The Power of Mathematics, Innovation & Optimal Learning, with John Mighton -Part 2

Have you ever considered how intellectual inequality in education might be a root cause of socioeconomic disparity? Join us as we dive deep into this thought-provoking issue with our guest, John Mighton, the founder of Jump Math. We take a hard look at intellectual inequality, a hidden yet pervasive issue in our society, and discuss how promoting intellectual equality in schools can eradicate it within two years. John brings a unique perspective, weaving in the power of mathematics, innovation, and optimal learning into this urgent conversation.

What if the key to unlocking your potential was simply altering your mindset? We explore how negative beliefs about one's abilities can inhibit success and discuss ways to shift this mindset. With John's insights, we discuss the role of perseverance and resilience in innovation, sharing personal stories and experiences to bring this point home. We examine the importance of analogy in mathematics and writing, and managing connections between seemingly disparate domains of knowledge can lead to major scientific progress. 

We also highlight the transformative work done by Jump Math in underrepresented communities and its commitment to equalizing opportunities for intellectual growth. As we wrap up our thought-provoking conversation, we're left with a deeper understanding of the power of mindset and the importance of addressing root causes in order to promote intellectual equality. Join us on this journey and be part of the change.

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The music for this episode, "Doctor"  is written and performed by our current artist in residence, #DouglasCameron

You can find out more about Douglas by visiting our show blog and by listening to our episode, #TheOldGuitar

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Chapters

• 0:32 Addressing Intellectual Inequality in Education
• 13:51 Mindset and Innovation in Education
• 26:18 The Importance of Analogy in Mathematics
• 29:35 Jump Math's Impact and Reach
• 43:02 The Impact of AI on Society

Transcript

Blake Melnick Host 00:32
Welcome to this week's episode of For What it's Worth part two of the power of mathematics, innovation and optimal learning. with my guest, John Mighton, We concluded part one with a discussion about the importance of creating an equalized classroom. In part two, john and I take this conversation to a deeper level the importance of addressing intellectual inequality as a root cause of socioeconomic disparity. For what it's Worth.
01:03
Well, that's a really good point and I've thought a lot about this whole idea of hierarchy in learning and education and in society, because, of course, the education system simply mirrors the society in which we live, the social inequalities, the economic inequalities and so forth, and the gaps are getting bigger, not smaller, and I think it's causing a sense of disenfranchisement with people in our society. But I also think it's causing a lot more problems than that. How do we re-balance? I think if we start with schools, that may be the best place to begin to promote the whole idea of intellectual equality, to address existing hierarchies in the classroom as well as within society at large. Is that the kind of thing you think should happen?
John Mighton Guest 01:43
I wrote a book called All Things being Equal where I argue that in spite of all our wealth and knowledge, in western countries we've really struggled to close the income gap, to develop sustainable economies. And I argue it's because we've missed one of the deepest root causes, which isn't material poverty, it's intellectual poverty. And we've done experiments. We did one case study where a teacher took a class with kids as low as a ninth percentile on these standardized tests, like three grades below in grade five. Within two years they all wrote the Pythagoras math competition and all but three got words of distinction. That's the true intellectual potential in children. So you can eradicate intellectual poverty and those intellectual inequalities in two years.
02:25
The solution is right at hand. And what breaks my heart is that as a charity, we're always trying to find supporters, because we don't want to give people what they want. We want to give people what works. And we've grown. We now reach about 6% of the Canadian student population. But it's been a battle and we subsidize that fight through philanthropy because it allows us to try things, experiment and do research and make sure that what we're doing works. People don't understand that. They just want to address the symptoms of problems, not the root cause.
02:55
Dropout rates, kids on the street, these intractable problems around poverty, the tensions we have in society because kids are brought up in a competitive system where there's a hierarchy and so on, and most of them suffer deeply and are very bitter about the experience Our anti-intellectual, because they had such a bad experience in math and science. These are all such serious problems and people are just treating the symptoms, trying to put band-aids over all these growing problems.
03:24
Just fix it at the root, we can do it within two years. It's hard to get people to really focus on the real problem.
Blake Melnick Host 03:30
I think there are groups in our society that have a vested interest in not dealing with root causes, preferring to deal with the symptoms rather than the root cause because it's easier, and I think that's pervasive in our society. I want to shift gears a little here. John, I have a question for you. Do you consider yourself a renaissance man or a polymath? You're good at a lot of things that most people would think are very disparate Art, mathematics, etc. Do you think of yourself that way?
John Mighton Guest 04:02
I deeply regret that I didn't learn how to learn earlier. I feel like I will never do the work I want to in these fields I'm in. I feel I've been lucky enough to get a taste of what it's like to do interesting work. That's not what I'd be doing if I'd been raised in a school system that had shown me early on how I could learn anything. Really, I know so many people who are natural writers compared to me. I learned so many bad habits in writing and that I'm always trying to break. I have to literally sweat over every sentence. Other writers stuff pours out of them. Same in math. I'm not a very fast mathematician. I'm creative because of all my experience, so I don't consider myself unusual in any field.
Blake Melnick Host 04:42
I've been reflecting a lot about the idea of the Renaissance person or the polymath that was defined back in the 1400s, during the Renaissance period. A Renaissance person, by definition, is a person with many talents or areas of knowledge. But perhaps the more interesting question is how they acquire expertise, mastery and multiple domains of knowledge. Jeremy thinks it's because what makes them Renaissance people is they have mastered learning, how to learn. They have the ability to take knowledge from one domain, something that they understand well, and transfer that knowledge over to another domain to acquire new knowledge. And they can do it very, very quickly because it's not like starting at the beginning. They're leveraging their existing knowledge base to accelerate new learning.
05:36
When I was growing up, my father, who was a very well-educated man, espoused the virtues of a liberal arts education for the very reason that it would give me exposure to different domains of knowledge philosophy, humanities, literature and that would produce a well-educated, well-rounded person who could have freedom of choice in the job market as a result of the ability to think and work across multiple domains of knowledge.
06:02
I do think the value of a liberal arts education seems to be diminished nowadays and our education is focused on specializations being good at one thing, and when I look across the education system, I see it as very industrial in nature.
06:19
It's a reflection of the industrial line process, where workers worked on specific tasks, students specialized at being good at one particular discipline or domain of knowledge. But the problem is the world has changed and it is changing exponentially. So we're faced with preparing students and future employees for the challenge of working with knowledge that doesn't yet exist, using practices that don't yet exist and jobs that don't yet exist. And this is why I asked you the question about whether you consider yourself a renaissance person or a polymath, because it seems to me that we may need graduates and employees that have that renaissance mindset. Perhaps we need to think about returning to a more classical approach to education, where we encourage students to see the connections and work between domains of knowledge, so things like mathematics wouldn't be as perceptually hard as it seems to be right now within the structure of the current system.
John Mighton Guest 07:15
I agree. First of all, there's plenty of time. If we taught kids efficiently, they could learn many subjects before the end of high school quite deeply, with a real love of learning, real curiosity. We could have that if we wanted, and there's huge benefits. First of all, people who do the most interesting work often pull from multiple fields. Secondly, it keeps people's sense of wonder and curiosity alive to be able to read an article in science and have some idea of what it means or economics or any field to be able to keep up on a high level with what's going on. We'd have much healthier social debates and I think people would just spend their whole life wanting to learn something new. They would see how interesting every field is and how interconnected every field is.
Blake Melnick Host 08:02
Your basic thesis or premise is we need to give people the confidence that they can be dynamic learners. I know you're focused in math, but it really in any subject by addressing that intellectual divide.
John Mighton Guest 08:14
And it would be interesting to see the political impact. Because I'm pretty progressive and I found a jump as a charity. I take a salary, I don't take it, so I'm very progressive. But lately I've begun to think maybe all our political debates are premature because they're always based on the idea of what people are, what kind of citizen we're producing now in our education system. But what if people were actually educated according to their true potential, where they could think through any mathematical or scientific problem, have an idea of what risk is, how interconnected everything is in the natural world, but also have a sense of the arts and the importance of the arts, of creativity? So what if people were raised according to their potential?
08:57
We might need less government because people can regulate themselves and make good decisions and they consider all of society when they buy something or make decisions and they're smart enough to do that. Or we might need more government because people realize to deal with some of these really difficult problems we need to work in groups. Who knows where we'd fall? Maybe we shouldn't even be talking about right or left, or more government or less. What we should be focused on is helping everybody realize their full potential. Then we'll see what kind of political systems we need.
Blake Melnick Host 09:26
I think what you're suggesting is it would give individuals the ability to think more critically about the truth and investigate the truth and understand the various perspectives. I have one more question. I wanted to ask you about research because I know it's important to you, and then I want to shift our conversation over to innovation specifically. But what about the fact that there's often a lot of research that gets published that proves to be incorrect or the research is faulty? How do we compensate for that, so that the research that we're reading actually delivers the results we expect?
John Mighton Guest 10:04
That's where we need to not just be guided by the research, but we also have to be constantly open to experimentation in the classroom to working together collaboratively to share ideas. The research I've talked about goes counter to a lot of what we're doing. The answer may be somewhere in between. That's why, in jump, we're constantly revised program, getting feedback from teachers, observing classes, and so on. Fortunately, though, in education, you can see the impact of these principles quite quickly.
Blake Melnick Host 10:36
Right.
John Mighton Guest 10:36
Academically, in terms of the academic achievement which you can actually measure and in the kind of happiness of the kids or level of engagement. And so I think, if you're guided by those things, you can experiment and always have some way of seeing whether what you're doing is working or not.
Blake Melnick Host 10:52
Many of the research initiatives that inform the practice of teaching the classrooms things like de-streaming whole language were developed in an ideal research setting. In other words, the extraneous factors, the day-to-day challenges that teachers have to deal with in the classroom, behavioral issues of students were removed. There were control group studies, but again it was somewhat artificial. This is why I asked you the question about whether you think teachers should conduct their own action research in the classroom, because it incorporates the day-to-day variables that are missing from the control group studies.
John Mighton Guest 11:31
I can add one more thing. French neurologists a while ago did brain scans of mathematicians like myself solving problems and they found we use a really primitive part of the brain that has the same sense of space and number that kindergarten kids do.
Blake Melnick Host 11:44
Right.
John Mighton Guest 11:44
That wasn't a surprise to me, because I don't understand anything in math. I'm even calculus, unless I can reduce it to that simple level.
Blake Melnick 11:50
Okay.
John Mighton Guest 11:51
If you want to do research, what if there's some principles that you feel are quite well-established, that math should be accessible to everybody? It helps if you scaffold things, all those things, you can test them immediately. I have to live by these principles because I'll walk into a class even behavioral kids and I have to give a lesson. I'm served by ten teachers. Right, it better work, or at least somewhat on average. It better work If I say I can get all the kids engaged. It better work. And so if you're guided by these principles that we should be expecting more of kids, that hierarchies are a problem you can actually start experimenting right away and you can see it right in your classroom. Yeah, a lot of these programs that get sold. Nobody who wrote them ever goes into an intercity school and has to teach a lesson.
Blake Melnick Host 12:34
Exactly.
John Mighton Guest 12:35
So you can test whatever idea you have instantly and if you're guided by these principles of equity or the idea that kids should be able to understand math, you can use that as a guide.
Blake Melnick Host 12:46
That's a great point, a beautiful segue into innovation, because this whole notion of testing and rapid prototyping, trying things out, adapting, adjusting based on the context in the case of teaching in a classroom, it could be the socioeconomic background of the kids in the classroom, it could be a variety of things, but it's that notion of continuous adaptation and testing and trying and improving. That's the scientific method, really. I'd like to play you a clip from Dr Tom Kerry, who is also a mathematician and I work very closely with Tom and he's discussing the mindset for innovation using mathematics as an example. So I'd like to play this for you and get your reaction.
Tom Carey 13:24
Let me go back to the mindset for a moment. I was part of a team at the Carnegie Foundation in the US, in Palo Alto, that worked with students who struggled with quantitative reasoning and whose struggles in the past had convinced them there's a math gene, and I didn't get it. So as soon as you put anything in front of me that looks like an equation or a mathematical string of symbols that I'm supposed to reason with, I know I am not going to get this. Now that mindset is a huge barrier. If people come into a structural situation totally convinced that this will not work for them, then it's no big surprise that they're really going to struggle, and the struggle, of course, will reinforce that perception. We had to find some way around that.
14:08
Fortunately, there was a recent PhD student at Stanford, working with Carol Dweck, who's been one of the fundamental researchers on mindset, and he had figured out some ways to create a space, basically to cause students to suspend that disbelief in their own ability to develop any sense of quantitative reasoning.
14:28
Now, you didn't necessarily convince them that they could do it, but you could create a space in which they temporarily suspended that belief. It would last from three to six weeks, as long as the experiences they had during that time were positive, and at the end of that six weeks you could have changed their mindset to believe I can do this, I'm actually able to do this and turn that corner on the mindset. So it is possible to do it. But the nature of those interventions took a long time to figure out, and so with people who now maybe have a negative impression of innovation they're somewhat conservative in terms of their approach to change and so on we have to first of all create some space for them to come, set aside the presuppositions long enough to have some good experiences. Now, obviously, if they set aside their presuppositions and then have bad experiences, it's going to be a lot harder the next time to shift that mindset. So we have a work cut out for us on the whole mindset thing.
Blake Melnick Host 15:26
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, John.
John Mighton Guest 15:28
Carol Dweck, who he mentions, who initiated the research on mindset, came to Canada and gave a free keynote for us because she felt we keep kids in the zone where they could develop positive mindsets. And she was gracious enough to do an interview with me and I asked her what if you combined mindset training, teach people they can get better through practice with an experience where they experienced that viscerally, where they actually did some math that looked impossible and saw that they could get better through practice. And she said that yeah, she thought that would accelerate the mindset work or make it more impactful. And it's interesting that he mentioned you may not be able to get them to believe they can solve the equations, but you can at least open their minds to the possibility. So I'll tell you how you can get them to believe they can solve the equations.
16:16
You put two tables at the front of the classroom. This works for grade five and six. You put five blocks on one table, three blocks and a bag on the other and you say there's the same number of blocks on each table. What's hidden in the bag? And the kids will realize it's two because they can see that's what you need to get five.
16:34
You say close your eyes. You keep doing that. And then you say I don't want to use bags anymore and you draw a box on the board and some circles for the blocks and they fill in the missing blocks and then eventually you say I don't want to do that and you write box plus five equals seven and then eventually you give them much more complicated problems, like where you're missing two unknowns and within 40 minutes the kids are going crazy for algebra and they get the experience around mindsets of seeing I could conquer any problem if I stick with it. So that's why I'm saying math is this great equalizer. Even the people in that study that were mentioned. I can teach any adult to solve equations within two lessons. It's very easy to teach people even calculus or deep level math to really give them a sense of what they can do very quickly.
Blake Melnick Host 17:17
Much of our research at WinCan around innovation has been focused on changing people's mindsets around innovation. Specifically, what does innovation mean? Part of it is unpacking misconceptions. Most people equate innovation with invention. They think it's beyond their capability, because they need lots of money, they need a well-funded research lab at a university somewhere, they may need venture capitalist funds, or they've simply never done it before. And, as you were doing with jump math, we're trying to make people understand that innovation is accessible to us all, regardless of what we do for a living. It's available.
17:56
In the course of our work, in the course of our studies. We can all be innovators and from that belief, we developed an infograph that outlines the attributes of the innovation capable graduate and the innovation enabled employee. And perhaps the most important attribute is mindset. Like mathematics, there are skills involved that people must master. You do have to draw on previous knowledge as well as experiences, but, as I said before, mindset is the most important piece Once we get people over the hurdle where they think they cannot possibly be an innovator because when they hear the word innovation, they think Elon Musk and they go well, I can't be that person, so therefore I can't be an innovator.
John Mighton Guest 18:38
I agree that those are critical and mindset is incredibly important a willingness to experiment and learn from experience.
18:45
But you know what I think the most important is that I've learned, it's just perseverance. I actually don't think I'm a great social innovator, because I saw these results, these draw-dropping results, with kids 15 years ago and we're still a drop in the bucket. There must be something wrong with my approach. But what's kept me going is perseverance over 15 years of one failure after another. I think we may be getting close to affecting a few school districts, but it's taken 20 years really, and one failure after another and one false start off the other. But I was willing to experiment and just keep trying.
Blake Melnick Host 19:21
I think that's part of the process and we would say certainly in the area of attributes of an innovator, resilience is certainly one of them. You have to be resilient constantly and I think this is a mindset issue. I don't love the concept of failure because I think failure usually is you get results that you weren't anticipating and it's only a failure if you stop. What can you learn from this outcome that you didn't expect, to ensure that it doesn't happen again or to buffer against it happening again? It's a mindset thing. People will say you can't be afraid to fail. I don't buy into that concept of failure. Failure comes when you just abandon it altogether because it didn't work out the way you thought.
John Mighton Guest 20:00
It can be very disappointing.
Blake Melnick Host 20:02
Yes, it can.
John Mighton Guest 20:04
I agree with that point of view and it sustains you. You think I'm just going to learn and go on, but when things don't work, that you think should be so easy and obvious, it can be very disappointing and it's hard to pick yourself up after that.
Blake Melnick Host 20:16
It can be for sure, but again, that is part of the scientific method. Researchers try stuff that doesn't work out the way they want. They go back to the drawing board and try to figure out why it didn't work. We've struggled to get people to believe that they can be innovators and we've adopted a very similar approach to what you've done in jump math, which is a gentle on-ramp into developing that mindset for innovation. There's lots of barriers that they run up against and the barriers typically are existing structures that are ingrained, hard to change.
20:48
I work with a lot of organizations that want cultures of innovation. They don't know what it means but they want it. But fundamentally they're not prepared to change their underlying structures to produce the outcomes they say they're looking for. You can't just say we're going to be innovative today, everybody go and innovate and we've seen this in business around collaboration. I saw that on every corporate value statement for every client I ever worked with and I would ask these clients what does collaboration mean to you? And they would respond well, we want people to work together to share knowledge. And I would say, well, don't they do that already? So nobody had thought it through. The collaboration they really wanted was purposeful collaboration that was tied to an end result. So here's my question to you Do you think innovation in general and I apply this to mathematics and just about everything else, in other words, developing that mindset for innovation, to believe that you can create something does that need to be tied to an outcome? Do you think?
John Mighton Guest 21:44
Yeah, I think so, because so many sort of fads that have swept the school system have sounded so progressive and so innovative. Unless you have benchmarks that you're going to test your innovation against some way of telling whether you're improving things, then please don't bother to innovate. If you can't make what you're preaching work in difficult circumstances, you've got to go back and rethink it. In education, you can't blame the teacher because they're not doing it right. You can't blame the students because they're misbehaving. You have to take responsibility and make sure that what you're promoting is working, and in the long term too, and in lots of different situations. If you don't have some way of measuring your success or your impact, then you shouldn't be innovating.
Blake Melnick Host 22:27
I don't know whether you would consider yourself an innovator in the field of mathematics, or maybe I'll ask you that question, do you?
John Mighton Guest 22:33
In pure mathematics, you mean.
Blake Melnick Host 22:34
Yeah, the application.
John Mighton Guest 22:35
We asked teachers if you had a kid who was three years behind in grade five and you were tutoring them, what would you do? And universally the teachers say we'd go back to that level. We'd scaffold into mandrel chunks, we'd give bonus questions to make them more confident, we'd give them lots of practice and review. That's jump. What's innovative about that? It's what every teacher knows, but that has been pushed away from by these fads. The only thing that maybe is different or innovative about jump is the idea that you can do that with a whole class If you actually go back to the level of the weaker students and quickly bring them up so that no one's bored. If you have bonus questions for the faster kids, you don't need to differentiate that much, and that's a radical claim because people always think you're going to hold back the faster students or bore them.
23:23
We've done multiple studies where we've shown the faster kids flourish and do better, Everyone goes further together. Everyone has a better mindset because everyone sees everyone can get better through practice. That's the only innovative thing in jump is maybe because I'm a playwright. I saw the kids as an audience when I started teaching math and they'll never get more excited than when they can get together on something and feel equal. So that's an innovation, maybe, but the actual methods are not that innovative. Maybe the care we took in scaffolding things is innovative, but teachers know this and if they were allowed to teach that way, whether or not they're using jump, we'd have a much stronger and healthier education system.
Blake Melnick Host 24:00
Right, but clearly you've been recognized as an innovator.Somebody thinks you're innovating.
John Mighton Guest 24:06
For your local guess I'm not just being modest. What we found works is what most teachers would think is good teaching if they were allowed. As I said, the only thing that's different is this idea that you could actually do it for a whole class or that you don't need to differentiate so much that you can create this equity very quickly. Maybe that's innovative, but also in terms of our accomplishments, they don't match our results. 20 years ago I saw grade three class all get over 90 on a grade seven fraction test and the ones who missed the test begged to write it. So how come I couldn't make that happen? More broadly, the problems are so intractable and difficult that I don't pride myself as an innovator. I'm just trying every day. The only thing I could maybe take pride is that we haven't given up yet.
Blake Melnick Host 24:54
You're working on changing people's mindset around mathematics. You've certainly altered mine in our two conversations. It makes me think that I need to go back and redo all my math curriculum from the past.
John Mighton Guest 25:07
I can give you one hint. I even learned recently. I have trouble keeping myself in the 85% zone. I'm always reading stuff that's too hard. I give up, I procrastinate. Recently I decided I'm only going to read stuff where I'm in that zone, and I'm not going to forget it. I'm going to go back to the beginning again and I'm going to redo it like just for a few minutes.
25:26
I learned this at age 65. It's made a huge difference in my experience of learning and the productivity. If you do math, don't push yourself too hard and always keep going back until you understand it completely.
Blake Melnick Host 25:41
Teaching old dog new tricks and all that kind of stuff right? One of the things we talked about that I think is really interesting in terms of changing people's mindsets and students' mindsets and teachers is the use of analogy. You're a writer, you're a playwright. Analogy you understand. Why is analogy so important in terms of conveying new concepts in mathematics, to helping develop that mindset I'll call it the mindset for innovation, because I do think it is that notion that you can incrementally improve from where you start. Why is analogy so important?
John Mighton Guest 26:15
That's a great question. I wrote a chapter on this in that book I mentioned. All.Things.Being Equal.
John Mighton Guest 26:20
One thing that I feel is common to mathematics and writing I'm always seeing analogies. I'm always looking for analogies, connections between things. Over the years I've developed a kind of feeling of resonance where I can feel these things. That's what's allowed me to be creative in mathematics. In fact, in the past 200 years almost all the progress in mathematics has been people seeing analogies between things, which is surprising to people. People don't think there's that level of creativity in mathematics, but there is. There's research showing that we're not naturally good at seeing analogies. We're very bad at actually humans are. But the research thankfully says you can train that ability really quickly, both in the arts and in the sciences, and that's one thing we really need to focus on is helping kids see analogies.
Blake MelnickHost27:07
I can give you an example for math, if you want.
John Mighton Guest 27:09
A triangle has three points and three edges. It looks like it's very different from a circle in geometry. But if you don't care about those features, if you just care, can I stretch a triangle in a circle? Can I pull a triangle so it becomes a circle? They're identical. But if you have a nod of string that's all nodded up, you may not be able to stretch it out into a circle. But in topology, in mathematics, people see the triangle and the circle is the same, they're the same thing. So it's kind of analogy. They see we don't care about things like points and lines, we just care about can you stretch them and turn one into the other? Turns out. Topology underlies all of modern physics. Even the way a virus will attack a cell depends on what kind of nod DNA is. So this one insight that we could look at geometric figures more abstractly to see things that look different as the same is responsible for vast amounts of scientific progress. So that's what I mean by the importance of analogy.
Blake Melnick Host 28:05
When we discussed the importance of analogy during our pre-call, it made me think about my own kids. So I went and spoke to my eldest daughter about her experience with math. She was a good math student, but she said I just didn't like it. And I asked her why. And she explained it to me this way she said that in every other subject, including science, there isn't a definitive right answer. In science, you're testing a hypothesis, you're experimenting. You may come up with results you weren't expecting and that forces you to go back and test again or revise your testing methods. There's a certain level of creativity in that that she did not find in mathematics and I'm going to say analogy here because she is a writer. I know that's what she's referring to when she says I didn't find math offered me a creative outlet. But what you're doing with jump math is actually bringing creativity to the subject.
John Mighton Guest 28:59
Yes, and it's too bad. Kids don't have that experience where they can see how beautiful these connections are and how surprising they are and how much creativity is involved in math. If math is taught well, they love also getting the right answer. They love solving a challenge and that's one of the benefits of math. It's much nicer than in writing. I never know if what I'm doing is good. In math I at least know I've got it. I'm hoping as we develop jump more and we have more opportunity to develop more and more enriched materials, we can show kids a level of sort of wonder in math even more.
Blake Melnick Host 29:33
That's a great segue. Let's shift over to a discussion about jump math and what's going on with the organization right now. I know you and I talked about some work that you're doing in the United States. I got a sense that you felt that there was more openness for incorporating jump math into the curriculum in the United States. Are you getting more interested in the US than you are here in Canada?
John Mighton Guest 29:56
We were, but I think now Canada is really taking off. But in the US most states have very similar curriculum standards and we match those. In Canada there's different standards across Canada and we've had to adapt the book to every province, but in the states our books work across most states so that's an advantage.
30:16
But I think there's been a real turning point, a tipping point in Canada, alberta licensed jump for elementary schools in the province. We've got whole school districts now adopting the program and a lot of districts trying it and piloting it. We've got some really nice partnerships with education faculties now and parents. We're starting to do family math game nights for parents, give them webinars or talks on what they can do at home, and we even formed a partnership with YMCA to develop a preschool program that we just tested. It got great results. So I think we're having a lot of breakthroughs in Canada now.
Blake Melnick Host 30:51
All our conversations around hierarchies and intellectual disparity made me think a lot about creating that level of equalization. And when I think about my own research around innovation, I think we should be doing the same thing. Serving underrepresented communities is maybe the best thing we can be doing, and I say that as the collective we. But if we close the intellectual gap, especially for underserved communities, what a wonderful accomplishment. That's a true innovation right there, because we've seen all the research. For the large part there is always exceptions, but people that live in poor neighborhoods, unless you choose to be a playwright or a poet.
31:30
It's part of how we fund things too, based on where the schools happen to be and the tax base, particularly in the US. What a wonderful thing to show increased achievement and developing that self-confidence within these communities where a lot of kids don't think they're ever going to get beyond high school, if they even make it through that and have the intellectual capability to go beyond that and to do great things with their lives. What a great way to do that by focusing on those communities that are in most need of a jump map.
John Mighton Guest 32:01
We did a study in England where we worked with behavioral and special ed kids in a very poor neighborhood of London and every year only about 15% were considered at grade level and every year about 60% passed national exams. And the teacher said the behavioral kids are now reprimanding the other kids because they want to get on with their lesson. So we've seen the potential impact in high needs communities.
32:24
What keeps me up at night is all the kids who are falling for the cracks, who will drop out or who will get in trouble because they've never had a chance to realize their full intellectual potential?
Blake Melnick Host 32:35
Perhaps one of the highlights of my career was when I was a drama teacher teaching at Vaughan Road Collegiate in the early 90s and I took a bunch of kids that no one believed would ever finish high school, let alone to be able to be in a play and have the intellectual capability to understand the script and the discipline and dedication to show up to rehearsals. But it turned into this remarkable, transformative experience for these kids. We won the Sears 50th Anniversary Drama Festival. That year the Sears Drama Festival produced a documentary called Just Watch which featured these kids going through this transformative process. They all graduated high school, most went on to College University and are now in a variety of different fields, mostly in the arts, by the way, in film and theater and performance art all because they developed that level of self-confidence that they were capable of doing something great and they had me who believed in them.
John Mighton Guest 33:34
What you did was so hard because it's at a high school level, it's in the arts. It's amazing what you did and you saw the power of that kind of transformative experience.
Blake Melnick Host 33:45
As soon as the kids saw themselves as being capable, that changed everything in their lives. And I still hear from those kids. I'm not kids anymore, but I still hear from them. And while this experience was really transformative for these kids, it was for me as well, Because I realized that I could affect an outcome simply by believing in these students, that I could actually help them change their own lives.
John Mighton Guest 34:12
And that's innovation, exactly. And that's why I think you're right to think anyone can do that. If they find a way of bringing out the best and the people they're working with, if they're willing to keep experimenting and getting better at it, I think anyone can be an innovator and you don't have to worry so much about whether what you're doing is having impact or not. You can see it.
Blake Melnick Host 34:32
Yes, you're right, you can see it. These kids were dealing with complex literary material with lots of analogy, lots of metaphor, lots of hidden meaning, and not only did they learn about teamwork and collaboration and how to produce something they're proud of, they also increased their intellectual capability in the process, much like you're trying to do with Jump Math the name Jump Math. How did you come up with that and tell us what it means?
John Mighton Guest 34:56
It's the junior undiscovered mathematical prodigies.
Blake Melnick Host 35:00
I love it when you get out of the gate. You're letting kids know that they have the potential to be exceptional in mathematics.
John Mighton Guest 35:08
You just need to be discovered.
Blake Melnick Host 35:09
So what's next for you? In Jump Math, john, you persevered for a long period of time. How many schools are using Jump Math approximately?
John Mighton Guest 35:18
We know there's about 200,000 kids using it as their main classroom program, but we think that vastly underestimates what we're doing, because we know lots of people are, say, on the Alberta Learns website. They're downloading materials. We don't know how many exactly I think we reach. Probably about 10% of Canadian students are getting Jump in some way.
Blake Melnick Host 35:37
Right, you have a pay-as-you-can model for Jump Math.
John Mighton Guest 35:42
As a charity, we can give the program away to any kind of communities that can't afford it. But also we are trying to take bad products out of the system by replacing them with Jump, and schools can pay for resources, so we charge when they can afford it.
Blake Melnick Host 35:59
I'm assuming there's some teachers that do this on the side as well.
John Mighton Guest 36:03
Yeah, there's tons of teachers that are using parts of Jump. Or I was tutoring a relative and saw one of my lessons that I wrote at home. It was Xeroxed. I think that's happening a lot. The only unfortunate thing is Jump works way better if you have professional learning and if you're using the whole program. Sometimes people just think we're only the student books, but the most important thing are the teacher's guide lessons. We call it structured inquiry. The teacher should be keeping kids on the edge of their seat with these challenges, these questions, and then they do practice. But if you're missing that, it's not really Jump.
Blake Melnick Host 36:39
Do you do a lot of work with teacher education groups.
John Mighton Guest 36:41
Yeah, we have very extensive professional learning. We're doing a pilot in Toronto right now where we've gone right into the school, done demo lessons, have lots of meetings with the teachers and support, and we worked with the University of Calgary Math Ed Department, the Workland School of Education. They ran a study of Jump. They helped us improve our professional learning. We now work very closely together. When a district adopts Jump, they might provide the professional learning. So we're constantly learning from each other.
Blake Melnick Host 37:11
So Jump is, in a sense, a resource for all teachers using JumpMath. In other words, they can reach out to you if they have questions or if they want some advice. Yeah, fantastic.
John Mighton Guest 37:23
Yeah, we are even trying to motivate teachers to be master teachers where they'll do a demo lesson for other teachers. We had two teachers do demo lessons the other day and after some math consults and watches and they recommend Jump to their school district. Teachers have an enormous amount of power and can really inspire other teachers. Teachers trust other teachers.
Blake Melnick Host 37:42
Yes, I agree.
John Mighton Guest 37:43
So we're trying to empower teachers in that way to help their peers.
Blake Melnick Host 37:47
Seems to me this is a wonderful opportunity, a wonderful resource for teachers. I think more teachers are aware of it, the more likely they are to start to use it either directly or even indirectly in their classrooms to try it out, because everybody wants their students to succeed. And you did mention I think you had this experience as a math teacher that it's not like the teacher walks in with the utmost confidence about how to teach math. If the teacher doesn't feel they're capable, then that transfers over to the students.
John Mighton  Guest 38:16
So that's one reason we put on our website JumpMath.org. Teachers can find lots of free sample lessons they can try and if they look for sample lessons, they can create a free account, they can log in, they can get sample lessons and they come with the slides, with the teacher's guides, the student resources and everything, so they can try a full lesson.
Blake Melnick Host 38:34
Perfect.
John Mighton Guest 38:34
We really wrote them as much to inspire teachers and to help them develop confidence as the students. We had a couple of math phobic teachers out west who, after doing a couple years of jump, went on to do masters in math education and now are inspiring other teachers, just like we believe. Any student can learn math. Any teacher can quickly learn math at a deep level.
Blake Melnick Host 38:56
I love the approach you take in jump math to pattern recognition. The visual elements of jump math and where I do seem to have some competency in mathematics is around pattern recognition. So in my professional career in knowledge management, one of the things that I've realized I'm pretty good at is seeing patterns. I look at patterns across an organization. Executives often say my goal and objective is to create a knowledge-centric organization or a culture of innovation within my organization, and I'm able to look across the various elements of their business, the structural elements, their mentoring programs, their professional development programs, how they assess people, how they onboard people, how they off-board people, really the day-to-day culture of the organization, and I can see how these pieces need to fit together to deliver the results the executives want. Very much like the patterning you do in jump math.
39:54
The other thing I thought about while I was working through some of the lessons that you gave me was the game domino train. Do you know it? It's the whole idea of creating patterns or recognizing patterns using dominoes, and dominoes is a bit of a math game. You have to look at your tiles and think I want to build the longest string of numbers that match, but before you can even begin to do that. You have to try to figure out how many patterns or how many strings that you can link together with the objective of getting rid of all your tiles before everybody else. But you also have to think about okay, I can build this string not just on my own train, but I can also build it on other people's trains. And it forces you to look around the board and say, if somebody adds this tile, then I'll have to modify my whole strategy.
40:44
Conceptually, you're trying to figure out all the possible options for your tiles in advance Much like chess, of course in a much simpler way, and I found that I'm actually really good at it. It's a surprise, the hell out of me. I'm thinking, oh, I got counting dominoes, I was going to be terrible, but I was able to see the patterns and that was pretty exciting for me. So I imagine that's the same thing as you mentioned earlier for young kids when they see those patterns.
John Mighton Guest 41:11
There's a double impact in the pride of mastering that problem. But also there's a beauty in these patterns and I think we respond to those patterns and structures and connections deeply and spiritually even. It's a tragedy that more people can't experience that and what you're seeing, the work you're doing, to hold a conditional statement in your head if I see this, I'm going to do this to see patterns and stuff. That's what I do as a researcher. It's no different.
41:37
You should find math much easier as an adult and if there's anything in our student books you don't understand, maybe go to the teacher's guide lesson, which is online. You can get them all online once you create an account and you can actually find the lesson that goes with those pages. Just read the teacher's guide. You should be able to understand it and notice how much easier it is. Now that you're an adult and you have a positive mindset, I say to my students if there's anything you don't understand, that's my fault, not yours. I didn't explain it well. If there's something you don't understand in the jump books, you just got to ask or get help. It's a problem in the lesson.
Blake Melnick Host 42:09
So you're basically saying that even adults can go back and benefit from jump math, particularly those like me that were not good math. Students can go back and actually up their own understanding of mathematics.
John Mighton Guest 42:21
Oh for sure. I'd highly recommend it because the confidence it gave me when I went back and saw all these things I struggled with were not beyond me had a big impact even for that reason. But also to engage more with the math and enjoy it more. People love Sudoku. Those people could be doing research. If you have the perseverance in Sudoku and you're training yourself and all the strategies and stuff, that's math research right there. That's all you're doing as a mathematician.
Blake Melnick Host 42:46
And, as we know, math is increasingly becoming more and more important in our world, and it's critical that people get their heads around a basic understanding of math. We have this onset of AI and that's going to have huge impacts on our society and on people. I have a guest coming on the show after you who is like you in some respects he's a robotics engineer, deep knowledge in astrophysics, and is also a writer and has published a book that we're going to be talking about. I'm going to take a look at the world of AI through the lens of literature, but he raises some really interesting questions, thoughts, predictions about the potential impact of AI on our world.
43:27
It's been a delight talking to you, john. I've really enjoyed it. You've taught me a lot For our listeners. There's some links on the blog post for this episode so you can find out more about jump math, get engaged, reach out to the organization for help and so on. I always like to give our guests the final word on the show. Is there anything we haven't covered that you would like our listeners to be aware of?
John Mighton Guest 43:52
One thing I could say is I don't know much about artificial intelligence, but maybe that our greatest purpose as humans is to actually appreciate the beauty of the world on every level. It's in the patterns in literature and math, because machines may be literally better than us at almost anything, but what we may do best is actually worshiping the world with every part of our brain, like actually being aware of its beauty and also maybe being able to stand back sometimes and see things that a machine can't do, because we have a broader perspective. I think those may be the things we need to focus on.
Blake Melnick Host 44:26
We are being a little led by technology rather than leading the technology. So you've made a good point there. I think we really need to be thoughtful about this new emerging technology and really how we see it benefiting us as human beings rather than the other way around. 

This concludes my interview with Mr John Mighton, renowned social entrepreneur and founder of Jump Math, a charity organization dedicated to addressing student underachievement and mathematics. Join us for the next episode of For what it's Worth called ALMA, with my guest, eric Montiero, robotics engineer by training, analytics expert by profession and author by accident. We'll be discussing artificial intelligence through the lens of his novel, ALMA. You won't want to miss it, for what it's worth.




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