I officially left Art of Problem Solving on January 1. After over 7 years of full-time employment, and over 8 years total when I include contract work and my summer internship, I have my second post-college employer: Inflection Point Learning. The upshot is that AoPS partially own IPL, and nearly every person in our small Institutional Sales department moved with me. My job title is the same, my immediate boss and one direct report haven’t changed, but the new context gives some sparkle and flavor to this second phase in my career that I’m beginning just shy of thirty years old.
Continue reading “Sorta Same Job in Nearly a New Place”AoPS Hackathon 2025
My company held its second Hackathon last week, when (most) regular work pauses or slows down, so we can instead focus on new ideas aligned to our mission.1We still need to work with customers, provide support, and generally keep the lights on. But anyone who wants to participate can always find the time to do so. We get to explore and build, play around, meet new people, and add to our general culture of inquisitiveness, curiosity, and hard work.
I used it as an opportunity to get back to my curriculum roots. I ran text adventure Math Jams in our online classroom for three years in the same fashion I do with OHAC. The main difference is I’m working with around 200 students who are voting on what to do—it gets chaotic.
It’s been over two years since I ran one of these sessions, so I took the week to brainstorm ideas with some people. The most recent adventure I ran, Casework, is full of company-specific easter eggs and takes place in a loose approximation of our old headquarters. This new adventure, Casework 2: Overwhelming Evidence, follows that up.
I’ve attached the text adventure document, along with the video I created for the final project presentation. It was incredibly fun to work on.
- 1We still need to work with customers, provide support, and generally keep the lights on. But anyone who wants to participate can always find the time to do so.
Department of Education AI Toolkit
The Department of Education1Look: I had an existential crisis while drafting this blog post. I regularly read newsletters about education and EdTech as part of my job and am acutely aware of the hubbub around the potential elimination of the Department of Education. Couple that with relaxed restrictions on AI development from the new administration, and I ended up in a loop of questions: Does any of this matter? For all I know, once Linda McWrestling is in charge of public education, these guidelines and toolkits will be formally retracted. I decided that wasn’t the blog post I wanted to write; all this politicking doesn’t change a good idea, and I hope thousands of schools and districts have seen this Toolkit and will consider it important regardless of what Sam Altman tells Trump is safe. released a toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable, AI Integration last October. I finally made the time to read it and love what I found. As with most things in education, if it’s sensible in that context, it is worth considering in every context.
- 1Look: I had an existential crisis while drafting this blog post. I regularly read newsletters about education and EdTech as part of my job and am acutely aware of the hubbub around the potential elimination of the Department of Education. Couple that with relaxed restrictions on AI development from the new administration, and I ended up in a loop of questions: Does any of this matter? For all I know, once Linda McWrestling is in charge of public education, these guidelines and toolkits will be formally retracted. I decided that wasn’t the blog post I wanted to write; all this politicking doesn’t change a good idea, and I hope thousands of schools and districts have seen this Toolkit and will consider it important regardless of what Sam Altman tells Trump is safe.
Self-Satirizing Nonsense and The Department of Education
From a recent Chalkbeat article by Erica Meltzer and Marta W. Aldrich:
Former Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn has been named to serve as deputy education secretary in the incoming Trump administration.
President-elect Donald Trump announced the pick in a post on Truth Social Friday evening. […] He also misstated her name as Peggy Schwinn, rather than Penny.
We again enter a period of time where The Onion has its work cut out for itself. The next paragraph of this article is also pitch-perfect in its matter-of-fact approach to reporting on how ridiculous everything is.
Schwinn […] would bring extensive education experience to the role, in contrast with Trump’s education secretary pick, World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Linda McMahon.
Sometimes laughing is the only antidote to the crying.
Tony Wan at EdSurge, on AI Writing by Students
A short article that mirrors my thinking rather well. In particular:
Each little metacognitive act of constructing a sentence, though, reflects valuable thinking. Knowing how to use conjunctions, for instance — the ifs, buts and therefores — is an important exercise in logical reasoning. How much should we outsource that to AI? Too much, and the writing experience may feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise like MadLibs.
Student Monitoring, Safety, and Privacy
In my weekly perusal of education newsletters, I came across a Time magazine article about new attempts to bring AI and machine learning to monitoring student behavior on school devices. While the article focuses on student mental health—suicide prevention in particular—I looked into the companies mentioned therein and discovered that the scope of monitoring efforts is broad and deep. It is a fascinating and discomforting topic, with each company working on a different aspect of student safety with rhetoric to match.
Continue reading “Student Monitoring, Safety, and Privacy”“The Great School Rethink” and Assessing Ideas
Last fall I read The Great School Rethink by Frederick Hess, who works with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He focuses largely on education policy initiatives, many of which might be familiar: school choice, assessments, funding distribution, and curriculum adoption, among others. While I find these topics and the debates around them interesting, my main takeaway from reading this book was broader. It reminded me that a person is not static, and when we talk with someone we have to focus more on the thoughts they’re presenting and not conflate that with our notions of who the person is when taken as a sum of their parts.
Continue reading ““The Great School Rethink” and Assessing Ideas”Problem-First Thinking
I was in a position to provide some talking points for my company’s upper-level math textbooks. It was written in the aftermath of customer-induced pique regarding how we sell ourselves. While it’s focused on my company, the core idea of a problem-first approach extends beyond what we do in particular.
Continue reading “Problem-First Thinking”