Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

And it was timed.

And he was dancing with a lightsaber to entertain them and keep them moving.

And the kids were all saying, what do you think it is?

What's the answer?

I think it's A, I think it's B. And then he would say, everybody put their whiteboards up and like the answer is B. And you get me the points.

And they would put the points on the board, right?

Contrast that with a teacher who was teaching algebra too.

And what she had done around her class was explain to kids that the ways that exponential functions work, the ways that quadratic equations work, they allow you to calculate something called exponential growth.

And what she did was as the kids were learning the math, she then assigned them to families from the neighborhood as financial planners.

So they worked and wrestled with those families across the semester.

to get financial information about those families' hopes, to buy a home, to pay for their kids' education, those kinds of things, their income, their expenses.

And the kids used their Algebra II skills to calculate the cost of owning a home, the amount they should be saving to be able to pay for their child's education someday.

And they worked with real families and presented them with financial planning resources.

As those kids engaged in that math, they were so deeply connected to the reason why that math matters.

It empowered them to be useful members of their community, to be experts who were resources to the families in their community.

Yes, that's right.

And at the same time, I'm actually really deeply invested in learning my math.

What often happens, I spend a lot of time talking to teachers and parents and kids, what often happens is that when teachers learn about this, they say, they first see the person with the whiteboard and the civics game and he thinks, oh, look at those kids are super engaged.

Those aren't the kind of kids who normally would be engaged in this.

They're all answering the questions and stuff and they think that's great.