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Descriptions of effective teaching often depict an idealized form of "perfect" instruction. Yet, pursuing perfection in teaching, which depends on children's behavior, is ultimately futile. To be effective, lessons and educators need to operate with about 75% efficiency. The remaining 25% can be impactful, but expecting it in every lesson, every day, is unrealistic. Perfection in teaching may be unattainable, but progress is not. Whether you are aiming for the 75% effectiveness mark or striving for continuous improvement, this podcast will guide you in that endeavor.
Steve Hare
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[00:00:00]
Hello, everyone. This is Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom. I'm Gene Tavernetti, the host of this podcast, and my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.
A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords, only stuff that works. I'm really happy today to have Steve Hare as my guest. Steve Hare is a classroom math teacher who taught for 30 years at the elementary and middle school levels in a district just outside Philadelphia. He's worked with both regular ed and basic skills students, and he's drawn on his experience in the classroom and the findings of cognitive [00:01:00] science to create the You Teach You book series that we will be talking about today and a free math fact website, factfreaks.
com. Steve, welcome. It's great to have you here.
It's great to talk to you, Gene. Good to see you.
Thanks, thanks. It's always fun. You know, one of the things before we got started, I said that we are not involved in a we're not going to be involved in a discussion about whether or not learning math facts are important. That's just a given,
It should be a given.
it should be a given. But one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you is because I've been working with, 25 years in various schools, and I've never been to a school where they didn't say our kids don't know math facts.
Okay, and then I'd go back a couple years later, guess what? Our kids still don't know math facts. There was never anything being done. So that's why I was excited to have you on, because you're a math teacher who actually did [00:02:00] something about that.
Well, yeah, and for the reason you're saying, like, I was, I was getting very frustrated along with my colleagues at, these kids don't know math facts. And I also didn't like giving speed tests and having to grade them. And especially since it was the same test all the time and the kids would memorize the test.
And, and I, so the bottom line was I was doing a lot of computer programming at the time and I decided it wouldn't be that hard to create a program that the kids could use on their own and it would you know, randomly generate math facts and tell them whether they were right or wrong. So that was the, the idea behind Fact Breaks.
And so tell us so Fact Freaks, that's the name of the, uh, of the website that people could go to. So, the first year that people were on it, how much did it cost for them to use this?
How much did it cost? We've never made a dime off of Fact Freaks. No, Fact Freaks was made to be free to [00:03:00] everybody. It's, it was kind of like, it was one of my life goals was to, I thought, hey, that'd be a great, Kind of mission in life to make sure that future generations all knew their basic math facts.
There's 400 of them. So, and they need to be learned to the point of automatic recall. So, I thought, Hey, we could provide this to the world for free. Let's do it. And fortunately, my wife, Diane she's more than happy to, to work with me to make that reality along with my son.
Alright, great. And so, has it changed since you first started? Has it
when it, when it first started, it was called Fact Practice and it was as basic as basic gets. No graphics, no anything. I used to have to load it on to IMAX individually to get it to run and this was way back in the day. But Since then, you know, it became, for a while, it was just a website that you could play off a laptop and so [00:04:00] forth, and then it became a mobile website that you could play on your phone or on a laptop or, you know, a tablet.
And that's what it is now, but there's been many iterations of it.
You know, you say that the kids can play it. I haven't been on the site for a while. One thing that I didn't notice, it wasn't gamified.
Yeah, I'm not a, let me, I'm going to try to be, I'm going to stay positive here. Bottom line is what I was frustrated with was a lot of the math games that I would use with my fifth graders back in the day. I felt like it was a lot of game and very little math, and it was very easy for them to continue going even when they were doing things incorrectly, and so that was one of the main things about Fact Freaks was it requires 100 percent accuracy.
If you get a wrong answer, the game stops, which at first, we thought, Oh, that's going to [00:05:00] discourage kids. But what we found was it actually increases the motivation because the whole challenge is how many math facts can you get? Randomly generated math facts. Can you get correct in a minute? And when you get through that minute, you know, you've gotten all those facts.
So you'll have kids that get, you know, 50, 60, now, not, I mean, that's exceptional, 40 is the goal, but even if you get in the thirties, you're doing good. But, you know that when you get to the end of that, you just did it perfectly, and the reason that we insisted on that, of course, is because a fact that's wrong is not a fact.
You need to be able to recall these facts accurately from memory and instantaneously. I should say for a second there one of the reasons that we, some, some people go, do they need to be that fast? And the, the point is, no, they don't need to be that fast. We use speed to generate automatic recall. It's a way of getting to automatic recall.
They need to be able [00:06:00] to hardwire them into their brain so they always have them.
one of the things I heard recently somebody who had I really don't know how the content was delivered, but they talked about if it's not fast, if the recall is not fast, then that means the kids are falling back to some sort of other procedure
We actually,
recall.
there's some data that listeners can look at. that we have displayed on the FactReek website that that indicates that that it seems to suggest that if they're slower with them with the fact if they're slower with choosing an answer they're also more likely to get them wrong. So, speed actually seems to be correlated with accuracy.
All right. So you had this, you used this in, you were teaching middle school. How long did it take kids to get to that level of proficiency that you just described?
[00:07:00] Well, I would start it right in the beginning of the year and bottom line is we would do it. I wouldn't. It wasn't the kind of thing that you did for a whole class period. You would do it at the end of the class period. You might do it on a Friday for an extended period and what and I, the way I used it, I wouldn't hover over the kids.
I let the kids play without me, you know, watching them and and then I would, you know, get their best scores at the end of the period. And bottom line was, it would take maybe two, three weeks, sometimes as much as a month, but those kids, almost all of them got to 40, which was my goal, in everything, in everything.
Right.
And then what happened was, in my experience, what happened was you didn't have, you didn't have problems with basic math facts for the rest of the year. So,
yeah.
yeah, so, of course, mileage may vary, but depending on students, but, but the bottom line is It, it works very quickly [00:08:00] and and the reason is because it's instant feedback.
Well, you know, it's interesting. I was listening to, it's hard for me to remember names anymore, but I was listening to another podcast and they're talking about the idea of, you know, Again, there's going to be no excuses. All the kids are going to learn their math facts. And they had another program and they had teachers in a school.
All the teachers would do for the first four minutes. of class. They told them, don't change anything else in your math class, just do the first four minutes.
Right.
That's all it took. That's all it took. It doesn't take a lot, which again drives me a little bit, a little bit nuts thinking about schools that year after year after year will say, our kids don't know math facts.
Guess that's just not acceptable. It's just not acceptable.
and the thing with, with fact freaks, and I this might be an interest of interest to parents is that it takes a minute to play a game. So the [00:09:00] bottom line is like you're waiting in line with your kid for pizza, have them practice sedition facts, have them practice scrambled. You know, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, you know, they can get a couple games in and the bottom line is, like, they're going to be sharp.
They're going to know their, their stuff.
How is it easy enough for a parent to look at that and be able to explain it to a kid?
Yeah, one of the, one of the, for younger kids, well, we have a basic training feature on the, on the site where it doesn't stop the game if they get a wrong answer. It keeps track of right answers and wrong answers. And that's for kids who are just getting used to this. But the. One of an easy way for parents to use it in this way I use with my own grandkids is you let them play and if they get stuck on a question, you just have them ask it.
So if they go, what's 6 times 7, I'll just go 42 and they type 42 and, and that's another way for them to learn as they're actually playing the game. So, and they love it. They'll ask to do it before bed. [00:10:00] So it's, it's interesting. It's fun watching kids actually enjoy learning their math facts.
So you developed this several years ago, continue to involve,
this was, I developed this 20 years ago.
Okay, so, so you did,
this was.
so this is, so, and, and it's evolved, you made it better, you know, all the time. How many, how many colleagues were using this?
Oh, in the town where I just semi retired right now, I just finished up my last year as a classroom math teacher. And in the district that I retired from, it was almost all the teachers, all the math teachers in the district.
that's great. That's great.
and, and what was fun for me was I would get students coming in to the middle school and students that I had never met before, and they were already obsessed with fact freaks.
And I was like, wow. And then they'd be like, you made it? And I'm like, well, somebody had to make it.
Well, do you have any, [00:11:00] so you, you had a suggestion for parents, any suggestions for teachers who are interested? Maybe a little hesitant.
I would just say, play the game. Play the game yourself, try it, see if you can incorporate it in some way. I should say, Gene, the, one of the things I want to get across here is it it's not, it doesn't cover all that you need to know about these operations. Like for example, in UTG book one, we go through in detail, you know, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and building up to, you know, conceptual understanding of these.
Operations. That's not Fact Freaks. Fact Freaks was mainly created to plug a hole that I saw that I didn't see anybody else seeking to fill, which was Fact Freaks is about automaticity. I didn't see anything out there that was specifically geared towards automaticity. And also, I'm going to use I'll, I'll use education jargon here for a second, but I'll, I'll, dial it back.
It's also [00:12:00] interleaving, which in, in Fact Freaks takes the form of scrambler and impossible scrambler, which involves division by zero. But the bottom line is, and I'm sure you'll appreciate this, you know how like in, in the major leagues, like you have to be, a batter has to be able to hit any pitch that gets thrown.
They don't know what the next pitch is going to be, right? Same thing with math facts. The real test of whether or not you've mastered your math facts is. If you get them scrambled, so Scrambler and Impossible Scrambler, if you can get to 40 in Scrambler or Impossible Scrambler, you have mastered your math facts.
You know, even if you get to 30 in Scrambler and Impossible Scrambler, those, those are now part of you. They're hardwired and you'll never have to spend extra brain power during math lessons trying to figure those, those math facts out from scratch.
I just want to say one more time zero cost, zero cost. You don't, [00:13:00] you don't need to, you don't need to give your credit card number.
Nope. And just so you know, it will always be free.
Okay, that,
had no plans on, on charging for Fact
all right. Well, let's talk about something that another area that You saw that there was a, a need, and that is a series of books that you've written. Could you, you talk, you reference that a little bit when you're talking about Math Freaks, the, the You Teach You series. Talk about that, how, where that came from and, and what's going on.
in a way similar to Fact Freaks. It was, you know, it was created, it was born out of frustration. You know, I was a frustrated fifth grade math teacher because the kids didn't know their basic math facts. So how am I going to teach them, you know, fractions and decimals and so forth? So, it's in the same way I I was frustrated during COVID that I wasn't able to teach the way that I needed to teach.
I was trying to teach during [00:14:00] COVID, during remote instruction. I was trying to teach out of my living room with a whiteboard, doing worked examples, you know, and kids sitting at home watching or, you know, Not watching what I was doing, and I realized that, oh my gosh, like now, you know, I'm not reaching them really at all, any of them.
And what I started doing was, I'm a big fan of John Sweller's concept of, of worked examples. And so I started creating activities, putting them on Google Classroom with worked example, worked example at the top of an activity for math problems, and then a series of math problems. you know, related to the worked example.
And I found that, well, that was better than me just talking to them in front of a whiteboard and trying to get them to do work on paper when I couldn't even see them. So I was sending these things and I would find that the kids would do the first couple problems and they would understand the worked example.
[00:15:00] I'd call them now pre worked examples. Which I found works better than working the example with them on the board, in my experience. And but I found that if the, if the practice problems that follow the example, if they got too far away from the content of the example, the kids would get stuck. And then they'd stop doing them.
They'd be like, I don't know what to do. And so, The frustrating, the moment of frustration, but also the moment of enlightenment was one day I heard myself saying, What am I supposed to do? Give them a worked example for every single practice problem? And the light bulb went on, and I thought it's, I had plenty of time with, you know, COVID.
And so I just started making these activities. putting them on Google Classroom. And I also put the keys for the activities on Google Classroom. They could check their own work. And what I found was all of a sudden, my inbox, my emails filling up with messages from students saying, this is [00:16:00] the first time I've ever understood math before.
And parents saying wow, this is, my kid is doing this stuff, learning this stuff. And most amazingly, I don't even have to help them because they can see what they're supposed to be doing from the examples.
We stop, stop for a second. I want, I want to go back because you mentioned something that I think I want to want to expand on a little bit, and that is when you do whole class instruction, when you did whole class instruction, what did that look like? Because you said you were doing worked examples, because many times somebody will purchase a purchase or start to use a resource, and they don't realize that they're Wow, there was a lot of work done prior, you know, you know, so, so kind of what, what did your instruction look like,
well, I can tell you,
Okay.
I think like a lot of teachers, I, when I first became converted to the idea of worked [00:17:00] examples, I thought, well, I can easily work these at the board and then have the kids copy them down. And that didn't work. Well, and for a number of reasons. One was this, the material was new to the kids, so having them listen to me, like, explain it and copy it down at the same time and expecting them to copy it down accurately, it was, it just didn't work.
Half the class had the wrong thing down or wasn't able to pay attention to the explanation. I've written about this in some tweets on, you know, on, on Twitter. Twitter. So then what I found worked better than that was what I now discovered as a thing was silent teaching where you don't talk during it.
You just, because the material itself, math itself is a language and it can be self explanatory. And I found that that worked way better. And so it was those ideas that led me to the, to the U Teach [00:18:00] U concept of a pre worked example for every single practice problem, or corresponding to every single practice problem. But the But the thing is, what I found was students are way more capable of understanding the examples that I think we've, we've given them credit for as long as they have the right background knowledge as prerequisite background knowledge. And I don't know if this is going outside the parameter of your question,
No, no, this, in fact, my next question was about how much background knowledge was needed. So carry on.
okay, so, so how did I, this is kind of answering your question, I guess, but how do I, how did. I use this in the classroom. Well, what I found very quickly when COVID ended, and I started doing this because I was so impressed with how it was working during COVID, that I swore that I was going to have tons of these activities, you know, for everything I taught at the seventh and eighth grade level.
And I, when I got [00:19:00] back from college. COVID when we, you know, back to in class instruction, I had these activities and I just went for it. I we did these activities every single day. I'm not saying that teachers are going to, all teachers are going to want to do that. But that's what I did. And and what I, what I found was that I had to develop a sequence and, and what I did was I went all the way back to the very beginning.
So, you know, the first activity you're, their kids are learning how to add single digit numbers based on their ability to count. And then you're going to multi digit addition based on their knowledge of single digit addition. And then you're going to build on single digit addition. you know, subtracting single digit numbers, you know, out of what you learned about addition.
So every new lesson built on the prior lessons. And if you didn't have that, that was a problem because that's the biggest problem I think classroom teachers face. If the kids [00:20:00] don't have the requisite background knowledge, how are they going to get it? Well, if you have a sequence of activities, you can send them back and you just go, go back and, you know, and what I found was The activities had to be self paced and kids had to be free to go back if they needed it to practice on an older, older activity.
They needed to be able to start from where they from the knowledge base that they already had. So if you had kids, If I, I started the whole class, the years that I did this, I would start the whole class back with basic addition, even though this was middle school, and have them work through the sequence.
And what happened was, the kids who already knew all their basic operations, they would blow right through the initial activities. And they would fill in any gaps that they noticed, like they go, Oh, you know what, I didn't, I wasn't as good at multi digit subtraction as I thought I was with that regrouping.
So they would plug in their holes as they [00:21:00] went. What happened was they would all get they would all get precisely what they needed. So, I wasn't, I wasn't forcing, like, they would use the examples if they needed them. I, I didn't force anything. I would turn the process over to them, and I found that that That was key.
I can, I can hear. Well, my ears are burning because teachers are listening saying, you know what, that's great, Steve, but I've got all of this material to get through. I can't, I don't have time to go back.
But the beauty, beautiful thing about this is that you can send the kids back to do it themselves. Like, here's the main thing that I would get across to teachers. Not everybody's going to do, use, you teach you the way that I used it. But but what I can tell you is the you know how in the beginning of the school year, you basically have a one to two month grace period.
You're not really required to get paid. to the, you know, meatier parts of the curriculum, right? During that grace period, [00:22:00] that's the perfect time to make sure everybody's up to speed with the basics. That's what the You Teach You books are ideal for. And the, the thing there is, if you're, suppose you're teaching fractions and there's a kid who doesn't understand multi digit multiplication, and it's holding them back with working with fractions.
You just, you can assign it for homework, so they just do it on their own time. You have to do this activity, you have to understand everything about it, you have to check your work. Pull yourself up so then you can start doing this stuff with fractions. So, it, what it does is it allows students to take control of their own learning, and I'm finding that that is a, a How do you say it?
A breakthrough approach to education, math education.
Another question that I think teachers might have, teachers I have, is that the way I hear you describe it, it's almost individualized differentiation. Is it that, how do you [00:23:00] manage, how, how, how do you manage a class? And I don't know how many kids you have in your classes In California here we've got 30 to
Oh yeah, oh yeah, we had
in a c in a classroom.
So how do you manage that when you've got kids working on different you teach, you work examples?
The beautiful thing there is that they wouldn't, because they all had a task, how do you say this? Because the activity that they're working on, they had the prior knowledge for it, because they worked their way through the sequence, right? So they can do the activity that they're working on. And of course in the room, I like to.
to refer to it as the sage at the side, not the guide at the side or the sage on the stage, but the sage on the side, because if they need help with something, then they come to me. And the beautiful thing there is they're interested in the help. They're interested in the answer. And it's fun to work with them like that.
But the bottom line is they can, they have the prerequisite knowledge, so they can do the activity. But the activities, of [00:24:00] course, slightly harder, slightly more complex than what they've previously done. So, it's right in that sweet spot of not being too easy, not being too hard, it's a nice level of challenge.
And that's what we're What that means is every kid in the classroom has work that they can do, every single one of them. Now I've taught for many years where you have, you know, you'll give an assignment to kids and well you have half the class can do it and half the class can't. And then you have a serious problem as a classroom teacher, you're running around putting out fires, kids are misbehaving.
So to get to your, to answer your question, What it does is it reduces behavior problems dramatically. And the reason is the kids don't feel embarrassed. Because, first of all, they can do the work that they have in front of them. So, there's no embarrassment at feeling stupid. They don't feel dumb because they have work that they can [00:25:00] do.
And what I'm always telling them is, I don't care where you are in the sequence, I care that you're working, understanding what you're doing, and you're working towards being able to do the more advanced stuff.
Talk about that. Go, go ahead Steve.
Just, I know, you know me, Gene, I talk too much, but the but the thing is what it looks like to a kid sitting in that classroom is, oh, I go into that classroom every day and I just do math like everybody else. So you don't, you don't have those embarrassment and then overcompensating by goofing around. You don't have those issues. Now what, I should say too, to get this to really work the way that I got it to work. Was you also give them some free time at the end of the period to decompress because you're asking them to do a ton of work on pen with pencil and paper and check their work and make sure it's accurate so they [00:26:00] are working my art periods are 46 minutes so they were working solid 40 minutes and then I'd give them six minutes to socialize.
That was gonna be my question because. As somebody who's worked with schools as a consultant, I've had an opportunity to basically spend seven period or six period day all day long, you know, just like us, just like a student. And I'm telling you by that six period. I'm dragging, and so I hear some teachers talk about, Yep, we do this, it's bell to bell, and I'm thinking to myself, You know what if that's true, you need a statue out front of your school, because kids can't, adults don't do that.
We will take, we will take time. So, so what, what's the reality
watch teachers in PD. Like, they're horrible because they can't sit still that long. So, so, you know, the bottom line is, I think what you're [00:27:00] hitting on is we should always be thinking about the experience from the point of view of the kid. If the kid's going, you know what, I put a ton of work in this class.
It's a lot of work, but I feel smarter when I leave. Yeah. They're going to plug into it, you know, and, and, and when they all feel that way, there's a culture that develops, you know, so, they know that they're going in there and they're going to learn and these are going to be, you know, skills that they're going to need in their future,
Well, I'm concerned about teachers who listen to something like this or listen, try something new that somebody is selling. Not necessarily selling for money, but just selling an idea. And it doesn't work out the way that the person talked about. And they think, what am I doing wrong? What's wrong with my kids?
The reality, we, we, we talk about an idealized, you just talked about the reality.
I feel so sorry for teachers. I mean, I've been doing this for [00:28:00] 30 years. Bottom line is, you know, I'm a middle school teacher. Well, I just, you know, retired from being a middle school teacher and you're doing, I, I've had, you know, seven classes. of kids every single day. So, like, you're gonna, you're gonna get up there and do this, you know, amazing performance seven times a day.
You know, we have to start offloading the things that we can offload onto the, to the students themselves to ease up the burden on the teacher. Let me tell you, when I did this, you, you teach you activity myself. I would be there and I'd be teaching the whole time, but the teaching would come from students individually asking me questions, or a couple kids would have the same kind of question, and we'd do a small group, and it was so much easier.
It was so easy to do that for seven periods a day for the teacher because I wasn't getting exhausted trying to perform seven times a [00:29:00] day. And, and on top of that, one more thing I should say, and I know I'm
They're all good things, Steve.
I also found that when I took a day off or, you know, had a sick day, right, it didn't matter. The kids just came in, did the same thing that they did when I was there. They were learning the exact same way, you know, and if they had any questions, they just saved them. What I would have, which I always found fascinating, was I would take a sick day, the kids would still be learning with the sub, and then that night I would start getting emails with questions from the students.
They'd be asking me while I was watching TV at home with my wife.
That's great. So, so you're talking about now I'm having a moment here because there was a real important
allowed, at our age, Gene, we're allowed to
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Callie, I know you're going to, you're going to edit this out. So you're talking, we were talking about so if there were more than, oh, I know where I want to talk.
Okay. Here's what I wanted to say. We can start again, Callie. All right. So you, the, you [00:30:00] teach you. is a series of books that covers different grade level spans and different content.
It's,
is that correct? And
it's, it's a sequence that starts with just basic addition based on counting and now the book, book four just came out, which is operations with negatives. And so the bottom line is it goes from basic addition all the way up to the beginnings of algebra. We did, we have algebra expressions at the end of the negatives book.
And
to be accurate, I misspoke with regards to grade levels. It is content
It, correct, it's based on content, and I let kids go as far as they want, so you'd have some kids who'd, you know, I had sixth graders a number of years ago, who I had several of them that went all the way through to high school material. I had to, I had to lay track. In other words, I had to keep making new activities to keep up with them, which was fun.
It was actually [00:31:00] really fun.
Well, one of the things that I think is another benefit from, from your book for teachers, because again, I've worked with, with with elementary teachers for like over like 25 years doing coaching. And one of the things that I've noticed to make a generalized statement, a very generalized statement, is that for the most part, math is not their strongest suit, not their strongest content area.
And one of the things, as I was going through your, your materials, is that If I was a teacher, I could learn it. I mean, you know, and I would feel much more confident in the material after. Yes.
parents too, because the examples are self explanatory. They're always self explanatory. So you can always jump in and go, Oh, I see what's going on here. And, and help the, help the student. I've had many [00:32:00] teachers I now have a number of teachers in my former district that are using you teaching materials.
And and of course we have teachers all over the place. Like now that I've started, you know, promoting this stuff on, on Twitter. But the, the bottom line is they say it's so, it's so easy to help students with for that exact reason. You know, you never feel like the material, you, the materials over your head as, as the teacher or the parent or the grandparent.
Well, there were a lot of things that you took into consideration in creating the materials. Like you talked about the worked examples. There's not much, there's not a lot of variation in the examples. It leads to the next level of
Some of them are. Yeah, some of them are sequential. Some aren't. A lot of them involve discovery learning. It's, they discover precisely what they are meant to discover because they have the answer key and, [00:33:00] and you structure the examples that way.
Okay. So, so we hit on another edgespeak. With discovery learning and here's one of the things that I thought I was a few months ago, I would've thought, that's the last thing I'm gonna hear Steve Hare say that he's into discovery learning. But then I was talking to people what they. I said, what do you mean by discovery learning?
He says, well, like, for example, I'll have kids add two plus two plus two, it's, and it's six. And then I'll say, huh, how many twos are there? And they discover, well, you know what? And, and I think that's what you're talking about. You know, you're, you're bringing them to that leap that is not even a leap.
It's just a step up the curve.
Right, and it, it fires their imagination, all of a sudden they made a connection. The thing that discovery lear what I'm against is unstructured discovery learning. Where the kids might discover it, but they might [00:34:00] not, like, no, we need them to make the connection. accurate discoveries, you know, and you can structure these activities.
Like what I always think of is like scientists don't just do experiments, they do controlled experiments, you know, so this is like controlled discovery learning and they actually do discover the stuff. You'll hear them while they're working, they'll be like, oh my gosh, and it's like, that's great, that's
And you know, you know what? Years ago, I heard Dr. William Glasser. I don't know if people are familiar with him, but one of the things that he said is that laughter is our reward for learning.
Yeah,
And it's actually true. You, you cannot learn something just without smiling.
yeah, and, and I've,
joy.
yeah, of course there is, you get a dopamine rush. It's like, because the precise thought that you get is, I'm smart. You try a problem, it's hard, so you might get it wrong. And you check the key, and you're going, hey, I got it [00:35:00] right. I'm smart. And then you just keep getting these, you know, I'm smart experiences.
You start racking those up and you start thinking of yourself as being smart and being somebody who who's good at math, which is exactly what we want. The other thing, though, here's another thing that might be less obvious. If they check the key and they got the wrong answer, I've found that they'll look at the wrong answer and they'll go, Oh, Oh, and they're like, Oh, now I get it.
So I am smart. So it doesn't either way. They feel smart.
Yeah.
I understood the explanation. I'm smart.
Dave as always, I, I always enjoy talking to you. I like your excitement and
I find I smile a lot when we're talking, Gene. So
Good, good. Then that means we're both learning because I'm
there we go. Yeah, right, right.
smiling a lot, too. So, where can folks get the You Teach You
uTeachU is just if they, to [00:36:00] to check it out, uTeachU. org. And if they are interested in purchasing, it's just shop. uTeachU. org.Okay.
you teach you examples, but but the bottom line is like this is just the beginning, like this kind of self instructional stuff based on pre worked examples.
It has applications outside of math and it has applications that I haven't even thought of. So anybody who's interested in creating these kinds of activities on their own I'm at share math. On Twitter. And and then utt. org for the books, and then factfreaks. com is the website.
All right, Steve. Always a joy. Always a joy.
right back at you, my friend.
All right. Well, we'll talk soon.
Okay, I look forward to it.