Shock, horror, surprise.

Obviously, I should plant my flag in the sand.

You'd expect someone like me to say, yes, teachers are indispensable, but I'd like to say it's not just because of some vaunted sense of self-preservation that I believe that.

I've got a couple of thoughts in my mind.

One directly builds off of something you just said about the pedagogical principles that you can People don't always, but you can build into an AI model that will help it be more effective.

You talked about not always being as helpful as necessarily a user would like a chatbot to be and instantly give us the answers.

So this is a known thing, right? And so much of you know, Claude Jachet-Petit co-pilot is quite well established how sycophantic these models are because they are trying to drive continued use and engagement, and our fragile little psyches are quite easy to manipulate in those ways.

What would you say to them about how they should approach using AI in the context of learning?

Um, w-wh-when you look back at your journey, it's, it's a decade on now, um, what do you think about the, I guess, not just what's happened to you, but to that thirst for knowledge that you then have witnessed through your YouTube exposure?

exposure?You asked this question before, I think, which sheds light on, on this particular answer, because curiosity, I think, is one of the most, uh, key, you know, quintessential human characteristics.

Even when people, uh, may have had trouble at school, for example, and a lot of people learned not to like maths when they were at school, I think we all have this inbuilt sort of inquisitiveness, and this wonder is one of the brilliant things about YouTube, that so many people are going on there to find explanations and, and demos, and people, you know, illustrating and explaining things that never made sense to us before, or answering questions that we didn't even know that we had.

So I'm really amazed by the fact that when I go onto the back end of my channel, um, there are obviously, as you can imagine, a lot of statistics about who is actually engaging with the content.

And even though I'm a high school teacher, so you'd think that thirteen to seventeen would be the main age bracket of people trying to do their maths homework.

[laughs]

And I do believe that there is a, um, a universal appeal to it.

In fact, I actually literally had a few comments on my channel.

Are there things that you bring to your classroom that you're thinking about them in the back of your mind?

Yeah, let's go to Mr.

Brown.

So he was my agriculture teacher, and the school that I attended was an agricultural high school, so about three quarters of the school's grounds was actually a very large farm, which meant that sometimes when we want- went from our classroom over to our farm plots to, you know, dig up weeds and sow seeds and that kind of thing, um, it, there was a fair walk to get there.

And I still remember clear as day, just as if it was, you know, last week or something like that, as a, you know, first few weeks in, in high school, walking down to the plot, and Mr.

Brown was taking the whole class down, and he turned to me and he said, "So Edward, how are you today?" And it was such a weird moment for me because, you know, as a 12-year-old boy, I don't think I'd ever been treated as a, a fellow human being by an adult before.

I'd been just treated as a child, and I was quite surprised and didn't really know how to respond in the moment.

Eddie, from your position on the ground, what do you think would, uh, make more boys aspire to become teachers?

Are there things that you bring to your classroom that you're thinking about them in the back of your mind?

Yeah, let's go to Mr.

Brown.

So he was my agriculture teacher, and the school that I attended was an agricultural high school, so about three-quarters of the school's grounds was actually a very large farm, which meant that sometimes when we want- went from our classroom over to our farm plots to, you know, dig up weeds and sow seeds and that kind of thing, um, it, there was a fair walk to get there.

And I still remember, clear as day, just as if it was, you know, last week or something like that, as a, you know, first few weeks in, in high school, walking down to the plot, and Mr.

Brown was taking the whole class down.

And he turned to me and he said, "So Edward, how are you today?" And it was such a weird moment for me, because, you know, as a 12-year-old boy, I don't think I'd ever been treated as a, a fellow human being by an adult before.

So I think if we can get rid of those ideas around traditional male role models and emphasize how we can, more men help show, particularly young men, different ways of performing and expressing masculinity with that emphasis on caring, I think will go a long way to making change.

Mm

... what student learning looks like.

Uh, leadership creates that culture, and I started to realize that there were certain things that I would never be able to change and never be able to do differently unless I was willing to take that step and say, "What is, what does the next layer of influence look like?" Now, I came to enter into, you know, m- as you said, mathematics leadership within a school, and I enjoyed it.

I learned a lot about it, but I also realized that there was all of these different dimensions to leadership.

And, and for me, um, I don't think this is exhaustive, but the three main branches of leadership I think that there are in a school are management, wellbeing, and curriculum and instruction.

And I think that, and I'm making a sweeping generalization here, but I think, I mean, I think I've seen enough schools that, that I've got enough data to back this.

I think for the most part, schools do the first two pretty well.

... what is it that motivates you?

Can you explain the math of randomness in a way that, that people could grasp?

The mathematics of randomness is an amazingly broad field, so probably the place that I, uh, would go to is the idea of, if you were flipping a coin repeatedly, we know that there's equal likelihood that it's going to come up heads or come up tails, and that equal likelihood means random.

That's the whole idea that, uh, one outcome is not more likely than the other.But one of the things that's most amazing in the study of randomness is that randomness cannot help but give rise to appearance of order.

So, for example, if you didn't flip one coin, if you flipped a thousand coins and you laid them all out in order, what would happen is that there is an extremely high likelihood that somewhere in your 1,000 coins, you would have a string of tails, tail, tail, tail, tail as you were going along.

You might get 10 or 15 tails in a row, which sounds like it isn't very random, but actually is almost guaranteed to happen if you are going to flip that number of coins in a row.

Now, this is really dangerous.

Uh, people might have heard, if they're interested in sport, they might have heard of the hot hand.

You know? The, the, there (laughs) is like no re- I mean, I'm glad they're not, but, uh, but w- why, what do- w- why have them?