The Math Kids Need for Money and Risk

Read the full transcript — The Missing Math: What Kids Need for Money, Risk, and Real Life (S8E3)

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Vicki Davis (00:00): Welcome back to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. Today we’re talking about the missing math, what kids need for money, risk, and real life.

Announcer (00:11): Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators. Tips and inspiration to elevate your teaching.

Vicki Davis (00:24): So I need to say this up front. This show is not against advanced math. I love algebra and I will work algebra problems for fun. I know that’s different, but Go with me here. We do need kids who will go on to do calculus and engineering. I taught accounting for several years, and some people might not call that math, but it is.

Vicki Davis (00:50): The students who took that class come back and thank me. And some of those students are people I actually do business with now in my hometown. every single day I personally do bookkeeping, not algebra problems. That’s the math that keeps this show on the air. So here’s the question I want you to consider. What math is missing in my school?

Vicki Davis (01:15): So let’s look at some numbers to help us make up our minds. In 2025, American adults got just 49% of everyday money questions right. The lowest area was the understanding of risk at 36%. Gen Z, our youngest adults, averaged about 38% overall this is a growing issue. In an NCAA survey, 58% of 18 to 22-year-olds had bet on sports, and 6% had lost more than $500 in a single day. This is the math that they need. At standard odds, you have to bet $110 to win a hundred. So you have to win more than 52% of your bets just to break even.

Vicki Davis (02:06): So here’s the outcome. After states legalized online sports betting, for example, the likelihood of personal bankruptcy in those states rose 25 to 30 percent. And families have no room to lose. Inflation, as I’m recording this show, is currently running at 3.4%. And energy prices are up 16% in a year. But it’s not just sports.

Vicki Davis (02:33): There are prediction apps where you can bet on almost anything, even tomorrow’s weather. Trading on the two biggest apps for this jumped from under $2 billion a month in early 2025 to $53 billion in July 2026. And Americans bet $167 billion on sports last year.

Vicki Davis (02:59): So all of these apps are built to make money. If the house wins on average, then on average, the people placing the bets will lose. So there’s good news. 30 states now guarantee a personal finance course before graduation. But a budget lesson doesn’t teach kids to understand risk and the odds. And those odds are important and not just about betting.

Vicki Davis (03:29): How do we read a medical test? That’s the missing math. And the people who build betting apps understand it very well. So today we’re going to have three guests talking about the missing math. Ted Dintersmith, a Stanford engineering PhD, on the math that decides your life. Diana Isern on why kids freeze up about money and what we can do about it. And Bhanu Prakash.

Vicki Davis (03:54): The human calculator who can actually beat a calculator. And he’s gonna talk about math anxiety. So let’s start with Ted.

Announcer (04:03): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (04:07): Today we’re talking with Ted Dintersmith. He has a PhD in engineering from Stanford. This year in 2026, ISTE+ASCD named him an Impact Award honoree. His new book is Aftermath, and it’s about the math that actually decides the things in your life: probability, risk, reasoning, and how we should be concerned that school skips it. So, Ted, welcome to the show.

Ted Dintersmith (04:35): Great to be here.

Vicki Davis (04:36): So let’s get our backstory. You’re a venture capitalist, Then you spent a year visiting 200 schools in all fifty states. So what did you see in that year that you couldn’t unsee

Ted Dintersmith (04:50): over a period of time leading up to that, I developed a point of view that there’s this gross mismatch between what kids are going to need as adults, the essential skills and mindsets, and the education model that really holds most teachers back. And that just changed my life. So goodbye, venture capital. Hello. advocate for bold, inspiring teaching practices.

Ted Dintersmith (05:13): there are a lot of people that just sort of say, Hey, I went to school, I’m an expert. Let me just tell you what you should do. Yeah, you’ve heard that I

Vicki Davis (05:13): yeah.

Ted Dintersmith (05:22): mean like sound familiar. So I said, like, why don’t I do my homework, right? Why don’t I go and meet with teachers and parents and students in all realms of our country. I just came up with this really kind of wacky idea of going to all 50 states in a school year and visited a couple hundred schools and saw, education at its best, its worst, and developed a real point of view of of what helps kids develop the skills and mindsets they’ll need and what empowers teachers to do their very best work.

Vicki Davis (05:53): and isn’t that the question? the thing is is when you tour schools, you can’t deny the spark you see in some students’ eyes, and you can’t deny the spark you see in the teachers who are unleashed to bring their best to the classroom. But then you also can’t deny the absence of that spark in other schools. And it’s heartbreaking. And we want every child to have a great education. So what was your conclusion? Like what brings that spark?

Ted Dintersmith (06:22): So the good news, Everywhere I went, I could find, a classroom teacher. in a district, I could find a school or two. In a state, I could find a district We know what to do. We’re doing it every day. The issue is it only takes place in nooks and crannies. so I wrote the book, What School Could Be to highlight the things that blew me away that are the antithesis of standardized education. the example here.

Ted Dintersmith (06:45): In its deep roots is the same as an example in a different state. how it shows up in the classroom, how it shows up with kids is dramatically different. And so the takeaway from that was we know what to do. If we trust our teachers to teach to their passions and expertise and draw kids into learning challenges they see as relevant and important, we can accomplish amazing things.

Ted Dintersmith (07:09): And as I say that, you think, well, of course that’s what we’re doing everywhere, but that’s exactly what we’re trying to impede. Because when we hold schools and teachers and kids and districts and states accountable to high-stakes standardized multiple choice tests, we drive out of those classrooms the joy and the real learning.

Vicki Davis (07:27): I’m on lots of different forums And this week one teacher said, there’s somebody in the district office AI generating all the lessons that my whole department has to teach. And they’re not done yet. So I don’t know what I want to be teaching after the first week. And I’m thinking, well, that’s not trust. That’s not

Ted Dintersmith (07:27): No.

Vicki Davis (07:41): empowerment. And and that’s not where we need to go. AI is not the opportunity to standardize everything. It should be the opportunity to personalize.

Ted Dintersmith (07:49): absolutely. when I took that trip, one of the places I visited was the National Teachers Hall of Fame, which is in the middle of Kansas in Emporia, Kansas.

Ted Dintersmith (07:57): And I was just so impressed with, this little museum on the campus of Emporia College. But then they said, like, go outside, go up on this knoll. And you go to that knoll and you see that chapel. But around that chapel are these obelisks. And on each obelisk there are the names of educators who gave their lives to keep their kids from dying.

Ted Dintersmith (08:18): we trust teachers with the lives of our kids and we don’t trust them with their lesson plans. This can’t be true, you know, but it’s true, right? That we we count on them for so much, and then we send them kids who come to school hungry, and then we tell them you’ve got to teach kids boring irrelevant content just so they can generate the data that tells us for years and years and years we’re making no progress on the wrong goals.

Ted Dintersmith (08:42): to the future of a functioning civil society. And if we equip generations of adults, young adults with the skills and mindsets they need, we’re going to soar. But when we treat young adults as data points, And say you need to study this just because it’s on some obsolete standardized test that gives our data bureaucrats the evidence that we’re getting nowhere. we set ourselves up for disaster. And so that’s why venture capital was a really fun, very lucrative career, and I’m not doing that. And now I’m doing something that’s incredibly hard where the money goes the wrong way. But I do think it gets right at what will make or break the future of this country.

Ted Dintersmith (09:21): And the futures of all of our young kids.

Vicki Davis (09:24): That reminds me of when I first started teaching and they handed me the Georgia State Standards for Technology. in the early two thousands and in there were things like floppy discs.

Vicki Davis (09:33): I threw it back and I said, I’m not your person if you want to teach these.

Vicki Davis (09:36): as Wayne Gretzky says, we have to go to where the the puck is going to be, not where it was yesterday. everybody is talking about what’s not working. We need to talk about what works because there are enough examples of what works

Ted Dintersmith (09:36): Yeah. Yeah.

Vicki Davis (09:52): to share that and to move forward. you know, you’ve talked about an Aftermath that we’re not really teaching the math that is relevant So what works? Where is the puck moving?

Ted Dintersmith (10:04): I’ll make a couple general observations and then get to the book about math. I’m a huge believer in film. so my first real contribution was this film Most Likely to Succeed.

Ted Dintersmith (10:13): Which premiered at Sundance in January of twenty fifteen. Shows kids diving into these bold, ambiguous challenges that cut across disciplines where they’re gonna have to invent and create and fail and get back up toward the goal of.

Ted Dintersmith (10:26): being able to produce something they can exhibit to their community. the film also shows teachers trusted to teach to their passions and interests. And then more recently I have a film Multiple Choice that shows kids in a mainstream public school in Winchester, Virginia. where all kids are immersed in career-based learning, there’s an enormous benefit from understanding what it takes to weld a joint or to construct a cabinet or to fight a fire.

Ted Dintersmith (10:53): as I’ve toured the country, people would share with me the stories, what lifted them up and what pounded them down.

Ted Dintersmith (11:01): many people would share with me in tears the damage that math did to their life. how it affected their self-esteem, how it blocked a career path, how it kept them from graduating from high school.

Ted Dintersmith (11:11): you can’t deal with piecewise linear functions or factor polynomials so you don’t get your high school degree. Think about that. as I looked at the impact it was having, a few winners and a lot of losers, I know why the math that’s in the curriculum used to be useful.

Ted Dintersmith (11:28): I’m not guessing. I know. And I know why it’s not useful at all anymore. I’ve given talks at Boeing to engineering teams and 3D modeling companies engineering teams. And I ask, do you ever do a closed form integral by hand? No. No one does it. Is it interesting? Yeah. Is it fun? Yeah. Can you treat it as a really great puzzle? Yeah. Were Newton and Leibniz brilliant? Yeah. yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Ted Dintersmith (11:51): Is it anything important to somebody today in the world? No.

Ted Dintersmith (11:55): but I think best belong in a physics class, which is why they were invented.

Ted Dintersmith (12:00): when I was in a graduate program at Stanford that was applied math, and one of the most interesting courses I took there was literally this was the title, The Art of Mathematical Modeling. Where you realize the math that matters in our life is immensely creative. But At the time, a junior faculty member was a guy named David Eddy, he had a medical degree and then a PhD in this math modeling program. And his thesis was on mammography screening. And he did research and found at the time, and it hasn’t changed that much, believe it or not, but 95% of medical experts in the field.

Ted Dintersmith (12:37): Did not understand the difference between these two things. I’ll say them slowly because they sound so similar. The probability you have the disease if the test is positive, and the probability that the test is positive if you have the disease. They sound the same, right? I mean, like, yeah, and once it and it turns out that in practice they can differ by 25 to 50x.

Ted Dintersmith (13:00): understanding that difference when you’re evaluating a radiology scan, or you’re interpreting that result for your patient is incredibly important because if the scan comes back or the test comes back positive, and it turns out that that means the probability you have the underlying condition or disease is a few percent, you take it seriously, but you don’t panic and rush. You Work to find your best possible medical team. If you take a test that’s 90% accurate, meaning that if you have the disease 90% of the time it says you’ve got it, and interpret your result as meaning, because it was positive, that means I have the disease. So there’s a 90% chance I have the disease, you rush. people panic, they freak out, and they don’t make clear decisions.

Ted Dintersmith (13:49): And I think that’s underscores the importance of understanding the math that can be life and death in our lives. And maybe most patients won’t understand that. Although I think if you read those pages in my book, I’m finding this is exciting. Six, seventh, and eighth graders are reading my book and saying, I get it. it’s not like this is graduate school math, And people will come away in three or four pages understanding false positives and false negatives and what the accuracy

Vicki Davis (13:49): Yeah.

Ted Dintersmith (14:14): of test means. these are middle school topics that kids can understand.

Vicki Davis (14:18): And false negatives is the number one issue in AI detection right now It’s like, yeah,

Ted Dintersmith (14:18): Yep.

Vicki Davis (14:24): we have a lot of false positives, but I think we have far more false negatives than from the kids’ own admission. And so understanding that difference is vital to functioning in the world today.

Ted Dintersmith (14:36): Vital, vital. when I looked at the juxtaposition between thousands of hours on obsolete math microprocedures and we’re oddball definitions of you know who knows what that really defines our eighth grade through twelfth grade math sequence that we have no evidence kids retain.

Ted Dintersmith (14:54): We have no evidence that the vast majority of adults ever use. Yet it’s half of our high-stakes exams. it defines what you need to graduate. Yet it defines really, in many ways, the future of your life. Math you’re never gonna use, you don’t retain, and your phone does perfectly. And these really powerful, relevant ideas get lost in the shuffle.

Ted Dintersmith (15:14): And they’re fun and they’re interesting. And so I said, I’m gonna write this book and I’m going to intentionally write it in the style of Freakonomics: words, pictures that describe the core ideas, and lots of relevant examples. And first big hurdle, a book about math. Most people run for the hills. So if you’re listening, I understand. You’re not gonna say, I gotta order Aftermath because I just can’t wait to read a book about math. Read it because people are saying, like, my gosh, maybe every 30 to 40 pages there’s a hairball math expression. But I offer it more in the sense of this is how a math geek would represent something like the windshield factor.

Ted Dintersmith (15:53): But but I talk about what that statistic means and how we go about estimating it. at the beginning I describe it as eight glorious, powerful, exciting chapters followed by one stink bomb. And the eight glorious chapters

Vicki Davis (15:53): Okay.

Ted Dintersmith (16:06): are, how do you estimate something? How do you predict something? What’s probability beyond flipping a coin? What are meaningful statistics? What does it mean to optimize? What’s an algorithm? how do you make decisions using math and game theory?

Ted Dintersmith (16:19): Eight fascinating chapters full of relevant examples across all disciplines, and then what we get so wrong about math in our schools. My takeaway is that the people who set the math agenda do not understand math. And when you have the blind sending everybody else into a blind alley, you end up with millions of people on the wrong side of the equation to use a math, Analogy. A couple things have surprised me and have been positive. One is I thought math teachers would hate it. I’m getting such positive feedback from math teachers. they’re telling me I’m exhausted with having to deal with kids who will ask me, when am I ever going to use it? And having to be fast on my feet to try to come up with some answer. they sense.

Ted Dintersmith (17:02): They’re never gonna have to return to an arc secant in their life. they don’t really need to know the cube root of minus 27. like this blizzard of stuff that’s that if you love the ideas, it’s got its fascination. Just as if you wanted to be a concert violin player, you love working endlessly on the chords or whatever. but it shouldn’t be what every kid has to master.

Ted Dintersmith (17:22): Just to get a high school degree, but that’s how we’ve done it. as I said, the fact that adults are saying, I’ve started your book and I’m really enjoying it, but I now have to grab it for my seventh grader because they’re reading it, and they think it’s really interesting.

Ted Dintersmith (17:34): math is cool. But if we never get to the ideas and we only focus on the low-level mechanics, we lose kids right and left.

Vicki Davis (17:41): we have sports betting. Well, now you can bet on anything, right? And

Ted Dintersmith (17:41): Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Vicki Davis (17:46): a fundamental understanding of statistics is something we really need as we move forward because of the quote attractiveness of all of this betting and the concerns that we should have. you better understand.

Vicki Davis (18:01): your probabilities here, if you’re gonna, put your money there. could you give us an overview of your thoughts on statistics, sports betting

Ted Dintersmith (18:01): Yeah.

Vicki Davis (18:08): and then hey, betting on what the weather is tomorrow, which is what you can do now in some of these forums.

Ted Dintersmith (18:13): Your your question just reflects your brilliance because and and I promise anybody who listens, I did not tee you up with this topic, but we’re in the middle of completing a short film on sports betting. And we found this rogue math teacher in Colorado who just said, I’m tired of teaching kids things they’re never going to use. And so he starts this initiative in his school to teach kids data sciences related math.

Ted Dintersmith (18:37): Focused on specific timely challenges where you integrate math with policy recommendations. And so these kids are doing a deep dive on the math of online gambling. the point that we will make in this film is young adults enter a world where every sports broadcast they watch is swirling with DraftKings and FanDuel betting options. And the commentators are talking about the running odds.

Ted Dintersmith (19:03): And we’re doing everything we can to lure young kids not just into making a bet here and there, but very, very smart, math-oriented people at those companies figuring out the right algorithms to lure you into addiction and generate revenue, which is happening. We owe it to our kids to equip them with the math skills to know what they’re getting into. And so, for instance, if you make 50 bets on FanDuel, what’s the probability you’ll come out ahead?

Ted Dintersmith (19:30): Don’t you think that every young adult ought to be able to know roughly that if I make bet

Vicki Davis (19:30): Yeah.

Ted Dintersmith (19:35): after bet after bet on one of these online sites, the odds are enormously high I’m going into debt. And if I go into debt and put it on a credit card, my parents or my own, that credit card will compound at 18% per year. And I may well inadvertently dig a financial hole I’ll never get out of. But Vicki here’s what’s interesting. I was able to arrange a meeting with the teacher and his two students with The governor of their state, Jared Polis of Colorado. And in that session, they recommend to Polis that Colorado put in place restrictions on online gambling. And Polis explains back to them: I think you need to understand the bigger context because the state of Colorado actually depends heavily on gambling revenue.

Ted Dintersmith (20:18): And the teacher makes the point, that he sat out on this because he was concerned about young adults being addicted to gambling, but didn’t fully appreciate that some of our state governments are as well. And that’s chilling, right?

Vicki Davis (20:18): Hm.

Ted Dintersmith (20:31): it’s like it’s an unfair game, right? because as I said, the people at these companies, whether it’s the social media things that try to pull you in or the online gambling All these online sites that try to pull kids in have as part of their team unbelievable math experts. They understand how to construct the algorithm flow to pull people deeper and deeper and deeper. So we owe it, to equip our kids with the skills to navigate that, to understand it, and to avoid it.

Ted Dintersmith (21:01): And we don’t do that, right? I mean, you can be an expert on the chain rule, and that doesn’t tell you beans about what you’re likely to deal with if you start making bets on one of these sites. so you can tell. I’m not just viewing this as a casual mission. I think this is incredibly important.

Vicki Davis (21:17): And even childlike games are facilitating betting. my dad told me two things at a very young age. He said, number one, the house always wins or the game wouldn’t be played. the other thing he said, Vicki, never gamble with what you can’t afford to lose. That’s your health, your family.

Ted Dintersmith (21:17): Yeah.

Vicki Davis (21:34): and ultimately, as the the daughter of a farmer, money, my great grandfather used to say that.

Vicki Davis (21:41): Some people take their money in the front door with a wheelbarrow and chuck it out the back window with a spoon. And that really kind of, I know spoon chucking it kind

Ted Dintersmith (21:41): I love that. Yeah.

Vicki Davis (21:53): of stuck in my little brain and and

Ted Dintersmith (21:53): Yeah, yeah.

Vicki Davis (21:56): stuck with me.

Vicki Davis (21:57): But statistics and balancing your checkbook and finance and compounded interest.

Ted Dintersmith (21:57): Yeah.

Vicki Davis (22:05): But when you have it working against you, It’s a horrible master.

Ted Dintersmith (22:10): Yeah, and I think if that’s true of all of these really powerful math ideas, properly taken forward, they could be your powerful ally. But if you

Vicki Davis (22:10): Yeah.

Ted Dintersmith (22:18): don’t understand them and other forces use them against you, it can lead to financial ruin, to horrible healthcare decisions, and so it’s not low stakes. we put the highest stakes in our education system on math micro tidbits that adults never use.

Ted Dintersmith (22:33): And we completely ignore the math ideas that are the highest of stakes in your life. And and that’s just wrong, right?

Ted Dintersmith (22:40): it’s why I said I’m gonna take this on, is I felt like as opposed to somebody who didn’t do well in math, who has no math credibility, who’s just grousing because it picked on me. And so I kind of have a long-term grudge against math I’ve got I think a a reasonably strong math background. I think you look at my math

Vicki Davis (22:40): Yeah.

Ted Dintersmith (22:58): background and you say, there’s a possibility he actually knows what he’s talking about, having, both with my graduate school degree and also with what I did with my career. But I feel like somebody needs to be a fierce advocate, right, on behalf of the damage we’re doing to our young adults.

Ted Dintersmith (23:15): Because people shouldn’t feel dumb because they couldn’t pass a math. And and that was another thing because so many people would say, I used to love math right up until. then you get to that one class you don’t connect with the teacher or they’re trying hard but don’t really have true mastery of the time. It’s very hard to find a great math teacher, by the way. and and you know, you sort of feel like your life went off the rails there.

Ted Dintersmith (23:36): And so I feel like, man, we should be offering you something to to pull you out of your feeling because people carry it to this day, right? So many adults still feel some degree of scarring. you’ll hear so many people tell me, Well, I’m just not a math person. like I’m just not a math person. And I said, read my book, you’re gonna find out you are a math person, and you’re gonna find out that math at its core draws on your creativity, as well as sharpens your logic, as well as gives you a feel for quantified information. And you’re going to also realize it touches you in life in so many different ways that you’re often not even aware of.

Vicki Davis (24:12): Ted, what should we be teaching? We’ve talked about statistics. what are the things that that need to be in classrooms

Ted Dintersmith (24:19): I don’t know if you’re familiar with TED-Ed.

Ted Dintersmith (24:21): Math is their most popular topic.

Ted Dintersmith (24:23): But they read my book and they said, like, nobody’s really going at the math ideas that make or break our lives. a lot of it is the puzzle aspects of math, which I’m all for something that gets kids excited about math. And if it’s puzzles, fantastic. That’s not my zone. so we will have coming out through early next year, one keystone video per chapter.

Ted Dintersmith (24:42): So a a five, six minute video, which is their style that brings to life the interesting concepts around, say, estimation. So what are margins of error? how do you construct a sample? How do you define the variable properly that you’re trying to gauge?

Ted Dintersmith (24:56): and have that in the context of a hook that gets people interested. with each of those Keystone videos, we’ll have complementary videos and a whole discussion guide and support system for teachers in the field here’s one of my takeaways from the feedback I’m getting: is as much as I’d love to change what’s taught in high school, that curriculum is hard to change.

Ted Dintersmith (25:18): But middle school

Vicki Davis (25:18): It is.

Ted Dintersmith (25:19): is really interesting territory because middle schools are telling me We’ve got two sets of kids, the kids that are racing ahead, where we’re being pushed by our parents to teach them advanced differential equations. And we’re like, we can’t do that. And then the second, much larger subset of the population are the kids that are just losing it. They they don’t get math, they don’t see its relevance, they’re feeling like they’re bad at math, they’ve lost their confidence, and they’ve lost their interest. This course.

Ted Dintersmith (25:45): Can reach both kids in the same course. And for the kids that love math, each of these chapters shows these great career paths So it’s a great career on-ramp, which a kid that’s loving math helps. And then for the kids that are not taking to the abstract formalism, they say, my gosh, I understand this idea. And I think actually both kids will learn from each other.

Ted Dintersmith (26:07): You know, we’ll sort of shift the view here because it won’t be the really good math kids and the kids that can’t cut it, but it will be like they each have different ideas for how you could estimate the number of homeless people in their county.

Ted Dintersmith (26:20): those are the types of challenges we want to invite teachers to bring to kids. And it cuts across disciplines. It could be done in the context of math as a silo, kind of a mistake in my view, but that’s the way we treat it.

Ted Dintersmith (26:32): But there are examples that reach into civics and history and science classes and sports. as you know, math is everywhere. So the book has all these examples from different fields where math sheds light on the important ideas you want kids to understand.

Vicki Davis (26:48): you’ve written about AI and you have a unique dichotomy in in what you say. Explain for us your views on the job area versus education area and how that fits together

Ted Dintersmith (27:00): I would start with what empowers a civil society to thrive. And I think when most people in a civil society find their way forward, everybody does well. And when only a few can find their way forward, you set this dynamic up for its collapse. you go back to, 1980 to 2010, we saw an early wave of technology roll out, robotics and software.

Ted Dintersmith (27:25): And outsourcing. And I have very little patience for the Pollyanna people that say, know, we’ve heard this before. there are always new jobs created for every job lost. And they completely ignore the fact that one person’s job loss and a person in a totally different area’s job creation are different people, right?

Ted Dintersmith (27:44): Millions of people in thousands of communities lost their jobs, found an eroded future. you see these communities with the boarded up hotels and the shutdown school and the mom and pop stores driven out of business by Walmart and Amazon.

Ted Dintersmith (27:59): Tell them don’t worry because somebody in the Bay Area got a great job that’s paying them massive amounts of money. And and my book, to its credit, I think goes after the unemployment statistic. we say, well, the unemployment rate’s still four percent, so those jobs are still there. But that person in that rural community who lost their safe, secure, middle class job may now be, a greeter at Walmart or may have a twenty-hour a week job at who knows what? Or give it up, and they’re not in the statistics. And so my worry with AI, it’s moving ahead so quickly and it’s so powerful that we’re going to see an enormous toll taken on, particularly entry-level knowledge workers. I think you’re

Vicki Davis (27:59): Yes.

Ted Dintersmith (28:40): already seeing that with fresh college graduates. the essence of our education system is 12 to 16 years.

Ted Dintersmith (28:46): Training kids to carry out knowledge worker assignments. And if that’s your skill set and you lost your creativity and your curiosity and your audacity and your agency, Claude is great. like I can use Claude to carry out my knowledge worker assignments, and it’s actually fantastic.

Ted Dintersmith (29:02): so I worry enormously about the differential impact.

Ted Dintersmith (29:07): And millions of people in knowledge worker jobs being out on the street, unemployed or marginalized, while a handful of people are killing it when it comes to making money with this.

Ted Dintersmith (29:20): I was in venture capital, and particularly disappointed with my former colleagues who are going all out to make sure there are no guardrails or regulations on AI, because it is scarily powerful. So

Vicki Davis (29:33): It is.

Ted Dintersmith (29:34): what’s the upside here? The upside is it makes all of us dramatically more productive. And so, in that balance of power, if we produce waves of young adults who are Very effective at leveraging AI to make themselves and their organizations more productive, we could create a world where overall everybody’s better off. Maybe not everybody, but where society thrives, where communities are lifted up. my film, Multiple Choice, shows a school where all kids are immersed in career-based learning.

Ted Dintersmith (30:09): Because AI is not going to replace a firefighter or your electrician or your carpenter. And by the

Vicki Davis (30:09): Mm-hmm. Welder.

Ted Dintersmith (30:14): way, those are incredibly honorable, challenging professions that we should be

Vicki Davis (30:14): Absolutely.

Ted Dintersmith (30:20): immensely admiring. We want our kids to be adept at using AI. And if we were to snap our fingers, which I can’t, but I would like to, and we produce generations of adults coming out able to leverage technology, whether it’s AI or The latest machine tool technology or whatever, young adults leveraging AI, developing skills and mindsets that machine intelligence can’t replicate, and lifting up not just themselves, but those they work with, their families, their community, I think we would be walking into creating a better America, an America on the rise. But if we say, run from it, right?

Ted Dintersmith (30:57): because you can use AI to write a boring formulaic five-paragraph essay, or because you can use AI to get a perfect score in the SAT math, we need to get rid of that because we want to train humans to be imperfect flawed versions of what AI does perfectly. If that’s our mindset, which by the way tends to be the prevailing mindset, we’re just going to further a world where for generations we’ve produced young adults with the wrong skills and mindsets. We’ve promoted what machines do really well and we’ve diminished what machines don’t do well that humans need to be able to bring to their lives for career, for citizenship, and for that deep sense of purpose that I matter.

Vicki Davis (31:39): we need to start looking at, hey, what can humans do incredibly well that can’t be replaced? I’m talking to a girl right now who’s struggling with a with a job loss trained five or six years ago in graphic design.

Vicki Davis (31:51): The job went to somebody who knew how to create the design, but used the AI tool that threw it on 50 packages for a major consumer company Because now the brand department for this big, huge company that used to have eight people is one person with an AI tool.

Ted Dintersmith (31:51): Yeah.

Ted Dintersmith (32:11): you nailed it, it will be one or two people with AI doing what used to be 10 to 20 people.

Ted Dintersmith (32:16): we have an obligation to equip our kids with the skills and mindsets they need in a world that’s changing at warp speed. And often it just gets dumbed down to these fierce, fierce battles over the wrong things.

Ted Dintersmith (32:29): The discussion just is urgent need of elevation, which is why, by the way,

Vicki Davis (32:29): Absolutely.

Ted Dintersmith (32:33): I’m such a fan of the work you do, because you elevate that discussion and and you make us think about the issues that matter. And that’s an enormous contribution you’re making.

Vicki Davis (32:43): Well, thank you.

Vicki Davis (32:44): We’ve been talking with Ted Dintersmith, PhD in engineering for Stanford, 2026 ISTE+ASCD Impact Award Honoree.

Vicki Davis (32:53): Ted, I think we have a lot more conversations to come as we try to wrestle with we want our kids to have a bright future. And we can’t get there by idolizing the past.

Vicki Davis (33:08): You know, so many people are saying, Hey, let’s just get rid of all the computers and go back to to paper.

Ted Dintersmith (33:13): stay tuned for the stone tablets because kids are learning losing the ability to chisel Roman numerals and marble. I mean like that’s that’s we can’t miss up we can’t skip that because now

Vicki Davis (33:13): my goodness. Yeah.

Ted Dintersmith (33:23): a study shows the kids who can chisel a Roman numeral in marble do better later in life. But that’s what it comes to, right?

Vicki Davis (33:31): There’s a study that shows everything.

Announcer (33:34): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (33:37): The mammogram example That’s the missing math of our own medical results that our students need to understand. Ted also told us about a Colorado math teacher whose students study the math of online gambling.

Vicki Davis (33:49): And took it all the way to the governor’s office. When math is relevant, kids take it somewhere. But a lot of our students won’t even talk about money. Diana Isern, our next guest, gets them talking.

Vicki Davis (34:04): What if the reason your students freeze up when you mentioned money is that somewhere along the way, somebody taught them to feel ashamed of it. Our guest today is Diana Isern, a high school assistant principal in New York City with 20 years in the classroom and in school leadership, an accredited financial counselor and the author.

Vicki Davis (34:25): of a new book called Money Talks: An Educator’s Guide to Teaching Financial Empowerment. Diana, You spent twenty years in New York City schools teaching and then leading the building and somewhere in there financial education became your thing. Could you take me back to the moment you realized this was the work you wanted to do and what happened?

Diana Isern (34:49): it wasn’t really on my radar for the first probably maybe six or eight years But as I started getting my own financial house in order, personally, and started looking for real estate, like looking to live somewhere or own something, I went into this wormhole of learning myself, and wanted to learn all about saving and spending better and more intentionally. that led into investing and then learning about real estate and stocks and ETFs and all those kinds of things. Vicki as an educator, when you have information, you want to share it. You want to give it to other people,

Vicki Davis (34:49): Yes.

Diana Isern (35:18): I started having a lot of conversations with teachers and teachers would come to me all the time and ask me about our pensions or TDAs or stocks or investing, all kinds of things. because I’m in high school, students would start to ask me, Hey, miss, yo, tell me about this stock so we started having lunchtime conversations, hallway conversations, everywhere. People just stop me all the time. it’s not yet mandated in terms of a standalone graduation requirement, in New York, but we decided as a school that we wanted to put this so every student would graduate with some foundational understanding of financial literacy before they graduated. So we did that about twelve years ago now.

Diana Isern (35:50): so students were taking that. And then they kept asking me questions. So I said, All right, let me go into depth and start my own course. So right before COVID, me and Two really, really passionate students were planning out this course that would go a little bit more into depth with like money mindset, budgeting, investments, different things that students ask me about all the time, but we couldn’t go too much in depth with with the financial literacy, the more topical course, We called it making money moves to be funny. And it just t had a life of its own and students keep asking to get in. I have students who take it multiple times, multiple years in a row. And we make it really connected to who they are, what their values are and what they want in their life. And it’s very much not a one size fits all approach to money. It’s who they are and their values and their familial, experiences and everything that they bring to the table as well.

Vicki Davis (36:38): Let’s talk about this money shame thing.

Diana Isern (36:41): like so when when a kid asks when they’re five years old or something, right? how much money do you make? And then they might ask an uncle or somebody, and then the parent says, Don’t ask that, that’s rude you understand why a parent would say that, right? In in the context.

Vicki Davis (36:41): Yeah, of course.

Diana Isern (36:52): and it also kind of starts this perception that we keep things siloed and we don’t share information it’s me and mine and it’s an individual conquest as opposed to it could be a community thing. We can learn from each other, grow from each other, right? and also it it it definitely comes from a feeling of like, I don’t want to ask those questions because I don’t want people asking them on me because I’m ashamed of what I have or what I don’t have. so there’s a lot of emotions all of us have different relationships with money, that’s one of the things that I advocate a lot for is not having to have all the answers. being willing to learn alongside students or young people or learners or people your age. whoever you’re having these money conversations with and you don’t have to be the sage on the stage as they they say, right? you can be the guide on the side or whatever those, you know, like corny you know, rhymes are, but it’s true, and that goes in terms of parents as educators, family, caregivers, aunts, uncles. we can all learn alongside each other and be open and vulnerable about that so that we don’t have this like yucky shame that builds up about how we’ve done things and mistakes that we’ve made. a lot of us feel a a large sense of discomfort over decisions that we’ve made, whether that’s like credit or debt or the way we’ve spent money or I should.

Diana Isern (37:59): have had more money saved. I I it’s always a lot of shoulds, right? I if if I did this, then I could have done that. If I right. And we a lot of us live in the past with those kind of ideas. And it’s not helpful. And it holds us back. And it doesn’t help us have conversations with each other because we’re so ashamed of ourselves and the decision that we’ve made.

Vicki Davis (38:18): So Diana, you talk about reframing financial learning from deficit to abundance and helping students recognize the many forms of wealth they already carry. What’s a form of wealth the 15-year-old has that nobody else ever named for them?

Diana Isern (38:31): had a student about two years ago, and do a money mindset survey in the beginning. And I at first I kind of left it open-ended, and I didn’t get very rich, like deep responses. I was like, okay, let me rethink this. So then I did a checklist, like a whole bunch of options that they can choose as many as apply. And that was super interesting. And then I had them explain So for example, I had a student choose linguistic wealth or skills. And he’s like, I never thought about it as a form of wealth. I like, well, how many languages do you speak? And he was from the Ivory Coast, Côte d’Ivoire. And he spoke four languages.

Diana Isern (39:02): I was like, okay, well, why would that?

Diana Isern (39:04): be considered wealth. And then so he’s I guess I could talk to people. It’s like, yeah, man. communication and and connecting with people and that’s a a different way people will trust you. And if you’re sharing financial information with other people, they’re going to trust you because they connect to you both culturally and linguistically, amongst many other reasons that is a great, form of wealth. So that was one that came up. humor and joy comes up a lot, and, those kinds of things, which we don’t really consider.

Diana Isern (39:26): as a form of wealth, but it’s definitely that kind of aspect is critical to us as people, as human beings. So different things like that that we kind of unearth together make them feel like they’re worthy of more and what they have too.

Vicki Davis (39:38): there’s always a risk of somebody saying, Hey, I followed my teacher’s advice and lost all this money. it’s the teacher’s fault. You mean that’s honestly why a lot of people stay away from financial literacy because there is a lot of room for misunderstanding or misapplication and every situation’s different. You can’t guarantee that a particular stock’s gonna go up, right? understanding that risk, I think the teachers who teach risk.

Vicki Davis (40:04): that’s important part of it, right?

Diana Isern (40:06): it’s a a super important part. And the the most important part there is to never give advice. So I’m very,

Vicki Davis (40:06): Yeah.

Diana Isern (40:12): very conscious and I tell my students and I’ll share with them. This is what I do. These this is a fund I hold and this is why. But do not listen to me only. I want you to fact check it and I want you to verify anything anyone tells you, whether it’s your uncle, your cousin, your babysitter, whoever who comes to you with advice. I don’t care how much you love them and trust them. I want you to take it and I want you to analyze it.

Diana Isern (40:33): then that includes me. And so what I do a lot is I inform them on both sides. you say you’re not super pro AI, you’re not super against AI, right? You’re pro learning. And that’s the same way

Vicki Davis (40:33): Correct? Yes, right.

Diana Isern (40:44): that I approach this. Like I don’t want them to be super scared and and freaked out about investing, but I do want you to go in being informed about the risk and the reward that you can get and why people might do this. And people have been successful and X amount of people have not been successful.

Diana Isern (41:00): then if you decide to then jump into it, then you’re going full knowledge of all the the aspects. actually came up when we did real estate last year. I had a student who was really into interested in flipping, flipping houses. So we did a project, we did a mini project on just that. So we found actual properties, we looked at all the numbers. I showed them how to analyze flips, holding costs, renovation costs, all they’re my it cost, 15,000 to renovate a kitchen.

Diana Isern (41:24): Yeah, man, you know, some sometimes more, sometimes less, we went through all the the facts and figures of it. after we watched an HGTV episode, they flip

Vicki Davis (41:24): Yeah.

Diana Isern (41:33): these houses in 45 minutes, and you’re I can make you know a hundred thousand dollars, it’s not so bad, right? and of course, they don’t see that all these people have been doing this for years, they have a whole team, And so after the majority of students were like, I’m not doing this, too much work, too expensive, too much work. And then I had one student and she was like, you know what? I still I still would do this. Like I still knowing everything I know now, I still would want to try. And then if it doesn’t work, maybe I try it again or maybe I just do buy and hold,

Vicki Davis (41:58): how do you talk about values-based money management?

Diana Isern (42:02): in any scenario where I’m talking about money it’s all about how they they want to use money to live a life that’s true to them and that matters to them. And we’re all very different in that sense. Even siblings, right? You could be raised with the same exact parents and have totally different money values from one sibling to another and want different things in your life.

Diana Isern (42:20): And that is okay. and so a lot of us when we’re chasing this one particular version of a dream and we get it, we’re like, wait, I’m still not satisfied. Or I have, a hundred dollars in the bank, and now I want two hundred, and and I never feel like I am satisfied. And that’s usually because it’s it’s not aligned to who you are and what you really want. and so that’s at the core of every single decision, every unit, it’s all it’s at the core of budgeting.

Diana Isern (42:44): And a lot of reasons why we don’t stick with budgeting generally is because we put these fake numbers that aren’t aligned to what we want in our life and what we’re willing to say no to so that we can say yes to things we do actually care about. And those could all be different. Like one of my students was we are doing her budget for the summer and she really wanted to go to a Harry Styles concert. Like that was her thing, you know? she was eating out at she was getting like chicken and fries every day after she worked.

Diana Isern (43:09): in New York, chicken and fries is a lot, it’s like $20. we’re aligning that towards this concert. And then she’s like, it’s now I could pack my food, I could do all this because I really want that other thing. that’s kind of how it it comes out. it comes out also in buying and renting when we start talking about our own property that we want to own or rent.

Diana Isern (43:26): values come into that. Like some people really have a passion about owning and some people are like, No, I don’t want the hassle and everything in between. And there’s no right or wrong. It’s just really what fits your life and what risks you’re willing to take and what stresses you want or not,

Vicki Davis (43:38): Now take us through your RICH framework and just give us an overview.

Diana Isern (43:42): Sure, that’s how I conceptualize belonging and doing financial education in a way that connects with students. the R stands for representation. So having students or learners see people that look like them in a lot of different ways, whether it’s through podcasts or through videos or articles, having guest speakers who reflect their experiences or it doesn’t have to be one-to-one, but connect to them in some sort of way to connect to their life experience. And also seeing people who represent other walks of life that they might not have had access to, right? And so they can connect to people who are different than them as well and and hear different perspectives. and then inquiry is asking questions. So being curious, asking why is this the way it is, both in my own life and in the larger society.

Diana Isern (44:22): why do I deal with money in this way? Why does my family deal with money in this way? And and and curiosity, not judgment. Real question, authentic questioning. And why is society this way? Why does money work this way? So continuing to ask questions and for the educator doing the same and being vulnerable about the questions that you’re still asking about your life and still wondering. So that’s inquiry and then connection. So connecting it.

Diana Isern (44:44): to their day-to-day lives, connecting finance, the formulas, so making sure that, okay, we could teach a formula, but how can we connect this to something real? So I could teach a mortgage

Vicki Davis (44:44): Yeah.

Diana Isern (44:51): calculator, for example. And but how can we connect this to a place that you really might live and where would you want to live? And comparing how how much it would cost to live in New York versus Georgia or, other places.

Diana Isern (45:03): So making it very connected to them or budgeting, right? Making that very connected to things that they actually spend on and how they move their money in their real life. So that’s that’s connection. And holistic thinking is thinking about the whole person. So we we tapped on that a little bit with the wealth, thinking about wealth in a more dynamic, interesting way that’s multifaceted and not only about a dollar amount that you’re trying to tr to achieve, but thinking about the whole person, the whole lived experience, the totality of what bring people bring to the classroom, both the educator and and the student and the learner.

Vicki Davis (45:33): So our guest today has been Diana Isern, a high school assistant principal in New York City, 20 years in the classroom and school leadership. And her book is Money Talks: An Educator’s Guide to Teaching Financial Empowerment. Thank you, Diana, for coming on the show.

Announcer (45:51): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (45:56): So Diana talked about the Harry Styles budget, chicken and fries every day or the concert. Her choice. Choices like that prevent the debt habits from crippling so many families. Today’s 20 somethings carry about a quarter more credit card debt than the generation before them did at the same age.

Vicki Davis (46:16): Even after inflation. this generation coming out of school right now is accumulating more debt, not less. And without the missing math of debt, our students could end up deeper in debt. My great-grandpa used to say there’s enough money for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greeds. this is the math that is missing that we need to talk about. So now we’re going to talk about math anxiety.

Vicki Davis (46:40): Bhanu says three out of four kids have math phobia. So I looked for that number, and here’s what the research shows that I could find. On the 2022 PISA, 39% of 15-year-olds said they get very nervous doing math problems. That’s up from 31% in 2012. So who better to talk about math than a man who can beat a calculator?

Announcer (47:03): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (47:08): Today we’re talking with Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash. Bhanu is the world’s fastest human calculator and founder of Bhanzu, a math learning platform. He won gold at the 2020 Mental Calculation World Championship. And now he works to end math anxiety. So, Bhanu, you hold the record as the fastest human calculator alive.

Vicki Davis (47:35): But let’s back up. You were three years old, you had a skull fracture, you spent a year in bed. What did numbers become for you in that year?

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (47:46): my parents were told that I might have some amount of cognitive dysfunction I spent an entire year at home, not going to school, looking at the challenges and puzzles which were thrown at me. And a year later, I realized that this was fun for me, and I was pretty good at it.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (48:04): How you understood numbers, how you understood basic arithmetic. something clicked. my love for what math is, grew up from then.

Vicki Davis (48:11): So you beat a calculator on stage in front of an audience, but then you walked away from competition. why did you shift the trajectory of your career?

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (48:20): I spent a lot of time competing in math championships, breaking a few world records I think for me trying to be the very best in mental calculation and arithmetic.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (48:30): Was a challenge was rewarding because there was more to do, push your own limits, see what a human mind can do. I could understand the world around me through it. And As I started doing a bunch of presentations showcasing what I was able to do, I realized that kids out there do not really have such a fun experience, with arithmetic. it goes without saying, three out of every four kids across the world have math phobia, which means that there has been a point of time in their entire learning where they said, my gosh, this is absolutely something I do not want to do.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (49:03): This troubles me. I think it had repercussions on kids’ careers. It had repercussions on their confidence. I was invited to one of the schools back in India in one of my hometowns to say, hey, you are the fastest human calculator in the world, Can you go teach this bunch of kids who are absolutely not good at math on how to like be good at it? And I realized that my understanding of mathematics was so zoomed out and not at the reality of what kids really needed to learn. I was drawn to the entire ecosystem of teaching. Because I think to create the joy of math learning experience, which I have had in front of kids, immediately felt.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (49:41): fantastic. I decided that day that I could do two things, which is I could be the face of math mental championships, or I could be the face of math phobia and say, How can every kid have an enriching experience with math And that eventually, snowballed into me picking up teaching full time.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (49:57): I think that that’s the digression it has taken from one fine day I think in 2017 which was almost a decade ago now.

Vicki Davis (50:03): So, Bhanu, as someone who is faster than a calculator, what is your stand on math facts?

Vicki Davis (50:11): fall on the continuum.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (50:13): I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and spending a lot of time with kids who have had a tough time with math.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (50:19): I think that arithmetic is just one facet of multiple other things which a child needs to know to be eventually good at math. it brings us to the fundamental question of what is someone being good at math? According to me, a kid who Is curious to be able to understand why something works.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (50:36): So the kids who I think eventually do really well in math might not traditionally be the kids who phenomenally do at math in school. There are certain math facts.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (50:49): And arithmetic calculations, which I think enable a kid to be a little more interfacing with numbers and maths than not doing it. I believe that doing mental arithmetic or doing calculations in your mind.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (51:03): Not using a crutch all the time. It’s a very good way of keeping your own mind fit. If you are able to do arithmetic a bunch of times in your mind, then you’re training your mind to think mathematically. The objective of doing mental math in your mind itself is not that important because we all have a calculator, So Is a kid who’s learning math learning math to solve problems? I don’t think so. It’s to just train their mind into logical arguments which make them lead to a solution, which eventually make them think mathematically. So, do kids today in the 21st century need to know how to do mental math? Not at all.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (51:40): Would I still advise every kid to try doing mental math in their mind so that they so that they start loving math and get very comfortable with it? Yes.

Vicki Davis (51:50): So let’s talk math anxiety.

Vicki Davis (51:53): what is the emotional aspect of teaching as we work to help kids love math?

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (51:59): Teaching isn’t as algorithmic as I think a lot of conversation around makes it to be. You’re the emotional state of a student is probably the most important variable to maybe predict whether they’ll learn something or not. I hear kids mention, I don’t think I’ve been cut out for math, right?

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (52:22): there’s math people and then there’s the arts people. these statements are alienating in a way where Kids who actually might have instinctively good skills at math and have all the right acumen to never be able to pick it. I think a human teacher has the ability to string stories which can make you understand why you need to care.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (52:47): A teacher can inspire a kid into saying, To make the world make sense, you need to learn math the way it is.

Vicki Davis (52:53): My husband is an engineer, and he wasn’t highly motivated in high school. his junior year he was a C student in math, but he had taken his SAT, almost made a perfect score on the math section. His guidance counselor called him in and said, What are you doing? you’re gifted at math. and these are your grades and this is your SAT and you’re very, very capable. You should look at at a technical field, like be an engineer or something. Well, now he’s an engineer. But if that conversation hadn’t happened, if that human hadn’t looked and said, Hey, the data we’re getting in the classroom doesn’t really line up with the data of what this student knows.

Vicki Davis (53:33): We need to talk to the people who think that test scores and grades are full measures.

Vicki Davis (53:39): But Bhanu, what you’re talking about, it took a human to say, hey, the data, let’s throw out the data for a minute. there’s something else going on here in terms of human motivation and capability. we’re becoming so dependent on AI tools and math tools to tell us a student’s capability, but what if that doesn’t tell us anything?

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (54:04): Yeah, the predisposition of wanting to have complete data to infer on what a kid is doing and what a kid isn’t without having the art of looking at what they’re capable of doesn’t really make you help every kid. after spending a ton of Time building assessments for kids, right? We’ve we’ve seen that a test itself does not tell anything about the level of the kid because the motivation of the kid on the day of giving the test is a very big variable, you assume, I cannot place you in a certain level and say that you’re at grade six level or you’re at high school level or you’re at SAT level by just looking at the solutions of your exam because you might not know the facts today, but you might be a very quick learner.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (54:47): So just looking at the test score might not tell me where you are right now in the skills which are to be measured. If as a teacher I ask you three questions you do not understand how to solve, I explain to you how to solve that math question in a minute, and if you’re able to pick it up, then you’re a highly independent learner. A test will never understand or evaluate whether you’re an independently quick learner. a test only takes a slice of life, right? It just tells here’s where you are, and here’s the reflection of where you are.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (55:16): Today, it doesn’t measure your ability to learn, and immediately implement it. So is testing all about just facts? Is data all about knowing what you know?

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (55:26): Or is it supposed to be about how quickly do you learn? Are you able to infer? Are you able to comprehend? Are you able to have retention? Are you someone who can recall? The frameworks in which you measure educational progress are so binary in nature, if I think about it, it’s the easiest way to look at it. Doesn’t really work because I’ve met a kid just a few months ago. The kid on their test was placed in grade 5 level. The kid was in grade 8 in school, was placed in grade 5 level because of a test, because the kid absolutely did not do well in the exam, which was the placement test. Because the kid never really learned some of the concepts which are at grade 8 level. It took a teacher two minutes to explain them a concept, and the kid was able to pick it up.

Vicki Davis (56:12): Wow.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (56:13): do you place them in grade five level? or do you spend some time into saying, here’s a quick learner, let me accelerate their path? No, a data and a and an exam is never gonna give you that. An AI inferred assessment is never gonna give you that. that’s how I see it. a kid is not 10 numbers in a worksheet or 10 numbers in a report.

Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash (56:31): It’s important for I think people and even educators to be reminded of that ’cause it can get very crowded in a teacher’s mind also saying, there’s so many tools, there’s there’s so much data here, why am I trying to use my mind?

Vicki Davis (56:42): we’ve been talking with Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash, the world’s fastest human calculator and the founder of Bhanzu.

Vicki Davis (56:51): A math learning platform.

Vicki Davis (56:53): thank you, Bhanu.

Announcer (56:54): Cool Cat Teacher Talk

Vicki Davis (56:55): So try one of these tomorrow. Number one, from Ted, ask an estimation question with no single right answer and talk through how you’d estimate that. From Diana, how will you talk to kids about investments? Making choices. And I would add debt and risk. From Bhanu, honor the why. So before you hand over a formula, ask why it works and where we’d use it. The odds on a bet, the interest on a credit card, the medical test.

Vicki Davis (57:22): So for parents, next time you hear someone talk about betting odds during a game, ask your child how many bets would you have to win just to break even?

Vicki Davis (57:32): Ted, Diana, and Bhanu agree on this. Math should help a child make better decisions about life.

Vicki Davis (57:39): We need to consider and teach the missing math, the math kids need for money, risk, and real life. Next week, I hope you’ll join me right here on this station. I’m Vicki Davis and you’ve been listening to Cool Cat Teacher Talk.

Vicki Davis (57:51): See you later, educator.

Announcer (57:53): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. Follow that Cool Cat teacher everywhere you connect.