Education on For Your Consideration

youcubed Data Science Curriculum

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently finished helping a small online high school create a new data science course, the foundation for which was Stanford’s youcubed Explorations in Data Science. It’s a snappy curriculum that is thoughtful and modern in its topic selection and a bit ragged at the edges of its resources. Its lesson layout is clear, its tools of choice are accessible and modifiable, and in the spirit of decades of statistics-oriented education, it helps students be wary of practitioners who lie and misrepresent either through thoughtlessness or malice. While I wrote this course to run in a format that relies heavily on self-directed work, wholly different from what youcubed anticipated, the curriculum was an excellent base that created ample opportunity for differentiation. By all accounts, students are loving the results.

Sorta Same Job in Nearly a New Place

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

AoPS Hackathon 2025

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.¹ 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.

Department of Education AI Toolkit

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Department of Education¹ 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.

Self-Satirizing Nonsense and The Department of Education

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Tony Wan at EdSurge, on AI Writing by Students

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

"The Great School Rethink" and Assessing Ideas

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Problem-First Thinking

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Dynamic Content and Curriculum

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Textbooks have been the premier mechanism for presenting curriculum for centuries. While the printed word is powerful and, for many people, superior to digital versions, the physicality of textbooks requires that their content remains static. Errors are inevitable, as are changes in relevant topics or pedagogy. New editions are the only tool to fight against the decay of a textbook’s utility.¹ In an educational landscape dominated by digital tools, it’s tempting to have content updated rapidly and frequently. This approach requires a deft hand.

Science Museums

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Science museums are awesome, and The Exploratorium in San Francisco is particularly fantastic. We went for their Thursday After Dark series, where they stay open from 6 to 10 at night, and you must be at least 18 to get in. They serve drinks and have a different theme each week with various exhibits and presentations among the standard fare. It was a surprisingly vibrant experience!¹

There are so many opportunities for excitement at a science museum, all stemming from different areas of curiosity and experience. Going to a new museum means new demonstrations and exhibits that I’d never come across. Others are similar to what I’ve seen before, and take me back to my favorite bits of physics classes oh so many years ago now. I get to experience concepts again, sometimes in fresh ways, and marvel at the world we live in. If you have any science museum nearby, give them a visit at least once a year. You won’t regret it.

SEL

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The tutoring organization I work with, Step Up, has focused heavily on the social and emotional learning (SEL) of the students in their program. To some extent, this is an expectation of any tutor who is also meant to be a role model. Just as with Big Brothers, Big Sisters, the goal is to improve the student’s outcomes in as many ways as we can; unsurprisingly, helping the student feel better about themselves and their place in the world can be a huge factor in their future success.

Agonizing Over Engagement

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Applying mathematical topics and skills to the real world is an often-discussed tactic to engage students who are otherwise dismissive of, or frustrated with, mathematics as a whole. By connecting the math a student does with real life situations—particularly skills they will “need” in the future, but also more abstracted situations that pertain to real life—some people expect students to gain an appreciation for what mathematics can do, and feel inclined to study it so they can actively participate in these various applications.

Dangers of Mathematical Rules

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Do you remember when you first learned how to round numbers? For example, to round 687 to the nearest hundred, we notice it’s between 600 and 700. Since 687 is closer to 700 than it is to 600, we round up to 700. Maybe you even learned a rule: Look at the digit to the right of the one you’re rounding. If it’s 5 or greater, round up. If it’s 4 or less, round down. Rules can be good, but they can also be dangerous.

Goals of Tutoring

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned last month, I started work with Step Up Tutoring {{LINK}}. It’s been a lot of fun getting to know my student, and it’s been a rewarding experience already. I really believe in this group that I’m working with, so I’ve volunteered my time to help them work on pedagogy and curriculum, with the goal of creating an easy way for their tutors to put together the best sessions possible for their students.

Tutoring Again

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started tutoring through an organization called Step Up Tutoring. They run online-only free tutoring for students in grades 3 through 6 in the LA school district, one of the largets in the country. They haven’t been around long, but have already developed a great relationship with the district and a pretty robust network of tutors (mainly in California) to work with the students.

Virtual Classrooms

Mon, 31 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Every student that was previously instructed in-person by my company has been on Zoom for over a year. While we’re making plans to transition our learning centers back to in-person come this Fall, we have also spun off a permanently-virtual version of these courses. Instead of letting this year be a fluke when considering curriculum and instruction, there has been significant time devoted to improving the experience of student learning in this online face-to-face environment. Here are some reflections on what I’ve learned over that time, both in teaching last year and helping adapt our curriculum.

Evidence-Based Education Part 1

Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We have had several sets of federal education standards, the most recent being Common Core, but the focus has been on what, not how. These standards outline a broad set of topics and skills students should accumulate, but very little guidance on how to go about it.

Algorithmic Thinking and Metacognition

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m teaching a math camp for students entering 6th grade. It’s my first time being the teacher of record for a course, and luckily it only took a few minutes for my anxiety to subside. It’s a small group – only 9 kids – so it reminds me of my days being a camp counselor, except now it’s talking about math with very advanced kids for 3 hours a day. It’s been a blast.

Are You Ready?

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Assessments are a tricky business. Writing an exam that successfully tests a person’s knowledge or abilities, without inadvertently giving preference or advantage to certain demographics, is very difficult. The examinations I’ve written so far for my job fall into the category of testing whether a student has mastered a certain curriculum. After a couple of months of class, we give them an exam to check if they learned all that they were supposed to. Everybody is used to such tests, and everybody has experienced them.

What Do Tests Test?

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks at work, I’ve been working on revising some of the exams for our elementary school curriculum. This has been an interesting task full of challenges. One thing I’m constantly working on is putting myself in the headspace of a bright, but still young, elementary school student. What wording can I allow in problems? How long can a problem be before we’re testing their reading comprehension instead of their math? How many problems should there be? How many problems of a certain level of difficulty? There are so many questions to discuss, but one is a bit more fundamental than all others, and can help inform the answers to each subsequent question. What do we want our test to test?

Pushing and Pulling

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past 6 months or so, the idea of pushing and pulling in education has been on my mind. What I mean by this is whether we should focus on pushing kids who are achieving in a particular subject as much as we can – advanced study in mathematics and reading, honors classes, extracurricular options – or focus on pulling kids up who have struggled in some subjects. I have been intrigued by this dichotomy in the education system precisely because I have seen both sides of it, and it makes me feel conflicted.

The Election and Education (Election Processing Part 2)

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Read part 1 here.
In light of the election, I have been on a bit of a thought and writing spree. While I recently processed through a fair bit of the election as a whole, there is so much that will be affected that I need to take it bit by bit. Right now I am thinking about education, particularly mathematics education, as this is something very near to me and something I have a strong passion for.