Learning to Enjoy Math, with Anthony Ase'

In this episode, Anthony Asé, a veteran Algebra and Physics teacher from Lindbergh High School in Renton, Washington, shares how he uses trust, relevance, and creativity to shift student perspectives on math. With over two decades of experience and a passion for working with youth, Anthony brings thoughtful insight into how math classrooms can become spaces of empowerment and growth.

Anthony discusses strategies for overcoming math anxiety, using AI as a learning tool, and making math meaningful for students today. In his approach—which centers on student connection, understanding, and respect—Anthony reframes "wrong answers" as learning opportunities and uses puzzles to build community. Tune in for practical tips and an encouraging vision of what math learning can be. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Transcript

Anthony Ase' 0:00
You're in ninth grade. Now go look back at that stuff that you thought was hard in fourth grade. Your brain is better now. Try again. And they can recognize, oh, it's not that big a deal. I just thought it was. Yeah, your brain has developed some. A lot of that stuff that was hard when you were younger, it's not so hard.

Winston Benjamin 0:20
The topic for today's podcast is learning to enjoy math with Anthony Ase'.

Winston Benjamin 0:26
Unpacking Education is brought to you by AVID. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student to learn. More about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:39
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education.

Rena Clark 0:49
I'm Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:50
I'm Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:52
And I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 0:55
And we're here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 1:00
Education is our passport to the future.

Winston Benjamin 1:04
Our quote for today is from Katherine Johnson, an African American mathematician at NASA who played a critical role in NASA's early space flights. She said, "We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop off of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology, and there will always, always be mathematics."

Winston Benjamin 1:36
Paul, Rena, what are you thinking about that quote?

Rena Clark 1:47
Yeah, it's interesting. So I think about my own background and thinking STEM is where curiosity and creativity meet. So it makes me excited because I really see those two things coming together. And the context, even thinking in the quote, it's how we understand the world. How do we understand the world and solve problems and give us not just opportunities, but a pathway to explore and ask questions and create things, discover questions, and then create ways to answer those questions. So I think it's more about a way of thinking. We've talked about computational thinking, different things, but a way of thinking and seeing the world through a different lens.

Paul Beckermann 2:32
Yeah, and since being on this team, I have learned much more about STEM because I was an English major. So I figure that gives me the latitude to be a little philosophical in my response. Because in some ways, I feel STEM is okay, here's the user's guide to the universe. It helps because it helps make sense out of all the elements and interactions of the world that we live in.

I really believe it's our key to unlocking future opportunities and possibilities that lie in our physical world. Humanities, what I was in, is more the interpretation and creative representation of that reality, ways to make sense of it in terms of our everyday lives. But STEM holds the key, I think, to understanding all that at an elemental level, and STEM is the key to unlocking those new possibilities. So without STEM, can't really move forward and have new discoveries. So go STEM.

Winston Benjamin 3:25
See, I hear that, and I am going to say my philosophy brain is still holding on to no math. But again, many students in our school system, math sometimes can cause fear, trauma, and just less enjoyment for students. And I love how both of you are saying that math and STEM opens up opportunities for students to engage with the world around them.

We are excited today because we have a math teacher. We are excited to welcome Anthony Ase' to the Unpacking Education podcast. Anthony is currently teaching algebra and physics at Lindbergh High School in the Renton School District. He has 25 years of experience as an educator and 11 years at the Renton School District. Welcome, Anthony. Thank you for being here.

Anthony Ase' 4:14
Hey, thank you for having me. I appreciate you.

Winston Benjamin 4:17
So one of the things that we really try to do is help ground our guests to our listeners. Do you mind giving us a little bit more around your background on your educational journey to become a math teacher?

Anthony Ase' 4:33
Sure, I'll try to briefly sum up a lifetime. So starting off in high school, I used to help kids with their classwork—kids, we were also kids. I used to help kids with classwork, and my teachers would always say, you should be a teacher. And I would laugh in their face. Teachers? I'm—shout out to Señora Lopez at Kent School District. She's fantastic. Reached out to her after I became a teacher and said, sorry. But that was how I started with the idea of teaching, was no in all the ways no happens.

Fast forward, I ended up working at a daycare when I was about 17, 18, and I fell in love with working with kids, which was strange. I didn't expect it. I continued to work at daycares, camp counselor, tutoring, all that jazz. And then I got my para certification from Whatcom Community College up in Bellingham. I went to school at WWU to get my teaching certificate. I failed to do that, ended up getting a general studies degree, and then I got my teaching cert via master's.

So my route was circuitous, but I stayed working with kids that whole time. I was working with them because I never stopped enjoying that. I enjoy working with kids. That's pretty much the story. I've worked at middle schools, I've worked at elementary schools, I've worked with EBD students, I've worked with severe mental health—all the things—and now I'm at a high school.

Rena Clark 6:15
So you talk about your journey a little bit. I worked with elementary math and middle school math, and now you're going from teaching middle school math now to high school. What's the difference between teaching middle school and high school? What are some things that you've noticed?

Anthony Ase' 6:36
Interesting bit. So high school, my students know that they need what I'm teaching, but what they think they need is the checkmark so they can graduate. But in middle school, kids have this extenuation towards adults, so everything I said was, oh, for real? There's this weird middle school—I don't know the exact word for it, I've been thinking about it—but it's almost on the edge of glorification, right? You're an adult, and you treat me as if I'm also going to be an adult. So you must be the coolest thing ever. So I care about everything you say.

Whereas high school is, yeah, of course you treat me like an adult. I'm a grown man. Why wouldn't you? Right? They're not, but that's neither here nor there. It's a weirdness, and there are different motivations or something.

The other big difference there is just that I taught both the same content in middle school and in high school, right? So I taught algebra to eighth graders, and I taught algebra to ninth and tenth graders as well. And just that differentiation between just the years of development, sometimes I can go back and say, hey, you're in ninth grade now. Go look back at that stuff that you thought was hard in fourth grade. Your brain's better now. Try again. And they can recognize, oh, it's not that big a deal. I just thought it was. So that's been the bigger positive change. It's just the ability to say, yeah, your brain's developed some. A lot of that stuff that was hard when you were younger, it's not so hard.

Paul Beckermann 8:26
Well, another thing that may or may not be different between high school and middle school, and Winston mentioned this earlier, was that a lot of students do have this fear of math, or this apprehension of math. How do you help kids with that?

Anthony Ase' 8:39
I don't have a direct "this is what I do." What I have is acknowledgement of the fear, right? And then a portion of where it comes from, right? So okay, you have math anxiety. Fine. What's math ever done to you to make you fear it, right?

The fun part about that is the same thing that people are afraid of with math is the same thing why most of us math teachers got into math. There's always a right answer, and because there's always a right answer, that means you're always capable of being just straight up wrong. Your opinion doesn't matter in math, and I think that's more of a thing that we're afraid of.

And so one of the things we really get into is just that, well, no, your opinion does matter. It's not the answer because I'm not only asking you questions that have the answer, right? I'm going to ask what you think about this. Here's a graph. What's it mean? There's no right answer there, which means there's a bunch of right answers, right? So it depends on how you approach it. Four times five is always 20. But hey, why do we need to do four times five? Has a bunch of different answers, and hopefully that takes some of the sharpness away from it. Yeah, you can still be wrong. But also, there's lots more ways for you to get to a right answer.

There's a story I was going to share with this that, yeah, I'm still going to. It's teaching at middle school. I got called out of the classroom to talk to a principal about something, a girl who just the night before came in and was trying to get help on work. And she was at the board, she was explaining things. I came back in, and she just finished explaining after I left the room and came back, and she just finished up.

I'm looking at the board work written wrong. The answer was in fact wrong. But what I could do to say to her, I was, I love exactly what you did. I can see your process. I saw this, this, and this. Can you see where the mistake happened? And she was comfortable enough with me to say no, but I'm certain you'll help me, right? Which was nice just to have, nope, I can't see it, but I'm comfortable with that part that I can't. I'm good here, right?

Paul Beckermann 11:12
I like that. I mean, it really humanizes things, and that's what the kids need. So that's cool.

Winston Benjamin 11:18
And the powerful thing in that is that she knows you're going to walk the path with her, right? She's not alone, and the fear sometimes, as you said, feels like it's coming from being alone. So my dad used to force me to do the multiplication tables, and then I was, we have calculators, so I don't really need to know the multiplication tables. Yeah, she did not agree.

But also, and this leads to my question, we got AI right now, which sometimes people feel is a positive or negative. But how do you engage students in math with this time of AI, recognizing that kids are me might look for the technology as a way to supplement their learning. How do you engage kids in math with the times of AI?

Anthony Ase' 12:13
If I take you at your word and you say engage with the technology to supplement their learning, that's fine, honestly. If you do Google Lens and it shows you the steps about how to do the problem, and you follow those steps and that's supplementary learning, I'm not too mad about that outside of a test, right?

However, when you go to it and you just want it to tell you the answer, if you recall from earlier, I'm not asking questions that are about just the answer. And that's two-fold. More, it gets you involved with your opinion and what matters. And two, it's harder to look up your opinion, right? It's harder to look up your perspective. So if the only things I'm asking can effectively be answered by AI, then I'm not asking good enough questions, right?

With that being said, yeah, it's a problem, right? It's for the kids who—it's a problem for. It's a big problem. I mean, let me put that big caveat in there. Most of my kids, they don't cheat. Most of our kids put in the work. I had maybe three I can count in the last five years that, honest to goodness, went at it and just would not do any work on their own. They would just look it up.

Couple ways I'd handle that. One, one-on-one conversation. Hey, look, this ain't how nobody talks. And you know that. I'm just going to point it out. A kid last week for his final, I just was very honest, just straight up, hey, you got a higher score than Kid A, Kid B, and Kid C, who you know do better in class than you do. And generally, when you're straight up and down with kids, they'll give straight up and down feedback. They're, all right, yeah, I did. What's the next step? All right. Well, for this final, I got to give you this, this, and this. This was the rules for this. Regular test, come see me on Tuesday after school and you can retake it. That's it. And that's pretty much it.

I ask questions that can't be AI because they depend on the kid, and then when I catch the AI out, I'm just going to call it out. There's one more thing I do in my physics class, not so much the algebra. As we're talking math, but I'll show them an AI response and just be, all right, your job is to tell me why it's wrong. Now, you can't use AI to figure it out because it's wrong. We've looked it up here. I'm telling you right now this is incorrect. Use the resources we've just had over the last week and tell me why.

So that's another little tactic that I can do, not so much in math classes, but it works elsewhere.

Paul Beckermann 15:05
How do the kids respond to that?

Anthony Ase' 15:08
For the first bit, they get really excited because even high schoolers love to prove something wrong. I think there's something in us, oh, I get to tell you that you're wrong. Yeah, I did have one girl last trimester come back to me, it's not wrong, it's right. And I was, it's wrong. Twenty-five times, all I need to do is find three. And she came back, two, three days after the assignment was due, and was, okay, I finally found some stuff. All right, cool, great.

But for the most part, kids get excited about it to just prove AI wrong. And then the number of kids, I mean, it's not a lot, but it's enough that it hits me, comes back. It was, I told my parents that I proved ChatGPT wrong, and they didn't believe it, and I showed them, and blah, blah, blah. And I'm, yeah.

Rena Clark 16:09
You're talking about how you can, in math these days, you're asking questions that can't be looked up in AI. You're talking about really developing students' thinking skills and developing many ways to get to a correct answer, many different pathways. So thinking about that and what students are learning in your class or your classes, how are you making that connection between what you're doing in the math class to their other classes or outside? Because so many kids, oh, I'm never going to use this. What's the point? So how are we making those skills, those things they're learning, valued or connected to things outside just the math class?

Anthony Ase' 16:49
I try to be very explicit to start off with, here is a direct example of when this gets used. And I try to make it as close to their current lifetime as possible, right?

Depressing information coming up here. I did my master's thesis on motivating students, and they aren't motivated by the future. Result after result after result, research after research after research, the future is not a motivating factor for students. And so when I make these explicit connections, it's got to be right now, maybe next month future, but maybe right.

So you'll hear, if you walk into my classroom in middle school, you'll hear me talking about toilet paper, buying cookies. Sixth, seventh, eighth grade math is the math of buying stuff 100%. Now, in algebra one, geometry, I don't teach that. It's more of the math—that's why the logic of things. I'll talk about, for my football players, when you juke, at some point in time, you're going to take a hit, you're going to redirect that force. This is where that's going to come from. I'm going to try and make it connect to something they talked about before.

And I think the big point there is recognizing that I have to talk to them first, and then I can try to make it connect to them, but I got to know them first. And I'm not going to say it's easy or quick, but it's useful, right?

Rena Clark 18:36
What? You need to know your students to relate to them? What?

Paul Beckermann 18:39
Yeah, imagine that.

Rena Clark 18:43
Even in math.

Paul Beckermann 18:45
Even in math. All right. Well, let's go to the content piece of things just a little bit. How do you vertically align what students should know and what they need to know to prepare them as math learners?

Anthony Ase' 18:57
What I'm about to say goes against a lot of internet talk. I love the Common Core standards. They are stupendously—you can read them from third grade to high school, and you can see how they build on each other, right? They go right with each other.

So one of the things I do, middle school and high school, is for entry tasks, I will 80% of the time use an old standard that leads into today's lesson for the entry task. So an entry task—I mean, you've done this conversation enough—but when they come in, they know in my class, on this screen, there will always be a thing to do while I'm doing attendance or whatever. And that 80% of the time will be a lead-in from previous stuff to today's stuff. And then at the end of today's stuff, I will make a connection to what's coming in the future.

Direct example: today, we started graphing functions for the first time, and they were graphing the path of a Ferris wheel. Now I am making a circle with my hand because that's what they thought the path would be up on a graph. And we got them to realize that it is—describe what's happening to the Ferris wheel cart. What's starting to go down, then it's going up, and it's going back down. Model us, that's your graph, the description you just made. Why does this matter? You just did your first sine curve, which you don't need till geometry, right? But just dropping it that, you just did some upper-level math stuff, and they ain't going to try to tell you I—act—they, right?

So when you piece that together with this standard leads to this standard, leads to this standard, I'm preparing you for the next course. That's the Common Core. Standards make it easy to do that. They have a whole map of where the standards go to and where they come from. It's nice to be able to do that. If I care about standards, that was much harder to do if I don't care about standards and I'm just teaching the way I was always taught before.

Paul Beckermann 21:09
And I love how you're activating learning each day. So that's great. That's a great way to bring the kids right into that learning too. Cool. Thanks.

Winston Benjamin 21:19
So as a middle school dean, I've seen a lot of kids talk about math nowadays, and I've had conversations with parents about math. It feels math has changed in terms of the way we teach math or where we are understanding math. How do we differentiate how math is taught now in comparison to how we were taught, right, as a way of helping parents break out of I don't understand this new math, right, helping eliminate that conversation?

Anthony Ase' 21:55
So that answer is a two-pronged answer. One, the sadder answer response is we're not doing it differently, right? So there are some teachers who are teaching things the exact same way they learned it 25, 30 years ago, right? A lot of us graduated high school before this millennium started. And we have to acknowledge that things are different. But here's where that happens. Well, it works for me. It worked for 90% of math teachers. And so changing that is a struggle. So that's the negative side of that answer, is we're not changing with the times.

The positive side of that struggle comes this. Some of us recognize that the way we were taught math, we weren't taught math, right? We were taught memorization skills, which are good to have, right? I will say this. I remember teaching parallel lines cut with a transversal in class many years ago, and I had a revelation at the board. I made my little line through the parallel lines. See the academic terminology I just used? I can see your face is not cutting. But don't worry, we're getting to the simplicity here.

I was taught parallel lines, this cutting body, transversal, alternate interior angles are congruent. Alternate, corresponding angles are congruent. And then in the middle of class, I drew this line, I stopped, and I just said, the small ones are the same as the small ones and the big ones are the same as the big ones, which is what it boils down to. That understanding didn't come until I was in the middle of teaching that lesson for the third or fourth time, by the way. It's not the first time I taught it. And I was, and the small ones and the big ones together make 180. But I memorized all those names. I memorized vertical angles, I memorized corresponding, but I never put together the small ones are the same as the small ones. The big ones are the same as the other big ones.

And so now that is the leading point to how I teach math. I want you to get the understanding. Yeah, when you're multiplying, dividing fractions, it's keep, flip, flip or whatever, right? But also I want you to understand that dividing doesn't just mean making smaller. It means how many of this part can I get out of that part of the thing? I can draw that picture and I can make it make sense.

And leading that back to our AI thing, AI can't make sense. It can only regurgitate the sense that somebody else tried to make of it before. So if I come to this is what I'm teaching you in math is logic, sense-making, conceptual understanding, then all this world of newness that's happening, you are not prepared to understand it, make it make sense, and then do a little bit more on top of it.

Rena Clark 25:21
Yeah, I didn't—I don't feel I actually figured out how to—I was thinking, we were taught to multiply the standard algorithm, and I am so much better after teaching math, just with all the different strategies doing it in my head that I learned much later on. I'm, if I had been taught math this way to start with, oh my goodness, would have been so much easier. Because even if you ask most adults, you're, they're literally in their head doing a standard algorithm. It was, oh, what's 302 times five? I'm, we just do 300 times five, which could do real quick, and then two times five and just add it. You can do it so fast. And I literally can see people in their head doing a standard algorithm.

Yeah, it's a sense-making piece, and that's important to explain to parents. But it's really great with kids, because, as you said, now we have multiple strategies, different pathways. And back to your earlier comment that once we know our students, we can really support them with those different on-ramps.

So I'm just curious now, you're all on trimesters, which is interesting because you're fitting a lot into the tri—a little bit different system than a lot of people are on semesters. So how are we building that class culture that allows for students to—you get to know students and then build that trust you did with that one student. So they can, we call it learning forward, or making mistakes through. So what are some of those strategies? Because I think you all just started the tri. So maybe you're doing this, maybe you have the same students, it depends.

Anthony Ase' 26:59
Yeah, I get really lucky. I get to keep a lot of my students for each trimester. That's not always the case. My physics kids are all brand new. I haven't had any of them before. I took maybe a handful in math class previously. But culture building is a—whatever. I'm not humble. Culture building is a thing that I think I'm pretty good at, right?

And the way I go about it is—I'm just going to sound dumb, but I genuinely believe that classroom culture is made by those who exist in the culture, not the ruler of the room, right? So if I want there to be a classroom culture, then I have to accept that I'm not the one who makes it, all right? I can guide it, and I can say, honestly, that's straight up not allowed. That's fine and dandy. But I got to see—I got to be willing to take a little bit of the power, authority that I've given and give it to them. So sometimes what that means is I let them mess up. I don't stop it. And then I just say, all right, well, you got to do that here.

This works with vagaries. Student A and Student B did absolutely nothing together as part of their work. Friday comes along and I say to them, hey, Student B, you did nothing with Student A, not a good look for you. There's one assignment this trimester so far, you got a zero on it because you also didn't do nothing. But I know you're both capable. On Monday, I'm recommending that you do not work with that particular partner. You have it. You can make different choices.

Today is Monday. Student A goes over to Student B, sits down. And I say, hey, I'm already telling you, not a good idea. Oh no, no. We got it today. I'm going to let y'all do this. I'm not going to get in the way, and you're going to see what happens. They did. They saw what happened. That's the second zero in the grade book for both of them. Do I this particular thing? No. Will it stay this way? I don't believe so. But it requires me to trust that eventually they'll make better choices.

Rena Clark 29:32
The key there, though, is also with guidance.

Anthony Ase' 29:35
Yes. Yes, right? It's not I just said, oh, well, they're doing jokiness, and I'm done. I'm not going to stop letting them know it's not a good choice. I'm also not going to stop showing them the results of that choice. But I'm not going to be, all right, you outside, you over here yet, right? There's a process to that of, no, I'm going to let you do your thing for the most part.

Same, exact same classroom, a student who I've had before, who was doing a lot of nothing. I let them choose their partners. I let them work with who they want to work with. She chose a brand new person to work with this trimester that she had never worked with before. She's turned in everything. It is—it's not 100% done, but it's all turned in, which was not the case last trimester.

So also exploiting that positive and being, at one point in time, this was Thursday maybe, I was, oh, hey, what up, Student G? I see you got your notes out first in the classroom. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate that. And she came up to me later after doing half her work, and I was, hey, remember to do the rest of your work. She's, whatever. I got my notes out before everybody else. And I smile. You sure did. I still want more, right? But she—she understands that, and her day was good. She had a fun day still.

So it took time. Takes a little bit of, I'm not going to—I'm not going to put out every fire. I'm going to contain every fire. The metaphor is, I'm going to contain everybody. I'm going to put it in the right spot. I'm going to keep my eye on it, but I'm not going to put out every fire because I have to trust them to know that they can put out some of those fires. And that helps them build that culture.

Back in my middle school days, we speak classroom agreements and all that jazz. The first agreements that I forced on them was something that I had to follow so that they knew that I'm, hey, give me a rule. What's—usually it's something allow us to have brain breaks and stuff. I always do anyway, right? It's not ideal. But they know that the first thing that's happening is, I'm in this with you. We are creating norms for us. Now I'm going to do the grading. I'm going to do the assignments. There are things that are just me. I'm going to dictate those. I'm a dictator for some of it. But when it comes to culture, I got to know what theirs is. It goes back to talking to other stuff.

Paul Beckermann 32:20
So you've been doing this for 25 years you said. I'm curious if you've—

Anthony Ase' 32:26
Different degrees. Okay, para educator, teacher.

Paul Beckermann 32:30
Yeah, you're doing this. You've been working with kids for a long time, right? And I'm just curious if you've noticed any shifts in student social connections, that culture that you talked about, but student culture, expectations, behavior. Have you seen changes? And if so, what are your thoughts about that?

Anthony Ase' 32:48
Ah, the biggest change I see is essentially the isolation socialness, if that's a way to put it. My first batch of kids when I first started as a para at Boudoin Middle School up in Bellingham, those kids didn't have phones. Phones existed, right? But it wasn't for kids. Those kids weren't on Instagram. TikTok didn't exist. What they wanted to do was not have homework so then go out, ride bikes, and yeah, the idea, right?

Fast forward 10 years, and every kid I know who did something outside the house, it was planned and scheduled, right? Even if they didn't have a planning schedule, they weren't leaving the house. And so that was—that's a weird thing to, for me. As, I'm in my 40s, you're a kid, you go outside. That's not the case.

The other thing that's weird for me to catch on to was, oh, the internet is real for them. That's a real social place. If you told me somebody tweeted something about me or posted online about me, I'd, I ain't real. I don't care about that, right? But that is where their socializing lies, right? And so when I come through and I tell them the simple things, hey, did you know if you don't look at your phone in bed, you sleep better? Hey, if you, you know, head-on a mode that keeps your phone off, you do whatever. That's literally me telling them, hey, shut out your entire socializing ability for multiple hours a day. I still want to tell them that, and I probably still will continue, but it's a big shift.

Paul Beckermann 34:49
Well, they say that the social media environment is the new mall. It's not new anymore, but when it started, we'd go to the mall to see friends or whatever, and or go to the ballpark or whatever, and now it's an online space for a lot of these kids.

Anthony Ase' 35:05
Go to the skate park, go to the mall, etc.

Rena Clark 35:09
Here's what's fascinating. I—so, my middle school this year, and I know because my kids are at a different middle school, and they are allowed to have access to technology at lunch and between classes. And at my middle school there's no—not even Chromebooks. They're one-to-one. But even at lunch this year, new—not even Chromebooks, no phones, nothing. And the changes we've seen and what kids are doing during lunchtime, they are actually outside playing basketball, outside doing, and here's what's another interesting correlation: the number of breakage and device misuse is less—is more than 50% less than what it was last year, just to give you an idea, because of that unsupervised time.

So it's been a really interesting shift to see. I personally love it. We got complaints. It was hard for two weeks, but now it's so lovely to see kids interacting. And I'm, oh gosh, I wish they would take my own children's stuff away because they don't talk to other kids.

Paul Beckermann 36:08
Yeah, there's an English teacher in our district. She said, oh, now that we've taken the phones away, or they can't have their phones during class, I have to tell kids to stop talking again, and I don't mind.

Anthony Ase' 36:23
It's a strange feature. It's strange when I have, oh, we got a little bit of free time, and it's quiet. Yeah? I'm, yeah, I know y'all each other because we were just doing this project, and y'all were talking throughout the whole thing. But I say it's okay, and on the phone anyway. It's weird.

The second thing that I think is the biggest social shift is because they're social on their own mind socially, right? There's this huge intake of adults' thought in kid brain that doesn't work, right? Because they're reading things that adults are posting and thinking that they correlate to them, and no, you have no experience with that whatsoever. You're saying—you're regurgitating a thing you've read. You're not thinking it through. And that has been the weirder things for me is to just hear my students, middle school and high school, say the same things that I have read my 40-, 50-year-old friends post. I'm, no, no, you're not. You're not in the same social group. You're not peers. But because online, there is no such thing as that, right? There's not that separation. You are digitally peers. Yeah, it's weird.

Winston Benjamin 38:00
Those are really two important things that we don't talk about as in the aspect of social engagement that is really messing with students or young people, right? That they're not engaging with friendships in the way that we used to or we understand. So how do we allow for the growth? So this is the last question that we have for you for tonight. And it's, I think, a really fun question because I do enjoy the way your mind works. What's been on your mind lately? What have you been pondering? What's going on? Talk to me. What's been on your mind?

Anthony Ase' 38:35
Oh, education-wise? So many. The question comes up very often, how long am I going to keep doing this? Right? I think you know that I ran for City Council a few years back, and I'm debating if the idea to run for office matters now, or do I do more good staying in the district? Or, questions, big questions.

Again, I used to work at district office, and the question of how do I convince other teachers to let kids grow up, or to accept that things are changing? How much do I accept that things are changing? Because, I mean, the last question, I just spent a big point of time basically complaining that kids these days, they don't play we used to. But should I be, okay, they're a different breed. They're doing things differently. I don't play my mama played, but I don't.

So I think the biggest question on my brain is, in a world that changes as fast as ours does, how can I possibly prepare them to use what I don't know what's coming? I think the only way I can do that is to give them that autonomy, give them that structure that says this is how you figure something out, and let them have a place, a safe place, to try and fail and redo, because they're going to go out and try and fail and redo. So you might as well have a little bit of, oh, I remember back in the day that old dude told me when I messed up this, I could try this out. Cool. I'll be that old dude in the back of your head.

But I don't know what's coming in 20 years. I don't know what's coming in 10 years. So how do I get them ready for it? Man, if you had told me that everybody would be trying to sell me a product with AI enhancements in it five years—nothing, but nothing. It's dumb. It doesn't work. I couldn't find a phone to buy this year that didn't have AI as its big thing, and it still doesn't work. If you would have told me that somebody could have a job posting social media messages, I'd—stupid. What are you talking about? But it is. It is a growing industry.

Paul Beckermann 41:17
Yeah. Well, things are definitely changing fast, so I guess we need a toolkit, don't we? Let's hop in.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 41:25
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out, check it out.

Paul Beckermann 41:36
All right, it's toolkit time. Let's share some tools here. Winston, Rena, who'd like to go first?

Rena Clark 41:42
So actually, Anthony mentioned one of my favorite tools, and we actually had the luxury of working together as STEM facilitators. And yes, I heart math, but I also heart Common Core standards. And one of my favorite tools is one of the ones he mentioned, which is the Coherence Map, which you can access. So it is achievethecore.org/coherence-map. And it's awesome because you can map standards, and you can find on-ramps, I say, for students to, all the way through. It's a really great way for understanding and building and understanding. So if you've never seen that, it's an awesome tool.

Paul Beckermann 42:26
Have to check that out. Winston, what do you got?

Winston Benjamin 42:29
So I got a book that people should check out, Helping Teens Overcome Math Anxiety for Teachers, Students and Parents: Five Strategies for Success by Deanna DeMilio. I think it's important that, as Anthony said, he gave a couple of strategies to support students' thinking so that they can overcome that math fear. And we're going into a world where math and computational thinking are going to be essential. So how do we support our students to really be able to engage in that future world? I think helping them deal with the fear around being wrong is really something that would be valuable.

Paul Beckermann 43:11
Yeah, that's great. I'm going to point people to a couple AVID Open Access pieces of material. One is a collection called Effectively Integrate Technology into Your Math Classroom. And if you're not into that, you can go and check out some of our community building resources. So whether you're on the technology side or the human side or a little bit of both, hopefully we have some resources for you. All right, Anthony, you get to drop something in our toolkit as well. What would you like to add?

Anthony Ase' 43:39
I'm going to keep it simple. Keep a puzzle out in your classroom. It is a nice way to—I need a break from whatever it is I'm doing. Also, you don't have to speak on it. People will just do it when they need to. And it's just nuts. It's a thing that the class completes together. It ain't got to be a 50,000-piece puzzle. Just have a puzzle out. And I have said nothing about it this trimester. At least seven kids have started working on it already, right? And not a single one of them has done it inappropriately. Puzzle. Have it out.

Rena Clark 44:21
I like it. All right. Well, that takes us into our next section, our one thing.

Transition Music 44:30
It's time for that one thing. That one thing.

Rena Clark 44:39
I don't know. I'm thinking about a lot of things, so I'm curious what you all are thinking about. What's still left on your mind? What's that one thing? So, Paul, you can go ahead and start us off.

Paul Beckermann 44:49
My notes that I've been taking look kind of like a Word Cloud. I've got so many different things that I've written down. The one thing that's kind of resonating the most, I think, is, Anthony was talking about how things are changing, and how are we ever going to be able to prepare students for everything that's coming? But then he also talked a few times about teaching kids more about the how than the what. The what's important. But really, there's a lot of emphasis on the how. That could be behavior, that could be math concepts. It could be working through, finding your problems. That's sticking with me, and I think that maybe is one of those ways that we can prepare kids for what we don't know is coming.

Winston Benjamin 45:34
I kind of want to piggyback a little bit off your point, Paul, and I think Anthony pointed this out is the key is to support students to become logical. You can argue against this thing called AI. You have the sense to make sense of what's going on. So I think that's a really powerful thing is to allow students to recognize that they have the ability to challenge things, to become logical.

Rena Clark 46:04
And I would say, I just love that you pointed out the future is not a motivating factor. Because how many times, and I literally watch kids rolling their eyes, that's nice, because they just really cannot see themselves or manifest what that means. It needs to be connected to their now, to their why, and you can only do that through knowing your students. I think that's just a very good reminder. So future is not necessarily a motivating factor. How are we connecting it to their right now? How are you, Anthony, anything to add? That one thing?

Anthony Ase' 46:37
It's just pay attention to your kids. Everything stems from that. You can't be culturally responsive if you don't know them. You can't help them figure out logic if you don't know their logic stance currently. Know your kids to the best of your ability, right?

Winston Benjamin 46:57
And that is a wonderful way to close it out and say thank you, Anthony, for helping us think through ways of supporting students as they deal with the challenging subjects, because getting to know your students will help them deal with any subject that they're having difficulties with. So we really appreciate your time and your thinking on today's podcast. Thank you so much.

Anthony Ase' 47:24
Thank you for having me. Appreciate you.

Rena Clark 47:28
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 47:31
We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 47:44
We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 47:49
And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 47:52
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 47:55
You make a difference.