuff. Let's just get some tape.

Let's get a big ass table and let's sit around it and let's have conversations about something that's really rigorous and meaningful and let's see where that takes us. I do not think that there's anything fundamentally getting in the way of that other than imagination.

I think that's a fantastic way to end this. It's a great, I mean, I feel like this is a, like, remember we're kids. There'd be like, you know, very special blossom.

I feel like this was a, this is like a very special wonky folk. Just because like your candor was, was terrific. We don't usually get into curriculum this much. It was, it was fantastic.

I know you want to, so, so it won't be the last word to jump in, but I just want to like just quickly then prematurely. Thank you for just your time. Your candor. It's a fascinating just discourse on, on where we are on a key issue.

Can I, can I end on one?

Absolutely.

But the last thing I want to say is just the vision of what math class could be because I think it's so beautiful. I mean it could be, it could be incredible. We have a lesson in seventh grade called Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.

In seventh grade, kids are learning how to write linear functions and kind of solve basic linear functions. And so the lesson is called Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow. And it's about how long it takes to donate to Locks of Love.

And you know, so on average, hair grows about a half an inch per month, right? And so the mathematics is a donation, A donation has to be 10 inches, right?

So at a half inch per month, like how long will it take to donate to make a donation? But then you can make it a little bit more realistic, a little bit more complex mathematically. Like what if you start with a certain amount of hair?

What if after your haircut you don't want to go down to zero? Like you want six inches left over, whatever, so you can start to develop out these mathematical models.

They become more and more realistic and mathematically they're more and more rigorous. So you're a seventh grade teacher. You can use this to sort of introduce or really reinforce linear functions.

The last question of the lesson, after students do all of this math, the last question of the lesson is.

We'Ve.

Been looking at one donation, but a wig, a full wig is 10, 10 inch donations. How long would it take you? Do you think it's reasonable that you alone could donate an entire wig?

And when you do the math on it right, 100 inches at a half inch, it's 200 months. That's about 17 years. So the last question basically ends on students saying I by myself, I probably couldn't do it on my own.

And that's where the lesson ends. But what do you think a 12 year old is going to say next?

They're going to jump together, all of us together.

What if we did it together? So can you imagine how, you know, using math as a lens for looking at the world? Forget all that.

Can you imagine how powerful math class would be if once a unit kids did the math, you know, did the seventh grade to standard linear function stuff and then said as a group this semester we, as seventh graders, we're going to organize a school wide hair drive for kids with alopecia and leukemia. And all of the kids in middle school come to the gym and they make a big deal of it.

And the barbers and people from salons from town come in and they cut the hair and the letter carriers from the postal service come and collect the hair.

And then six months later when Locks of Love sends the hair back, like they've got the kids from hospital and they give them the school, they give them the wigs as a community.

And then 8th graders are doing something about recycling and 9th graders are doing something about what time school should start because of the kind of sinusoidal, you know, like awareness functions, like over the course of the day.

Can you imagine how kick ass school would be if math class essentially served as the epicenter for these experiences that then like ripple through a community and all of it ties back to like this is grade level stuff. I think, I think if I were to die, because I do look at, I think the veil of ignorance was a really good thought experiment, right?

If I were to die and come back, I would love. That is absolutely the type of experience that I would love to have in seventh grade.

And please, for the love of God, like do not stick me on a laptop.

I just think it seems like, yeah, it seems like a big ass table approach to all sorts of issues here. It's like, hey, how do we do our pedagogy? How do we stimulate the kind of discussion going to require a big ass table.

It's kind of like walkie folk here. And Karim, I mean, it's great to catch you at this moment. I'm kind of excited to hear what you do next.

I also hope that you'll retain at least enough involvement in education that you can be around the table from time to time or maybe even convene a table from time to time because it seems like you do have a lot of experiences that, who knows, they may be fortified by what you do next. But we need more big ass tables and you've helped us expand the walkie folk table this, this week. So we really appreciate your time.

Well, thank you for having me around it certainly, as, as a citizen, I will be cheering for education and citizen math and every math teacher out there. That's I can promise you that.

Thank you so much, Karim, for your time and again for everything you've done and brought and brought to the sector.

Thank you for, thank you for saying that. That means a lot.