One Man's Mission to Unveil Math's Beauty

Math is really beautiful, but many students don't ever get a chance to see it, because we hide that beauty until way too late in a math student's educational experience. We're hiding whole amazing areas of mathematics until the students reach college, but many of the students don't make it that far. They decide before they get there that there's nothing to see here. They say they're not a math person because they're bored with math because they've been taught that math is arithmetic. They haven't been taught that math is discovery. Math is a creative discipline. I know a lot of artistically creative people. The most creative people I know, though, are mathematicians. You know, they have to create new frameworks in which to create new knowledge. They are creating castles in the sky. My name is Richard Rusick. I'm the founder of Art of Problem Solving. We develop educational resources and opportunities for students who are really interested in learning. I did not learn very much in the classroom. We didn't have the internet then, so there was no, you know, there was no YouTube to watch videos, but I learned a lot from textbooks and working on problems. I had a stack of formula sheets, and I would just memorize them, and I would eventually get to a training program for the students who did well in a series of national competitions. I'm there for five weeks. I see 50 or 60 problems during this time, and I got exactly zero correct. I had to go back to those formulas and ask, why is this true? Why is that true? And realize that I did not know and had to start trying to prove some of these things. I was coming out of a high school that, you know, northern Alabama, it was an aggressively average high school, but I go off to Princeton. I'm worried about competing against students that went to the magnet school, private schools, and I found in the first few weeks it was very clear that I had it backwards. I had training they didn't have, and that training was all those years staring at problems I didn't know how to do and having to learn how to fight through them. I had learned how to take basic ideas and solve really difficult problems, and I could transfer that general skill into physics, into computer science, into engineering, into economics, into philosophy. We're training kids to compete with computers. This is what computers do. They get it right every time, and when we train kids to compete with those computers, we're setting them up for failure. I think this is part of the problem is this is the way that they are evaluated. So we need to bring these challenges earlier. We need to put students in these situations where they're not going to be able to get it right the first time or the second time or the third time, and the kids know how to handle that. We train it out of them. You look at kids when they're four. I mean, four-year-old kid can't do anything, but they'll try. They'll fail. They'll cry. They'll run off to their room, and then they'll do something really amazing. They'll come back really quickly, and they'll try again because they're four, and they haven't learned yet how to quit forever. Learning's hard. It is painful. Yeah, it's a little frustrating, but you're getting somewhere. That's the sign that you are finally getting somewhere with whatever you're trying to learn is when you're feeling this kind of discomfort. If you're comfortable, you're not learning anything. I think one of the things that making this transition to fighting through the problems as opposed to just knowing how to do it when I look at it is understanding that it's a process and not an accumulation of knowledge. It's about being more playful, looking at the problem, and trying to learn about the situation. Remove a few constraints from the problem and explore or add constraints to the problem and explore a little bit. What we don't do is show them how to do it and then say, okay, this is how we did this problem. Here's another one that's similar, so we'll show them a problem. We'll work through it together. If they get completely stuck, we'll kind of guide them a little bit and then come back and summarize at the end and say, hey, look at this general strategy we used. You can motivate the steps towards that and then they'll have another tool in their toolkit. I don't think of myself as teaching math. I think of myself as teaching students problem solving. And by problem solving, I mean teaching students how to solve problems they've never seen before. And math is a really powerful way to teach that. I think a lot of it is modeling for the student the questions we eventually want the student to learn to ask themselves. Instead of saying, oh, you just add the seven and three, here's why. What we do is walk them through the questions that one might ask themselves in order to figure out how to do the thing. We found that there were a lot of students out there for whom textbooks were not sufficient. So we started with a community where we could just bring the kids together online and then we started building online learning systems, adaptive learning system, where you just give the students problems and lead them into harder and material. And I started developing videos to go along with the adaptive learning system. We have two online schools now. We have learning centers. We have an online community that is hundreds of thousands of learners from all over the world. Our textbooks are comic books. A lot of students are visual learners and a lot of mathematical information can be conveyed really effectively, visually. We use it for pedagogical reasons as well. You can't lecture a third grader. But in a comic book, you can simulate conversations. We can model some of the strategies we want them to use. We can model students asking questions. We can model students working through challenges. We can model students being wrong and being okay with that. All of these resources, they're readily accessible to those who have the means to pay for them and those who have parents who know to look for them. Meanwhile, we're removing a lot of these opportunities from schools. The set of students who are getting involved in these programs is getting narrower and narrower. So as a result, our country has a much narrower pool of people who are going into advanced math and science. The next step in our evolution is learning how to work closely with schools, where the delivery mechanism there is the most important person the student is working with in their educational experience during the day, which is their teacher. So there we're trying to learn how we are going to learn how to work with teachers in the classroom to empower them to give their students the experience we give our students. So we're going to go and find that talent ourselves by going into the schools so that we can reach those students who don't have the means or the knowledge to look for opportunities outside the classroom. We need to be drawing talent from across our entire population.