Impactful activity to help students practice vocabulary. Could be used for any topic - here is one I made up for differential equations.
Excited to present at the Math in Action conference at Grand Valley today on the top ten things I wish I knew about math teaching 10 years ago!
Here are the slides!
Probably not relevant to anyone else, but I just discovered you can upload a Markdown (.md) file into Google Drive and it opens as a neatly formatted Google Doc.
I wonder if a good razor for integrating AI tools in classrooms might be this:
You should try to teach students how to use AI in your subject area and even have them use it in your context. However, if you’re unsure of what that looks like, how it might be done effectively, or what drawbacks it might create, then apply the precautionary principle - hold off on letting students use it all until you have thought all of it through.
"AI Expert: We have 2 years before everything changes"
Saturday, December 27, 2025
This may be the most important interview I watched or listened to in 2025 and I encourage you to listen to it as well. It’s not obvious how the next few years will play out when it comes to artificial intelligence. It is, however, clear that the touted goals of the major AI companies and the actual goals are not the same. and that they’re racing towards those goals as fast as possible.
I refuse to write letters of recommendation using AI chat bots. The kid asked for my words, not chatGPT’s.
“She used to read books all the time. Now she never does.”
Friday, August 1, 2025
A couple of weeks ago I said the following to my 12 year-old daughter, after we found out that she is now the only one in her friend group without a smartphone: “Don’t answer this, but you know how you sometimes want to look something up on your school computer, but you know you shouldn’t because you might get in trouble… well, when you have a phone you will just look that thing up.
Built some shelves for our playroom
Sunday, July 20, 2025
Built some shelves for our play room to display my son’s LEGO builds. Not because we think they’re so awesome, but because we were running out of space to put them! We will also store the small totes with the LEGOs he’s not using.
“Take a good hard look at people’s ruling principle, especially of the wise, what they run away from and what they seek out.” - Marcus Aurelius
Leaders must maintain guiding principles because they can’t explicitly prepare for unpredictability. These principles exist for everyone, although they may be more or less explicit from person to person.
We want leaders who think hard about their principles.
Small project from yesterday. Repurposed a piece of scrap wood into a coat rack.
Future pie pumpkins! (A little late in the season but still should be ready for the fall)
Well, I stumbled on this gem this morning. #jazz #blues
OpenAI has figured out that people prefer to hear what they want to be true over what is actually true. They prefer insincere compliments over honest feedback and constructive criticism (so long as there is no way to find out that the comments are insincere).
I don’t think that technology can solve everything - even AI (LLMs). This is an incredibly important talk and discussion about how chatbots are changing social interactions, including finding friendship and falling in love with them. What principles should be adopt to avoid dystopia?
My message to the graduating class of 2025
Friday, May 23, 2025
I don’t usually give a talk to my seniors because I don’t feel like I have anything insightful to share. But the other day I woke up at 4:45am with an idea. I threw the the slides together before work and was only able to practice part of it before I gave it. Here it is, in its entirety.
The math classroom that we math teachers enjoy being part of won’t be optimal for mathematical novices. We should generally resist the urge to use that environment as our aim.
(This remains true until and unless students have mastered the concepts that they will be working with.)
Math in Action 2025
Friday, February 21, 2025
I have the privilege of sharing a wide range of ways that I use Desmos, especially the Desmos activity builder, at the Math in Action conference on Grand Valley State University’s campus! Whether a teacher is brand new or has been in the classroom to decades, my hope is that all participants can find something valuable and usable in their classroom! Here are my “slides,” which is built in the Desmos Activity Builder.
Everyone is probably already aware of this, but it was only a matter of time before advertising came to AI chatbots. Perplexity seems aware of the problems with this, and is going to try to mitigate it. We’ll see. I suspect the game theory will drive a race to the bottom similar to social media.
Although, powerful open source models may be disruptive enough that advertising in AI LLMs doesn’t have the influence like it does in social media. Imagine if nostr and twitter started at the same time and nostr didn’t have to fight the network effect of most people having their social graph in FB, twitter, IG, etc.
To fully deliver on our mission to spark the world’s curiosity, we need to invest in building not just a beloved product, but a robust and self-sustaining business. That’s why starting this week, we will begin experimenting with ads on Perplexity.
Before getting into the details, we want to highlight our guiding principle: the content of the answers you receive on Perplexity will not be influenced by advertisers. Users come to Perplexity for a more efficient, uncluttered, and unbiased search experience, and that isn’t changing.
Ads will appear in the US to start and will be formatted as sponsored follow-up questions and paid media positioned to the side of an answer. Here’s an example of how they will appear:
Good stuff.
Prioritize:
- Sleep
- Learning
- In-person interaction
- Exercise
From the book “math without numbers” by Milo Beckman
