The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Loribeth Ford Jarrell. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: A reminder for our listeners, it’s really helpful when you give us a five star rating on your favorite podcast app when you’re done listening today. Ratings help us build audience, which helps us continue to attract the excellent guests that we have on The Jim Rutt Show. So leave us a five star rating. And if you have a spare minute or two, consider writing a review. Thanks, folks.
Today’s guest is Loribeth Ford Jarrell. Loribeth is director of Sumplicity, S-U-M-P-licity, Math. She’s president of Jarrell Academics, and together they have a lab school/lab program comprising a new model of educational service delivery based on the neural characteristics and firing patterns of individual children. Welcome, Loribeth.
Loribeth: Thanks, Tim. Glad to be here.
Jim: As regular listeners know, I’m somewhat obsessed with the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive science. So maybe you could start off a little bit by saying, what do you mean when you talk about neural characteristics and firing patterns of individual children?
Loribeth: Well, it starts off by working with children as individuals. So when we put children into a class or a cohort, a lot of things that are very specific to that child in terms of their needs and learning are eradicated or obfuscated by the classroom environment. And a lot of educational research is actually also conducted in situations where you really can’t control for the variables, and so you really cannot see very clearly what’s happening with the individual children. So when you work with children individually, you want to work with them longitudinally. You want to start them at four, you want to keep them for a period of 10, 15 years, and you want to see what happens to those children along the way for the long term, rather than having one teacher, one class, 40 kids, and then they move on.
So if you actually tilt the model back to the one-room schoolhouse model, you have teachers who have a chance to see the development from behavioral characteristic A to behavioral characteristic B across time. And if you build up a big enough contingent or cohort of children and you start to see patterns, and these patterns, they’re ubiquitous, they are shot throughout and they are repetitive and iterative, and so you wind up having these characteristics in children that really change the way you should be doing the education with them. So everybody’s looking for a bespoke model in custom education, and I think I have the stub of what will inform that for the long term.
Jim: Cool. Let me back up a little bit and tell us what you guys actually do. What do you actually deliver? Who is your audience, et cetera?
Loribeth: Sure. So we started out as a tutorial program and we drifted into the microschool arena. I cut my teeth professionally with different tutorial programs. I used to work for that K company, you know that had the one with the sad face, and I worked for their corporate office for a few years. And then I worked for their competitor out of Korea for a few years, and basically I outgrew both of those programs. Those two programs formed the first 10 years of my career. At a certain point, I felt like I had evolved enough to jump off and start to become my own thing. And also start to develop a model of how children learn that really will inform the ability to obtain a custom education under a custom timeline, really. And that’s a big ask.
But I think that the world is going modular. I think education is going modular. I think there’s so much response in the environment, homeschooling, unschooling, all of these things. People are saying, “Hey, the thing we had been doing for the last 150 years doesn’t really fit. We all know that, but what’s going to drive our together process?” And so we’re essentially a tutorial model. Our focus is mathematics primarily. We can do just about everything, but we are custom in the math space because the math space has very particular needs from children. We’re mathematics teachers.
Jim: So you’re supplementary, as best I could tell from your website?
Loribeth: We are supplementary. Well, we have done a couple of years of microschool, because microschool movement is pretty big right about now. And we’ve actually created different models for the microschool process as well, so yes.
Jim: Distinguish between those two for our audience.
Loribeth: Supplementary education means the kids are going to come to us after school on Saturdays, on Sundays, they’re going to get tutorial services. And we’re talking about tutorial services in the way that Alexander would’ve understood tutorial services, not the way you understand them. Tutorial as the gold standard rather than the model of delivered education. So the kids will come after school on the weekend.s and then during the microschool period, the kids would come 9:00 to 1:00 Monday through Thursday. They would get a full service delivery on full education and they’d get a day off, and we didn’t drop a beat. So there are two different ways of interacting with those children. The approach we use ports across models.
Jim: Of your students, what percentage are, say, public-school students looking for enrichment or catch-up or whatever, versus home-school or non-school or such?
Loribeth: I would say that 70% of my students are public-school students. And the big difference is that most of my contingent happened to be children of Indian descent, kids who are here from parents of H-1B visas. Essentially those kids want an advantage. They don’t want to be left to the American school system, so they will find every way that they can to plug in to get education. When you have a God of Education, Ganesh, dedicated towards educational practice, you look for every opportunity. So a lot of my kids are looking for advantages. They’re looking for the opportunity to be the best in their class to graduate with honors and get the scholarships and all those kinds of things. But we span the range. We have children that are full on autism spectrum. We have children that are the highest, the top of their class. We have everybody in between. So we’re not really just a special tutoring program. We’re really designed that this model works for everybody, literally it works for everybody.
Jim: Maybe we could get in a little bit to what the model is and how do you do your individual assessment?
Loribeth: Okay. So the first thing I do is try to establish who the child is as a neural processor. When they come in, first thing I do is watch how their eyes work in the room. Do they bury their heads in mom’s skirts or do they kind of look around, right? This is the first thing I’m looking for. What I’m looking for is auditory versus visual dominance. There are a number of models, and it started with Howard Gardner in 1983, multiple intelligences. And of course the neurologists went looking for all these pieces in the brain and they couldn’t find the direct maps to what Gardner was saying.
But through the process of doing some of this research, we’ve discovered that there is really a difference between the modalities and the auditory and the visual are the dominance and the kinesthetic and the tactiles are the sub dominance that are used whenever a child’s having difficulty or experiencing difficulty. So all the other things are kind of peripheral, but the two big drivers are whether or not a child is an auditory dominant when they interact with material or whether they’re a visual dominant when they act with material.
Now that’s just the intake mode. This is the second layer. The second layer is what I call the vector space. And the vector space is where there are sort of linguistic stimulus that will create reactions in their executive functions. So if I tell a contrary vector kid, “Hey, you can’t do that.” “Well, yes I can.” And then they get right to work, they got to prove me wrong. And if I tell an ownership vector kid, “Well, that’s my work. I want to do that.” “No, no. No, you can’t. That’s my work.” So as soon as we start pushing work at children, we’re shutting down their ownership vectors.
The vector space, there’s about 10 different vector dials that you can activate on a child and they’ll show you who you are. And when you start activating those dials, you get a custom education because you know how to drive the train. Rather than trying to drive a train and throw the children on it, and some of the kids are going to stick to it and some of the kids are going to just fall off. So we have this model where when the kids come in, about three and a half or four, if we can get them that early, we start interacting with them and we start building material for them. All the material in our program is custom built. So there are 3,000 booklets at this time that we will… It’s like a palette. We paint with the palette with the child. And we will use those booklets and we will use the different modalities that they show us that they need to direct this education.
Jim: Maybe you could run through the 10 vectors. I think that’d actually be quite interesting. And maybe at least briefly, how do you assess those?
Loribeth: They come out neurolinguistically. They usually come out with the child’s behaviors. So on my Facebook page, I post videos frequently of these things when they happen. I’ll give you some examples. I guess the first one we need to talk about is novelty versus completion. Children have differential needs for novelty versus completion. A lot of times I’ll have four kids at my table and one of the kids will be doing their work, and then suddenly they watch what another kid is doing. And parent’s the sitting there and they say, “Oh, stop, pay attention. What are you doing?” And I’m like, “No, they are paying attention.” The brain is designed to learn. We are designed to learn for novel things that happen in our environment. So letting that child actually have the space to imprint what’s happening around them is a big deal.
So novelty vector kids require a different kind of folder than my completion vector kids. Novelty vector kids will not do a whole assignment because they wind up saturating so quickly. So they need to go a little of this, a little of this, a little of this, a little of this, a little of this. And my completion vector kids are exactly opposite. They need to finish a thing completely. They need to bring it to closure, and it’s an internal need inside of them. So they have folders that are very thin because they need to feel that completion. Novelty vectors don’t have that need at all. So what happens is they go through their curriculum very differently. But both are efficient means, both are efficient modes to engage that material. So novelty versus completion is one of the very first ones.
One of the next ones is contrary. The contrary vector. Contrary vector is a really interesting one because it is not intentional and it is not willed. The contrary vector is driven by language frames. So I can get a kid to do almost anything I want when I drive that contrary vector on them. If they have that contrary vector, they have a need to oppose me. When they have that need to oppose me, that’s literally how you get them to work. Now, if I’m a classroom teacher in school, right? Okay, imagine this, Jim. You’re a classroom teacher at school and you say to a kid, “I don’t think you can do that.” Now what’s going to happen to you? You’re going to get fired. You’re going to get booted out the next day, right? But some of those kids need to have something to fight against. They need to have something to scaffold against, and so they need you to be contrary with them, right?
Jim: The reason I’m laughing here, you can’t see it because we’re not video, but I was extremely contrary.
Loribeth: No. Not you?
Jim: Always. And I still recall the biggest deep dives I did in third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, even up to eighth grade, were proving the teacher wrong, right?
Loribeth: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: She said X, “She’s wrong. Let me prove it.” Me and my best friend spent a whole weekend one time proving our science teacher wrong,.
Loribeth: And that motivated your executive function. That’s exactly right. Now, here’s the other thing I’m going to say. Just having interacted with you for just the grand 15 minutes that we have. I would mark you for a 70% auditory at least. Because of the way you actually inflect sound. The way when you open, you’re big and you’re low. But what ends up happening is these vectors attach to specific neural pathways. So auditories typically have a contrary, an ownership and an ego vector. And that is not necessarily true for my visual dominant processors. So it actually turns out that these two things are actually mutually oppositional. So my auditory is on the one side. The more auditory they are, the more those vectors tend to come in. So you wind up having more of these.
Think about the opera diva, it has to be their way, and, “I’m not doing it in [inaudible 00: 12:02] don’t do it my way and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” So you have these two different kinds of processors. So think about when you have musicians, the musician profile is one of the greatest ways we can find the auditory versus visual interaction. You have players who are great ear players, they sit down, they can kind of play whatever they hear, they love to miss and mess around with the music. But man, is it hard to learn to read, right? They have the hardest time learning to read.
Okay, then you have kind of your classically trained on the other side who do really, really well with reading but improvisation is a little tough or they can’t quite get there with that improvisation. They don’t really feel the music, they just follow it on the page, right? Now, these are broad categories, and of course there’s mixing in the middle. But these are the two classes. And actually it turns out that my auditories, who are the super musicians that just are the ear players, also are horribly bad at math. They’re horribly bad at math. There’s a huge correlation in this space that those players, and we can predict it, we can predict it from four years old because we can hear how they do sound.
Jim: Based on the least what you’ve said so far, I think you guessed wrong that I’m an auditory dominant, because I did play music when I was in middle school and I was quite good at playing the music as written on the page. I picked that up way faster than most. But I couldn’t improvise or play by ear to save my ass, right?
Loribeth: All right so-
Jim: And further, I am a reader, not a listener. Kind of embarrassing being a podcast host, but I don’t listen to God damn podcasts, right? I will actually take the transcript of the podcast and read that. I’m a reader, not a listener or watcher. People say, “Oh, you got to watch this on YouTube.” I go, “I ain’t going to watch that. That’s bullshit.” So I’m a reader. And oh, by the way, I’m extremely good at math.
Loribeth: Sir, you just described yourself as an auditory. Let me explain.
Jim: Okay.
Loribeth: Let me explain. This is actually one of the things that everybody kind of gets wrong.
Jim: Okay, this is great. I love to learn new things.
Loribeth: You’re going to love this. So you are probably in the 50-50 zone. So imagine a parabola and you have your auditories up here, your visuals down here, but it’s an entire spectrum. Okay? So I am an auditory that’s super up here. I’m an 85 percenter. Let’s say we do music, can you harmonize off the top of your head? Can you just harmonize a third, fifth or seventh part harmony?
Jim: Not with any great precision.
Loribeth: Not with great precision, okay? Now, can you do voices for different kinds of things? So if I said to you, “Speak to me in your crazy Russian voice, right?” You can do this?
Jim: Yeah, very good. I’m very good at that.
Loribeth: Right? You’re very good like this. This is very funny. This is an auditory skill. This is not a visual skill.
Jim: Get yourself in much trouble with politically correct people if you do that these days.
Loribeth: Right? But you know what’s amazing to me is it’s a big deal when I’m teaching my kids and I can slip into voices. So if you can do those voices, you have that sort of auditory, you’re probably more in that 50-50 zone where you’re balanced between, but you’ve got those pieces. Because the people who don’t have those pieces are on the visual side. It actually turns out that the map is backwards. So the reason why you’re not getting a lot of… There’s a lot of researchers.
Veritasium went out and did this and they said, “Oh, there’s no evidence to learning styles, blah, blah, blah. It’s all hokum.” And I laughed and I said, “Well, that’s because you got the maps backward.” Visual learners don’t need visual help to acquire concepts. They don’t use the colors, they don’t use all those things. It’s actually the auditories who need the assist that comes from the color, not the visual processors. It’s not your learning style, it’s your dominance in terms of how your brain metabolizes information. And the auditory channel is actually faster in your temporal lobe, whether you’re visual or not. I mean, that’s just the way that that works. So when you teach children visually on a board and they have to make that meaning through their eyes before they make it through their mouth, you’re automatically disprivileging 40% of your population from acquiring mathematical concepts. It’s a big deal.
Jim: That’s interesting. And of course, public schools doesn’t know any of this. They just do one size fits all, right?
Loribeth: Well, that’s always the complaint. I mean, there’s a lot of lip service that’s given to, “We’re going to do multiple intelligences,” but it’s just kind of a random scattering of random things. There’s no driver behind it that says, “Oh, this kid truly does need this, and this kid truly does need this.” And what I’m saying is that I can actually diagnose that, I can tell you exactly which place to put them in and then what schedule to put them in. Because it’s the schedule too. Children need more time than just a week to do concepts. Your fast absorb processors need two days, your slow absorb processors need seven days on that concept. And we don’t give them any variation in that ability to do it.
Now in my program, I don’t assign anything. In my program, I give them a binder and I say, “You’ve got to work every day. That’s the basic rule. Now all you have to do is pick what appeals to you. Pick. You pick.” And based on what they pick, the brain will wire itself quite easily. When they start picking things, you start to see what they leave behind and why are they leaving those things behind? Then that’s what your time in class is meant to assist for, “Here’s the little piece that I’m going to give you. Here’s the little piece of the jungle I’m going to cut away for your path. But the path is yours. It’s not mine. I’m not telling you how fast to learn something. I’m telling you that you’ve got to engage it, but the time it takes you belongs to you. It belongs to you as the learner, right?
This is the big thing I really want to have different. Education belongs to the child. It doesn’t belong to your ideas about the state. It doesn’t belong to your philosophy. It belongs to the child for the child’s own purpose, for the child’s own use. And so they have to have some control over the process of acquiring since they’re being plugged into it. And they don’t have any control over that process. They can’t say, “Hey, can I take two more days to study this? Because I really feel like I’m close, but I’m not there yet.” We don’t give them that chance. Why? Why don’t we give them that chance?
Jim: I had one accidental experience with math education. Somehow or another I got involved with tutoring freshmen at a liberal arts college in chemistry. And I immediately assessed their problem wasn’t chemistry, it was very basic math. First, this wasn’t a super elite school, but kind of a medium elite liberal arts school, and almost none of them could do fraction math, particularly if the denominators were different. And I go, “What the hell? How the hell did you get out of high school if you couldn’t do fractions with different denominators?” And then, so basically the first thing I taught them is a whole bunch of tricks on how to do fraction math, just simple multiplication, addition, division, simple.
And then the other was something I’d learned from my brilliant high school chemistry teacher, hi, Mr. Boston, if you’re still by any chance out there, which is that if you can start to really understand what ratios are and cancel out the dimensions. And then whatever dimension you’re trying to get, if you get the dimensional analysis correct, then it’s just arithmetic to get the answer. And that would be the second thing I’d teach them. With those two tricks alone, they went from struggling in freshman chemistry to being A- students, at least, in freshman chemistry. The thing that struck me was these kids had been taught all kinds of arithmetic and math in their high school years, but probably way too much, too many topics, but not enough depth on the really important ones.
Loribeth: So you can do a lot of damage by switching models when the child can’t visually process that many models. So this happens in kindergarten all the time. “Oh, let’s do this model, let’s do this model, let’s do this one.” Because we don’t know which one’s going to work the best. Well, it actually turns out there is a model that works the best and it’s the 10 frame dot pattern, and you literally can kill the number line and kiss it goodbye because it’s doing more harm than good. Children from four to seven have an emergent visual field.
So what this means is they literally don’t see space. If you put three dots on a paper and then you put a number line that represents a three space, they do not understand the relationship of lines to spaces in those number line models. And the number line model, even the ANS of Dehaene and all of that is all predicated on this idea that children can hold this sort of spatial representation of a number line in their head and they can’t and they don’t. So the problem is you are starting the entire process with the wrong model, and the model that you need to use is the 10 frame dot pattern exclusively. You don’t need to go jacking around with all the other stuff.
Jim: What is that? If you could explain what the 10 frame dot model is?
Loribeth: Sure. I mean, every teacher in the world is going to know this. You have five dots on the top and you have five dots on the bottom. You can draw this out in a piece of paper in front of you if you want. So the nine is represented as five dots on the top with four on the bottom, and it leaves a little negative space. And then there’s a five dots and a three dots. So there’s two in the negative space for the eight. But basically the entire purpose of addition is not to count up. It’s to make the 10. And basically if you have an eight plus six, you do not count up 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, so on and so forth. What you do is you take two from the six, make the 10 and leave the four behind. That’s it. Period. Done. There’s absolutely no counting involved in it. It is the completion model of a 10 group, which is essentially what place value is and what place value does. Everything we do with a number line is actually getting in our way in K-2.
Jim: That’s interesting. I like that. I remember being a cheater in second grade because I could count real fast in my day, and then I discovered in third grade when we were supposed to learn the multiplication tables, I could add real fast in my head. So six times eight, okay, six plus six plus six [inaudible 00:21:36] 48. But fortunately I kept at it and learned my multiplication tables. But yeah, there’s certainly a temptation, particularly if you’re quick, to cheat and count on your fingers or count in mental fingers for adding and subtraction.
Loribeth: It’s not a cheating issue, it’s a survival issue. Because a lot of kids can’t visualize numbers in their head, and that’s taken for granted. A lot of people think that children see the numerals in their head and they can process it. They don’t. Especially the auditories, right? So what winds up happening is they get completely lost trying to frame the image because they’re not visual dominance and they can’t make that work. So there’s a lot of practical things that teachers that are in the second grade space don’t understand. Kids actually really do negatives really, really well. Believe it or not, elementary school children they’re rock stars with negatives. So let’s do a problem real quick. I don’t know if you have a pencil, but can you just write down 52 minus 37?
Jim: 52 minus 37, yeah.
Loribeth: Tell me what do you see?
Jim: 15.
Loribeth: Do you see 20 minus 5 there?
Jim: Do I see 20 minus 5?
Loribeth: Yeah.
Jim: No,
Loribeth: My kids do.
Jim: Well, I do. Well sort of do, but frankly, I have the algorithm down so hard I just run the algorithm, right?
Loribeth: Well, let’s talk about the language though. So when you see that five and that three, you say five and three, but it’s really 50 minus 30, isn’t it? Isn’t that 20?
Jim: Yeah.
Loribeth: Isn’t 2 minus 7 just negative 5?
Jim: Ah, I like that. Ah, okay. I never approached it that way, but yeah, that works.
Loribeth: Borrowing is stupid. Borrowing is actually the worst model to do double digit subtraction. Now, a lot of old school teachers are terrified of it. They’re terrified because… So there’s your 10 frame. Yeah? There’s your 10 frame.
Jim: Well, then I also did the carry. Again, it’s just so beaten into my head that I just do it on that.
Loribeth: Yeah, but I want you to walk away from that. I want you to walk completely away from that for a minute because I’m going to teach you something that’s really a lot faster based on [inaudible 00:23:27].
Jim: Oh, I love this. This is actually something, I’ve just learned a new mental trick. I had two minus seven, minus five. 50 and 30 is 20. 20 minus 5 is 15.
Loribeth: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. But it actually turns out that that’s natural for children, and we un-train it with the borrowing algorithm.
Jim: That’s interesting.
Loribeth: They actually naturally grasp, you have two and you’re supposed to take away three. Well, tell you what, let’s take away the two now and let’s save that other takeaway for later. So it’s just a negative one. They get that. They get that. But second grade teachers are terrified of it. Write down another problem. We’ll do it together. So do 546 minus 157. No borrows. Do not borrow. Now we’re going to talk this through from the left. We’re going to say 500 minus 100, and we’re going to say that that’s 400. We’ll write that 400 down just because that way we will remember it, right?
Jim: Okay.
Loribeth: Now in the next column over, we’re going to say 40 minus 50. We’re not going to say 4 minus 5, we’re going to say 40 minus 50. We’re going to name it correctly. Then we’re going to write down negative 10. That’s easy. And then we’re going to write down negative 1 for the 6 minus 7. So far so good?
Jim: Yeah.
Loribeth: Okay, so 400 minus 10, that’s 390, minus 1, 389, no borrows.
Jim: I love it. That’s amazing. Why don’t they teach this in school?
Loribeth: That’s what everybody says to me every day.
Jim: I remember learning all the traditional algorithms. But in my mind, they’re just turn the cranks, right? There’s not much intuition associated with them. And all of them, the multiplications, et cetera.
Loribeth: Yeah, but for children, they’re not turn the cranks for children. They’re really heavy cranks. And what winds up happening is-
Jim: It takes a long while to learn.
Loribeth: That’s right. And you’re actually expending metabolic resources while you do that. And partial sums and partial differences are actually the superior algorithm. It’s just everybody’s terrified of them. And then of course when somebody tries to teach them and doesn’t teach the parents are like, “Oh, this new math is Common Core.” And I’m like, “There’s nothing wrong with Common Core friends. You just don’t understand what you’re looking at.” And so once you understand what you’re-
Jim: I love that.
Loribeth: Yeah. It’s really what it is.
Jim: Yeah. The other thing is that not only is mentally easier, but it also starts to actually produce intuition about powers of 10.
Loribeth: Bingo. Bingo, bingo, bingo, bingo, bingo, bingo. So why would we tell children in second grade that we can’t do a negative and then un-teach that later in seventh and say, “Well, now we do negatives”? That makes no sense. That’s absolutely silly. We don’t really talk about the true meanings of numbers as we do it. We do, “Here’s the algorithm, here’s the algorithm.” And we give so much lip service to, “Well, let’s be critical thinkers.” But we’re not because when it comes to changing it, there’s so much resistance. So the processes I teach create a lot less metabolic draw from a child, and that metabolic draw allows them to enjoy the process and enjoy the math. And it’s not about play versus drill, those are kind of false flags. You got to have enough drill to get practice and you got to have enough play to enjoy yourself, right? It’s not either or.
So you build all this in together, you move them up, and in four to five years, they’re top of their class working two years ahead of grade level. We are missing so much signal because we’re doing it the wrong way. We’re doing the wrong things at the wrong time. For example, word problems. There’s been a lot of research over the last few years that word problems make math more meaningful. But what happened is we took word problems and we put them in the first and second grade space where they can’t see yet. They can’t read yet. They can’t think yet. And now we’re saying, “Oh, we’re going to do word problems instead.” Well, I’m sorry, but you’re just making them hate it. You’re making them hate it for no reason when they can’t even do that. So what actually happens is you’re double taxing Broca’s area in your brain.
So Broca’s area, kind of Wernicke’s area have these roles in mathematical processing and language processing, and what you find out is the brain does not like to do them at the same time. So basically you give a kid a math page, what do they do? They always skip the directions. Now, does anybody ever say, “Why is that? Why are they skipping the directions neurologically?” Or is it just, “You’re a lazy kid and you’re not reading your directions”? There’s actually a neurological basis to this. The brain selects. The brain says, “Okay, well we’re in math class, so I guess the operative stimulus here is to do math. So forget the reading. Forget the reading, because they don’t need that right now.”
So they don’t read the directions, they don’t see all those pieces. It takes time for brains to actually able to do the code print and the numeral print together. And first and second grade is the wrong position for that. It’s the wrong position. Okay? It doesn’t stick. So there’s issues. There’s issues with decay. There’s issues with how long the children will retain. There’s issues with… Have you ever heard of a long consolidator?
Jim: No.
Loribeth: This is the really interesting one. I’ll have a kid who turns out to be a long consolidator. And you’ll do their front end work, you’ll do their acquisition work to learn the concept, and it looks like they’re not getting it and it looks like they’re not getting in and you test them on Friday, they don’t get the test. And then you come back on Thursday and it’s there, boom. You tested them on the wrong day because they’re a long consolidator. We have all these assumptions built into how we deliver education. None of them are based on anything real. The mad math drill drill that the kids are giving, “Do 40 problems in a minute,” there’s absolutely no research behind it. None. Yet children all around the world have to do this thing because their teacher says so because their teacher printed off some random garbage off the internet. But it’s not real. These are not the same kinds of problems. So write down two more problems for me. Write down 12 minus 17 and write down 17 minus 12.
Jim: 17 minus 12.
Loribeth: They look like the same kind of problem, don’t they?
Jim: Mm-hmm.
Loribeth: They’re not. The 12 minus 17 is 50% harder than the 17 minus 12. Why is that?
Jim: Well, because you have to know about negative numbers.
Loribeth: Right. Well, you’re going to have to know about your negatives. So what’s going to happen is you’re going to do 7 minus the 2 is going to be easy enough. You got the 5, the 10 was never bothered. But when you have 12 minus 7, you got to know to take off the 2 first to get back to the 10, and then take off the 5 on the other side of the 10. That is a different level of engagement.
Jim: Yeah, much harder.
Loribeth: Yeah. And just because they’ve occupied two digits minus one digit does not make them the same class of problem at all.
Jim: Mm-hmm.
Loribeth: Visually or operationally, right? So you have a lot of random spaghetti, garbage being thrown at kids, and then they get these negative impressions on themselves because they can’t do it because the teachers don’t actually have a clue what they’re doing. And then you have kids, you have math detritus left all behind because these kids don’t feel good about it. They don’t feel good about themselves. That’s kind of a major problem about the whole thing. So there is a process. When you introduce somebody to something, there’s A, C, Me and E. And I hate that it’s ACME, because I’ll be laughed off the stage.
Jim: But okay, Road Runner, beep, beep.
Loribeth: Yeah, exactly. Right? But really the first position is acquisition. In acquisition, you take turns with the child, you have some fun and you put it away for the day. You don’t try to cram it down their throat, you just let them get familiar with the territory. Second phase is consolidation. They will literally rip the pencil right out of your hand when they know what they’re doing. But then you have to watch out, and this is the important part. There is an inverse relationship between endurance and accuracy. You can have a 100% kid getting a B+. Here’s how this works. If you work outside of the child’s absorb window, the child has an absorb window, they have good energy, good concentration for about 10 minutes, but your assignment extends past that 10 minutes and they don’t know that they can take a break. Okay?
So what happens is you go past their absorb window and then you start seeing the first mistake, and then you see the mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake. And it’s a cascade of diminishing returns. And now your kid who would’ve gotten an A on that paper if they just taken the break now suddenly is getting the B- on that paper because now they just have all the mistakes that they made because they were tired. Mistakes in mathematics, especially early mathematics are not conceptual. They are fatigue. They are fatigue. They are not driven by not understanding numbers. And this is the mistake everybody’s making. They think, “Oh, kids don’t understand numbers.” No, that’s not it. They literally run out of glycogen and oxygen as they’re processing. We have a trampoline in the center because when the kids are working, they’ll get that deer in the headlights look, they’re not processing. And I’m like, “Go to the trampoline, take two minutes, go to the trampoline.” They come back and they sit down and they just do that problem that they were struggling on. With nothing from me, right?
It’s just because we had to resolve the cortisol. We had to flood the brain with some glycogen and oxygen, come back behind their visual field. Because it’s really the glutamate that’s happening that’s feeding the ventral pathway and the temporal lobe and that glutamate, if you don’t have the right distribution of oxygen and glycogen in your brain, you’re not going to process. Has nothing to do with your understanding. It’s not your temporal lobe that we’re worried about right here. It’s actually the other processes that are going on. So you wind up having these differences between the two different types, the auditories do different things than the visuals do. And the entire educational framework is aimed at the visual bias.
I do things on a chalkboard, right? I do things on a chalkboard. You need to watch me do this thing on a chalkboard, but are we going to have a conversation about math? Are we going to talk? No, you’re just going to receive what I’m teaching you. When you do this, you just privilege 40% of your processors in every classroom in America. Every classroom in America, 40% of those processors who don’t get a chance to talk about concepts or talk through a test, don’t get a chance to encode the material correctly. This is big. This is the STEM gap.
Jim: Interesting. And of course some of it just comes down to logistical realities. It would be a lot more manpower intensive to have a conversation with each child about the topic as opposed to the one to many.
Loribeth: See, I actually don’t agree with you. And here’s why I don’t agree, because I think you can utilize, you don’t have to be a master in mathematics to have basic conversations with children. These can be trained. I hire people off the street to have these conversations and I say, “Say it this way. Talk about it this way.” And that’s all they do. And they don’t have a professional degree. They don’t have a fancy credential. Basically, if you can be empathetic with a child and listen to them and just talk with them, say these words, you’re fine. We could hire an army of parents. All the moms who want to be involved in our schools but don’t have a role to play, they could be brought in and taught how to have these conversations with kids. This is absolutely in the realm of the possible.
Jim: That’s interesting. The other thing you mentioned earlier is the old one room schoolhouse. One of the cool things about the one room schoolhouse is a lot of the teaching was the older kids teaching the younger kids. And as we all know that if you can teach something, you actually know it. If you can’t teach something, you don’t actually know it in most cases.
Loribeth: And that’s why when I have a kid and we think that they’re done, we think they’re fully cooked and in position, they’re getting 95% correct on the paper. And then I just hand them a blank white piece of paper and I say, “Make a problem for me.” And then depending on how they set that problem up, they can be getting a straight A in class and still not set that problem up correctly because their understanding is not a deep understanding, it’s a surface understanding. It’s enough to skate through what their teacher demands, but it’s not an actual deep understanding. So a white piece of paper will tell you more about your child’s development than any test that they will give you.
It actually turns out boys do funny things. When they don’t understand a concept and you say, “Well make a problem for me,” they’re like, “Okay, fine.” So they make you a problem that has like 10 zeros after it because the more zeros there are the harder the problem must be, right?” They don’t realize that it’s all the same thing. So making the problem is actually your assessment, not testing. I mean, I haven’t done a test on any of my kids in well over 10 years. We don’t do tests. We don’t need tests. Every book is actually its own measurement.
So every book is clear and clean and it’s not mixed up with other concepts. So every book is its own concept. And since that’s true, every book is its own measurement, we don’t have to do a test. We don’t have this formative versus summative question that a lot of the schools are dealing with. “Oh, here’s your formatives. You practice on this and here’s your summative.” No, every book is its own thing. And then you have to make the test, make the problem for you, and you can see clearly what you need to see. It’s really kind of interesting.
Jim: What does the M stand for in ACME? What’s the acronym?
Loribeth: Don’t call it ACME. It’s Acquisition, Consolidation, Mastery and Execution.
Jim: Oh, Mastery was the M. Okay.
Loribeth: Mastery. So basically it’s the 95% on paper position, right? Everything between 70% and 95% is really the same thing. And there’s no need to categorize the grades between A, B, C, and D. That’s really silliness. It’s really just you need more practice. If you’re getting a 70, you need more practice. If you get a 91, I don’t care, you still need more practice. You’re not there yet, right? “Yes, but I got an A.” I’m like, “I don’t care about your A. I care about do you understand the concept? And you’re not there yet. You don’t have the ability to talk that concept through. You don’t have the ability to show it to me on paper. So I don’t care about your A. I care about your actual true development.” And you don’t do that with grades. You do that with interactions, with careful, compassionate, considerate interactions.
So the entire program is stuff that is built to work with visual processing. I’ll show you an example. So basically it’s single dots versus 10 groups, so that you really define the meaning. You’ve got two 10s and you’ve got four singles there, and it’s very clear, and they have to actually determine. So at four years old, they can’t write a lot of things, but they can draw a line. So sensitive development of curriculum material means what can they do at different stages? And not just printing off random garbage. And you find on the internet that somebody slapped the name second grade onto, and that’s what we’re always dealing with. We’re always dealing with people who go to the internet, “Oh, here’s your second grade website,” and then they print out stuff that’s just absolute garbage, and it’s not even in line with what the child understands structurally, and then they expect the child to perform on it. And that’s the definition of insanity.
Jim: You mentioned that you’ve created how many different books?
Loribeth: 3,000
Jim: And you’ve done that, you and your team yourselves?
Loribeth: Yes. We are bespoke. We have our own graphic arts team, so we’re not on a franchise receiving our material from anyone else. We are actually working with children and developing what they need by the way that they interact with us. That’s a big deal. Different children see pages in different ways, and so they need color. Everything we do is in color, first of all, nothing’s in black and white. And then we develop materials based on how their eyes will work on a page. If you put too much on a page for an auditory, they don’t know where to focus, and then it becomes very overwhelming to them. So you have to block part of the page off so that they can see. But if you put enough white space around, they can visually focus on where they are.
It’s a monster overpitch on children’s visual processing. A lot of education is not cognizant of the fact that the visual cortex is not developed. It is not even fully grown until they’re seven years old. When you ask them to do all these task demands that are so visual on their homework and this, that and the other, they’re not ready for it. They’re not ready for it, and you just create a lot of damage for no reason. What you really should be focusing on in that four to seven-year-old space is visual processing. Visual processing is the game changer. If you focus on spatial relationships and you focus on the saccadic movement of the child, so the horizontal saccade, the vertical saccade, it takes time for those saccades to kind of unfold. What you see on a page is not what they see. You see Cheerios, the child sees oatmeal.
Jim: Yeah, that makes sense because the brain is still consolidating at a pretty high rate at that point. It’s basically pruning extra neurons and synapses, not so much adding, but pruning during that period.
Loribeth: Correct. And so what happens is we just sort of overweight that front space with the things we give them, and then they can’t process it, and then they feel bad about it. Now, it’s amazing to watch a kid with an ego vector. We were talking about the vectors. When I was in teaching school, they taught me scope and sequence and wait time. So wait time, wait time, you’re supposed to give the child enough time to think about the concepts. Well, all of this presumes that the children are egoless. Because that’s not true. So what happens is, if a child with a strong ego vector is given too much wait time, all they do with that time is instead of not getting it right away, they just turn it on themselves and start chewing themselves up from the inside because they’re not getting it right away. That’s what the ego vector does.
So that ego vector gets in our way from acquiring the concepts. “I don’t get it. There’s something wrong with me, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, “No, wait, hold on. No, no. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re fine.” But that ego vector will interrupt the process. And so we have to watch out for that. So there’s the contrary, there’s the ownership. There’s the ego. Ownership vectors, I’ll tell you a story on me. Ownership vectors, I would call myself a super odd, I’ve got the classic contrary. I’ve got the ego, I’ve got the ownership. And when I would sit in every college class and I would get a syllabus, my hackles would raise as soon as I got that syllabus. “You’re telling me what to do. I don’t have freedom to go explore anything myself. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I want to do it differently. I want to control it my way.” As soon as I get a syllabus, I had to rewrite it in my head. I have to own this space. I have to be invested in this space, and I have that vector.
“But you have given me an assignment. Well, gosh, where’s my part of it? Where do I get to plug in on that?” Right? Ego vectors are motivated, their executive function is motivated by, “What’s the guy next to me doing? Well, how am I doing? How’s he doing? Well, how do I…” But it turns out that the ego sort of comes in around with the visual processing. So around seven, seven and a half, the ego development of a typically developing child will come in at about the same time that the visual field becomes concrete or cured. And there’s this moment when they understand themselves as a self relative to peers, and that’s different from the ego vector in a five-year-old. If I see a five-year-old with an ego vector, that’s not having an ego, that’s actually an overt concern. It’s not even age-appropriate at that point. You have these sort of differential expressions with children.
Between four to seven, the visual field is curing. The ego comes in around seven, seven and a half. From seven to eight to nine, that’s when you can do those word problems and you can do that more analytical aspect of development. But before that, you need to be super careful with the visual field of the child. The visual field of the child is the thing that is setting the entire process. And if you don’t fix the visual field first and you don’t work on the background orthogonality of the child, then it ripples. If you don’t fix it, it ripples through everything else. Imagine this thing you could have done when you were four and five years old to help you see lines and spaces, and suddenly you can’t figure out your graph in algebra because you can’t track your graph right. You can’t count your boxes right. You could have done that work when you were four, five, and six years old. But they don’t because they don’t even know it exists, right? The visual field is the thing, yeah.
Jim: We’re talking about math here, but it just struck me that if the visual field is so important, presumably it has some implications about reading also, which is the other big problem we have.
Loribeth: It does, and the interesting thing about this is that hyperlexic children lean more heavily, and you probably were one of these, more heavily on the auditory channel to read by context than by decoding. And there’s a very delicate sort of art between these. So I was a super great reader. Super, super, super reading at three, blah, blah, blah. Horrific at math. But I also remember that a lot of my reading as a child was predictive. I understood the context. I understood what was happening, so I just sort of inserted the word that I thought should be there, rather than making my eyes do that work. “Making my eyes do that work? I ain’t got no time for that. I can just guess at it and I’ll be close enough.”
Okay, well, it turns out that auditories can be very, very good readers, interestingly, because there’s not that much movement across a page. When you’re doing a line, it’s not looking here, looking here, looking here, looking here, looking here, right? It’s actually a very controlled movement, and it’s horizontal saccades. And as you do horizontal saccades, they process faster than vertical saccades. In math, you get this discontinuous processing between the horizontal and vertical saccades as you’re trying to do these different things. In reading, you get to kind of just stick in one place. So it’s actually not as taxing on your visual field.
And it’s interesting. So I was like, “Well, how can I be such a bad visual processor when I was a great reader?” Right? Well, turns out that I’m leaning on that auditory a lot. It’s amazing too. Sometimes I’ll have kids that will draw really intricate little pictures on their books. And those pictures, the parents were like, “See, they’re visual. They’re visual.” I’m like, “No, actually, think about how much eye movement they had to make to make that picture. There wasn’t a lot of eye movement there was it? They actually kind of stayed there and did all those little tiny details inside of that picture, but they didn’t have to move their eyes very much at all, did they?”
Jim: Another thing that’s interesting is that we now know from science, including people like Dehaene, who you mentioned earlier, that reading is actually auditory, in that the brain decodes, the lexography, whatever, however we want to call it, and actually plays it more or less as sound through the auditory system so that you use all your… Because obviously we did not evolve with writing. We evolved with spoken language, and that’s really the only way we can handle language with any level of sophistication. So reading is this weird exaptation. Of our audio language skills where we essentially map the written to the oral. So I can see how those things are maybe more closely related than they might be to other forms of graphical problem solving and navigation.
Loribeth: So in my series, soft fiction, that I’m using here, we know neurologically that auditory information comes in faster and more accurately in the temporal lobe, and we know that it has to actually match up in time. Reading takes longer. So basically reading goes through the occipital lobe and it actually takes this ventral pathway to the temporal lobe. What happens is the auditories get there right away with the auditory channel. The visuals, they will map this, but what will happen is the visuals will get there faster with the visual channel. So there is this interesting thing between the timing of these two processes and some of the processes are more dominant. So basically, if you’re an auditory, you process information more quickly to meaning with sound. And if you’re a visual, you process information to meaning more quickly with sight. That is what’s happening in that process.
So what happens is when you’re teaching math particularly, you got to look at this thing, “Well, I don’t get it, Ms. Loribeth.” “Well, tell me what you see. Just say what you see first.” “Oh, okay, blah, blah, blah. Oh, I got it. I don’t need your help. I had to process it through my mouth, not my eyes.” And so think about every auditory who’s sitting there looking at a blackboard, where’s the mouth involved? The mouth isn’t involved. That’s a super, super problem, and it really actually, and in my opinion, from watching the cohort that I’ve taught over the last 20 years, this is the STEM gap. This is where it lives. This is where our at-risk populations have issues because the auditory dominance is the driver, not the visual dominance. If you think about women in the sciences, and you think about how women tend to be on that auditory channel side, and so it’s almost an 80-20 split, and women pass through auditory signal, but that’s not the modality of math.
It’s really funny to watch how this works. In kindergarten through third, you have very little difference. They’re all receiving the information about the same. And about fourth grade, if they didn’t get the development right in K-4, fourth grade they go off the rails. That’s where you first lose your auditories is off the rails in fourth grade. But if they manage to survive fourth to fifth to sixth to seventh, you wind up seeing the composition of the teachers change. You wind up getting slightly less women, slightly more men in the math teaching.
And then as you start to get higher and higher, you start to see more men in the math teaching, and you start to get these situations where the people are complaining, they’re saying, “Well, he did this thing on the board, but I didn’t understand it, and he couldn’t explain it, and he didn’t explain it,” right? That’s because he’s visual dominant and he can keep going because what he prints makes meaning to him on the page, but he can’t explain it. Here’s a great experiment. Ask some of the most accomplished mathematicians in the world, take a page out of a book that they understand from very, very complex math, ask them to just read the page aloud and ask them to interpret in language every print symbol that’s on that page. They can’t do it very often. They know what it means.
Jim: Yeah, I’m a middle tier math whiz, but you give me a page full of differential equations, I can tell you what it means. I know what it means, but I couldn’t fluidly at least turn it into language.
Loribeth: That’s the gap. That’s the gap. And the problem is, if you can’t turn it into language, what is it that you’re actually doing? Because meaning comes in the temporal space from that language side. It’s amazing that when you… I have twins, I have some twins in my center that I teach. One of them is an auditory, and one of them is a visual. And the visual almost always gets the higher score. Almost always, right? The auditory gets the lower score. She makes more mistakes on the page inevitably. When I give them a challenging problem, the auditory can always figure it out faster than the visual. Always. So it’s really interesting. You got a lot of 4.0 kids who are visual dominance who can do great, but they can’t think their way out of a cardboard box.
You’ve got a lot of kids who are auditories who are getting lower scores than they should be because we don’t understand what those scores actually mean, and we’re telling them, “Oh, you’re not qualified to study up here. Oh, you don’t get to participate up here because you’re just not good enough.” Right? And we’re losing a lot of human signal because we don’t understand what we’re looking at when we see children’s mistakes. There are major issues. Did you understand, do you know that the five, three, eight switch is the single most repeated mistakes in early elementary mathematics? Put a five, three and an eight on a piece of paper. Just write them down.
Jim: Five, three, eight. Okay.
Loribeth: five, three, eight. Okay, we call it the five, three, eight switch. So when I have a kid who’s doing their process is, and the right answer is five, they’ll say the five out loud while they’re working, because in my space we talk, right? They’ll say five, but their hand will write a three. Now, let’s question the epistemology of this. Do they know it or not? They said it correctly. They wrote it wrong. Which one do you want to privilege? Right?
Jim: Interesting question.
Loribeth: You privilege the one on the paper.
Jim: Yeah. In our system, we would privilege the one on paper.
Loribeth: But the one that’s in their mouth is what they actually thought that they knew. They weren’t even aware that they wrote down the wrong number. See what happens, if you look at the bottom loop of that five and the bottom loop of that three, when you have neural fatigue and you have a visual field drop, the bottom loops, actually, your brain will say, “Well, that’s a three or a five,” and it won’t discriminate between the two of them. So the fives, the three and the eights, they actually represent 60% of mathematical mistakes that children make. Are we going to tell them they’re B students or C students because they made this mistake? That’s silliness. This is a mistake that’s so ubiquitous that we know what it is. Right?
There’s another one. The 12, 20 switch. A lot of times kids will switch 12 and 20 because of the twuh-twuh sound. A lot of these mathematical mistakes are neurolinguistic. They’re not conceptual. They’re not conceptual. You’ve got a kid counting down on a trampoline from 20 down to zero. 20% of those kids are going to go 15, 14, 12. They’re not going to say 13 because of where the tongue is relative to the process. But it has nothing to do with their number of concepts. It has to do with the neurolinguistics of speaking the numbers.
Jim: Let me switch topics a little bit.
Loribeth: Sure.
Jim: As I said, I was pretty good in math in high school through about halfway through college, elementary school, et cetera. But I do remember having a big hole in my math learning due to the fact I had the flu in fourth grade and I was out of school for 10 days, which was the only time I was ever out of school for more than two days my whole school career.
Loribeth: Sure.
Jim: And that happened to be when they taught how to do long division. And nobody ever picked up on that, nobody ever tried to fix it, et cetera. Fortunately, my father, was a high school dropout, but nonetheless, reasonably competent person with computation, he realized I was struggling with that and he sat me down and over two days just pounded it into me how to do long division. But if it hadn’t been for that, probably my future math career would’ve been very substantially diminished because someone allowed a hole to appear in my knowledge base and didn’t fill it. How do you react to a statement of a problem of that sort?
Loribeth: Well, I mean, shoot, when I get a kid in at fourth grade, the first thing I have to do is back sweep everything to make sure that all the Swiss cheese holes that have been left by literally everybody have been closed down. I mean, there are a number of things that they don’t understand. So write down some problems on the paper. Write down 12 plus 19 plus 18. Okay?
Jim: Okay. All right.
Loribeth: Now-
Jim: The way I would do that one is 18 and 12 is 30 plus 19 is 49.
Loribeth: Here’s how I would teach my four-year-old. Circle all your 10 for me. What are the 10s? 10, the 10-
Jim: 1, 1, 1. Yeah, 10, 10, 10.
Loribeth: Right. The 1 1 1. The three 1s, right? So 10, 10, 10. Then I would put the eight and two together to make a hidden 10.
Jim: Right, yeah.
Loribeth: And then your other number is the leftover.
Jim: Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Again-
Loribeth: Does it make sense?
Jim: High emphasis on the-
Loribeth: Place value.
Jim: … powers of 10, right?
Loribeth: It’s place value.
Jim: Yeah. That’s the big breakthrough of Arabic numbers versus previous number systems. Happened to actually read a book this week about that, amongst other things.
Loribeth: Malcolm Gladwell had this exactly right. So if you think about the difference in the Chinese language, so a lot of people in China are like, “Oh, we’re better processors than anybody else.” And what will happen is they are, they’re faster because the neurolinguistics of this is it takes less resources to say their numbers out loud. Literally. But their language system allows you to say one 10 one, two 10s one, 3 10s one, four 10s one. That’s the way they think of it. The way a North American speaker thinks of it is, “Oh, this is 31. It is this name on this number line, and I cannot break it or divide it.” But when the heuristic is literally focused on your place value from the get-go, then you are fluid through the numbers.
Well, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a chapter on this called Rice Patties and Math Tests, in Outliers. And what was amazing, I read this book in Chicago O’Hare Airport and literally I was screaming, like running down the terminal because I’m like, “He gets it, he gets it, he gets it, he gets it. Right out of the box.” And my husband’s like, “Are you insane?” I’m like, “Yeah, kind of.” But this is the deal. The deal is that the way we name numbers, the problem is 11, the problem is 11. Because when you put one name on something that’s divisible, you can separate the 10 and the one, right? But when you put one name on it, you say, “Oh, that’s a unit. That’s composed. I can’t do anything with it.”
Jim: So we should like 21. We do correctly under that terminology, so what we need to do is rename the teen.
Loribeth: The teens are the problem though, so yeah. And the problem is they come quick. So you have issues with visual perception between what’s 13 and 30? They sound too much alike, right? Oh, this is one 10 three, this is three 10 zero. These are different things. I’m going to show you another algorithm real quick.
Jim: Okay.
Loribeth: Long division is kind of nasty. The reason it’s nasty is actually visually. You’ve got this thing, you go horizontal, you go vertical, you go horizontal, you go diagonal, you go horizontal, you go vertical. You’ve got all these moving parts, right?
Jim: Yeah.
Loribeth: Write down 51 divided by 3 in fraction form.
Jim: Okay.
Loribeth: All right. Now look at that bottom number, the three. Multiply it by 10 in your head. It’s 30, right?
Jim: Right.
Loribeth: Suck that 30 out of the 51. And what does it leave you?
Jim: 21.
Loribeth: Oh, don’t those both divide by three.
Jim: Yeah.
Loribeth: Oh, so we have 10 seven?
Jim: Okay.
Loribeth: 17?
Jim: Yeah, that sort of works.
Loribeth: Oh no, it works every time.
Jim: Yeah. But when I see 51 divided by three, I just know it’s 17. That’s just something I know.
Loribeth: Yeah, but 51 is one of those numbers. People are like, “Oh, it’s prime.” No, it’s not prime, it divides by three. You can add the digits five and one, right? But try 84 divided by 7 the same way.
Jim: Yeah, I know all my primes just by deep instinct up to 16 by 16 probably. But this method will work on bigger numbers, presumably?
Loribeth: Oh, it’ll work on everything because the number sense is what drives it.
Jim: Yeah. I love this. I love this. How come you’re not famous? You have all these good ideas.
Loribeth: Well, maybe you are the start of that, who knows?
Jim: I have to say, everything you say just says, “Jesus, this is way better than the way I was taught.”
Loribeth: That’s pretty much what I get everywhere I bring it, which is that… I get tears a lot, “Why didn’t somebody teach me this way? It’s so easy.” I’m like, “This is what numbers really are. This is what numbers really do.” But that’s not the same thing as bringing it to the children. I mean, knowing how the algorithms work is only a piece of it. Being able to put the right algorithm with the right kid at the right time. That’s the art.
Jim: Yeah, let’s dig into that a little bit, the delivery aspects of it. Because this sounds like it’d be pretty complicated in that if each kid lives in 10 vectors and the vectors impact how they learn what, how long it takes to consolidate, et cetera, that essentially means a completely bespoke trajectory through the content for the kid. How in the world do you manage that?
Loribeth: Actually it’s easy. It’s really, really easy. So we give all the kids a binder. The binder has 13 different threads in it. So we have an addition thread, a subtraction thread, a multiplication thread. But then in the back we have a patterns and a shapes and lines and a non-verbal processing and a visual. So we have an entire side that’s arithmetic and we have an entire side that’s analytics. And it turns out that young children, four to seven, will always go to that analytic side first before they go to the arithmetic side. It’s more fun. It’s more interesting visually to look at. So they actually start doing that, those books and they like doing the homework. They actually like it. People are like, “Oh, kids never like homework.” That’s bullshit because they… Sorry, I’m the first one to say fuck on your program. But that’s bullshit because they do, they love it. They love doing this work and they’re like, “I’ll do this.”
So basically I painted an old mailbox. I took a mailbox and I said, okay, “His name is Seymour. I made him the alien.” And I said, “Seymour, his food is your homework.” So instead of saying, “Turn in your homework,” I’m like, “Go feed Seymour. Seymour’s hungry.” So the kids want to do as many books as they can just so they can feed Seymour. And then they’re like, “I did 20 books this week, Ms. Loribeth.” And I’m like, “You rock star,” right? And they just turn those books in. And then I have a grading staff. I have a core, so I’m not the grader, I have a grading staff of two or three people that literally sit there 40 hours a week and they just kind grade everything.
Now, AI could maybe help with that piece in terms of being able to grade the material, and I know the technology is out there for me to do some things like that, and maybe we’ll move in that direction at a certain point. But it’s not that hard to manage actually. When you have four kids with binders that are set up for them and they are actually able to just do that material, it’s less work for you as a teacher. You’re not trying to manage behavioral problems. Behavioral problems are almost always correlated to the child not having work they can do. When they have material they can do, they do it. Right?
There’s no such thing as a lazy kid. If they say, “Oh, my kid’s just lazy,” I want to bust their kneecaps, because there is no such thing as a lazy kid. It’s just you’re not paying attention to what that child’s asking you for. So what happens is the kid will say, “Well, what do you want me to start with?” And I’m like, “What’s easiest thing?” So they go to the easiest thing and they start rocking that out. So when I start their binder, the binder is 90% easy for them and 10% hard. And across six weeks I adjust that binder to, okay, now it’s 50% easy, 50% hard. They will always choose the easy ones first. That’s what brains are designed to do. “Well, I got that one done, I got that one done. Well, this one was the hard one. Well, then when we came into class, now that’s the new easy one. Now here’s the new hard one.”
And they just walk up this process and direct instruction doesn’t really even exist. I don’t actually teach at a aboard at all. Ever. It just doesn’t happen. So I have a 1: 4 ratio. I teach my teachers, it’s 1:4. We sit with four kids at a time. They’re all doing their own individual work, and we’re just interacting with them and having conversations as they go. It’s natural. It’s a natural process. It’s not this forced artificial, “Tach at the board and then take the test,” process. And the kids do amazing. They do simply amazing work.
Jim: How much of that do you think is by the 4:1? They ratio, that’s like the most elite Ivy League college might get to something close to 4:1.
Loribeth: Well, so what happens is because of the auditory dominance, we think that that’s not a matter… It’s a matter of do you want to do this right for kids or not? And if you want to do this right for kids, we need to really reconsider the model. Here’s why. At 4L:1, I can basically give everyone one-to-one attention. But at 5:1, I lose the ability to do that. I lose the ability. So if I’m running a kid table because I’ve got a staff member sick and there’s six kids at my table, I tell the parents, “Hey, we got a staff member sick. It’s not going to be perfect tonight.” And they’re pretty okay with that, right? It’s pretty fine.
You can do this with a classroom, absolutely you can. You have to be willing to do two things. You have to be willing to set up a couple of paras who can come in and talk to kids. And you have to be willing to take some of the grading load off teachers. You have to make that a different piece. Instead of, “Oh, the teacher is responsible to design the lesson and grade the material and collect all the data,” the teacher should be driving the instruction process. That’s what the teacher should be doing. When you see a kid who’s not making it, your job as a teacher should be to inform instruction, not to be a records keeper. “Well, you got it wrong. Sorry, F.” “What could I have done to do better?” “I don’t know.”
Jim: Study harder.
Loribeth: Yes. That’s literally what parents across the America are encountering when they go in to have teacher conferences. So one of my local districts here gave up on grades, that’s great. And they said, “Well, here’s on track and here’s not on track. And here’s what… We’re not going to give you grades, but we’re just going to tell you if you’re on track, and we’re going to tell you if you’re not on track.” Well that’s great. So when the parents go in and have these conversations with the teachers, “Well, what can I do to get on track?” The teacher’s got nothing. They don’t know how to help the kids. They don’t know what’s wrong. They don’t know what’s missing. They don’t know how to help those kids. So that’s not doing anything.
Jim: Isn’t that the part of it that they could have 30 kids in their class and there’s no way they could have a real deep understanding of where each kid is at?
Loribeth: I could do it. I could pull it off. I’ve been doing it for 20 years, a first year teacher couldn’t.
Jim: But you do it with four kids, that’s qualitatively different.
Loribeth: I do it with 200 kids a week in five different classes. I run the volume on a scale that your average classroom teacher doesn’t do anything. I mean, because what I’ve done is say, “Hey, look, my job as the professional here is actually to be the analyzer of the information. What do I have to do differently for this child because of what I’m seeing?” Not the collector of that information, right?
Jim: But at the end of the day, the teacher that teaches four kids at a time can establish a deeper understanding of the kid, his styles, his vectors as you call it, his holes where he’s at, and can meet them really where they are actually at, rather than, I sometimes refer to the public schools as the sausage factory. They just throw shit in, turn the crank, whatever comes out, comes out. Right?
Loribeth: That’s true. But what if we de-professionalize? I’m going to propose that this idea that we have to have a math credential from an established university to teach elementary school students, blah, blah, blah, I’m going to tell you, I can pick somebody off the street and give them the five things they need to say to a kid with a particular book and say, “This is what you need to say.” We need volume of people interacting with children. We don’t need the high credential person who’s not paid enough, who doesn’t want to do the job because it’s an insane job to do. We need a model that makes sense. And the model we have does not make sense. So this is what I think we should be doing, which is why this is what I’m doing.
Jim: I love it.
Loribeth: I don’t teach in a regular school because I wouldn’t be able to. I wouldn’t be able to take direction from a board telling me, “You got to use that textbook,” when I’m like, “That doesn’t fit that kid. That kid’s never going to look at that textbook. It’s a flat no.” I think teachers unions around the country should rise up and just tell these boards to go take a hike because, “No, I’m working with this child. I know what this child needs and this is what we’re going to do.” Right?
Well, I’ve developed an entire curriculum that any kid in classroom America could use and they could use it with my help, with my guidance, with the support that we would provide if they wanted to. A lot of what’s happening is we’re instead of actually going the right direction and finding out what kids need, we’re using computers to proxy information, but the data that we’re collecting on them is not accurate. We collect information on their mistakes, but we don’t collect information on their why. The why of the mistake is the more important piece. So what’s happening is you got parents all over the place getting scared by the data collection that they’re getting, not knowing whether or not their child’s going to develop correctly or not. But they’ve got these data points, they’ve got these computer printouts, but they have no idea what it means. So I had one parent who came to me, they were given an ERB test for the independent schools-
Jim: What’s an ERB?
Loribeth: The ERB is like an organization that does testing, the SSAT and things for independent schools.
Jim: Oh, okay.
Loribeth: And they brought me the read sheet on this. And honestly, the data on this read sheet was the child looked like they were behind, right? They’re like, “You’re 60% behind.” And the parent was like, “What? What’s going on?” And I said, “Stop. Stop. Look at the fine print at the bottom of the sheet, it says, ‘Against other independent schools.’ This is your child’s performance against the other top 1% of children, not against the national standard.” “Oh, you’re 60% behind the other top 1%.” Oh, okay. Let’s breathe. Let’s not have a panic attack. So my biggest concern is we can do better for all of our processors. We can do better across the board. We can change the model, we can change the interactions, and we can understand that kids need to talk and the test isn’t telling you what you think it’s telling you in the first place.
So we got to figure out how to get there en masse, and that’s a bigger conversation. But this is the right direction. I mean, 90% of my kids make the gifted programs, and 90% of my kids aren’t gifted. We’re good enough at understanding those children to allow them to plug into the context that they have available to them. So the biggest issue is how does an auditory encounter a classroom? And it’s very different than a visual. Very, very different. They do different things. They have different thinking patterns. So that’s kind of the deal. Does it take some independent thinking? Yeah. Yeah, it does. Not going to lie. But I think it’s very, very doable and it’s a really beautiful process. Watch a kid go from four years to 14 years and really truly love math and truly understand it, it’s one of the most amazing things you’ve ever seen. Have you ever seen a three pendulum rotary arm harmonograph?
Jim: I don’t even know what that is.
Loribeth: Okay, here you go. So you’re going to write this down for me, and after the show is done, you’re going to look it up. We want kids to understand that math is beautiful. And so we built a three pendulum rotary arm harmonograph for our class. And basically what it does is it takes the pendulum motion of the arms and you put a pencil in each of the arms and it creates these beautiful Lissajous patterns all throughout the page.
Jim: Well, I’ve seen those. Okay, so that’s what that thing is called. Okay.
Loribeth: That’s what that is, yeah. And so when my kids work every day like they’re supposed to, they get to go work the harmonograph. So basically I reward math with more math. And it becomes like, “Oh.” So when the kids do really a good job, they’ll do their work every day, the rule is if you do a good job and you work every day like you’re supposed to, you can ask me for anything from higher that you want to see. So let’s say their older brother’s doing algebra. So they said, “Ms. Loribeth, I worked every day this week.” And I’m like, “Great. What do you want?” They’re like, “I want to see algebra.” “Great. I’ve got a material I can give you. Fine, you did your work, so I’ll give you something higher.”
So they have a path. They can grab the pieces and walk themselves up because they see that doing the right things gives them the right outcomes, as opposed to the other thing. The thing we’re doing to kids across the country is saying, “Oh, grit, grit, grit, grit.” And then we’re grading the heck out of them to the point that we kill all love for math. You can’t tell somebody, “Gosh, have a growth mindset,” and then turn around and give them scores that are terrible because you didn’t develop them. That’s insanity.
Jim: I love this. I must say, I didn’t know what quite to expect. I just reached out to you on… You’d said some interesting, provocative, unusual things online. I said, “You know, I bet this woman knows a thing or two about education.” So I reached out to you and said, “Hey, why don’t you come on my podcast?” I’m really glad I did. This has been extraordinarily interesting conversation. And some of you entrepreneurs out there, y’all look Loribeth up, maybe you guys could franchise this thing and make a few billion dollars, right?
Loribeth: It’s not about the money. It’s never been about the money.
Jim: Yeah, give me be a 10th to 1% as the matchmaker, right? No, I’m really glad we had this conversation. It’s very interesting. One final conversation. Now, you mentioned maybe this, I don’t know [inaudible 01:09:26] of this is, you said 70% of your children come from Indian, let’s call them more generally, South Asian families.
Loribeth: Correct, correct.
Jim: Now we know those families take education really seriously, and they don’t take a lot of shit from their kids either. The kids do their homework, God damn it, right? How would your program work with your average slovenly, lazy, stupid Americana?
Loribeth: What’s really funny, so I’ll tell you that most of my Indian parents are terrified of me. Because if they start treating their children like that, they will have hell to pay. If I have to deal with a cortisol response in a child that you created that actually blocks their ability to encode and access, we’re going to have a problem. So I have to train the parents. And with Americans, again, the issue is really just getting the value, the cultural value of understanding it’s worthwhile and then you have to invest. You have to invest daily. There is no…
And unfortunately, you’ve got these sort of other counter movements in the educational sphere right now saying, “Oh, homework doesn’t matter. Homework doesn’t matter. So we’re not going to give you any homework because we don’t want to make you feel bad.” Right? Well, I’m sorry, but the right homework every day does matter. It gives you a three year advantage. And you have a lot of parents in America that just really are not math competent themselves. So what I actually do with my families is I say, “Look, you’re bringing in your kids, but I know you don’t understand what you’re looking at here, but parent tuition is free.” I literally make my parents do the program.
Jim: I love it. That’s great.
Loribeth: Because they never had a chance to learn it, right? So what winds up happening is with a lot of my Americans, I’m like, “You know what, why don’t you just sit in class tonight? I don’t want you sitting in a waiting room. I don’t want you do that. I want you sitting at my table with your kid because I want you to take turns with your kid. I want you to take turns so that you do that A position correctly. If you launch taking turns, then the child will feel comfortable and bonded to you emotionally because of the work you’re doing together.” But they’re like, “I don’t understand how to do this,” I’m like, “Just model that it’s okay not to understand. It’s okay not to understand. Be humble.” And just show them, “I don’t understand this one either, but let’s try it together. Okay, here’s good here, let’s do it.” And that’s what we do.
So you have to give more support. The big feeling in Common Core and the whole delivery to the Common Core to the country has been not communicating with parents, parents who didn’t know the method. There’s nothing wrong with Common Core. Common Core is actually a set of written objectives that says a kid in Mississippi should not be at a different place than a kid in California, right? But the textbook manufacturers take and they interpret Common Core in different kinds of ways, and some of those ways aren’t appropriate for children. There’s one curriculum that I will not name that is hell on Earth for a child. And if you have that curriculum in your district, I tell you to move. It is literally such a bad curriculum. I say move districts because it’s that bad. But you’ve got to support parents.
Anybody who’s moving into a new math curriculum needs to be like, “Okay, it’s parent math night.” Why do schools not do parent math night and say, “Here’s what we want them to do. Here’s what we want”? Everybody in my program participates parents and the kids. That means you get reception. Now, again, the cultural values, you just have to work on people for a while. I mean, that’s really what it boils down to is like, “Hey, this matters. This changes your life. This is literally a different trajectory for your child. If you can figure out how to plug in and do this thing every day, you’re looking at a different kid 14 years down the road.”
Jim: I just say that everything I hear here just sounds so right. The kids that get to go to your programs are really getting something of huge value.
Loribeth: Thank you. Thank you. I’ve worked and sweat and bled and cried to make it happen. And it happens. And we’re in a fight. The fight right now is everybody’s like, “Oh, all digital. All digital.” And I’m like, “No, children are not all digital.”
Jim: In fact, children have too much digital in their life at this point.
Loribeth: Well, the other problem I have is that I know for a fact that when an auditory looks at a screen, they only have so much visual resource. So what can happen on screens is that the child is tested on a screen, but they don’t have visual sufficiency to stay with that screen. So they out early. Well, then their score goes down and then they get trapped into a loop because they can’t move on by these automatic programs. Because the program doesn’t know what it’s looking at, it’s just looking at a score, right? So you’re going to see me push back on the whole rush to everything on the computer. NNAT on the computer. Come on, seriously? WISC on the computer. No. Some of those old paper ways were actually better because they were truer and closer to children.
In COVID, we had 40% of our kids just not get online because they can’t look at screens that long. Not for cognitive work. Now, they can look at it for Minecraft all day. But for cognitive work, right, for cognitive work, they cannot look at that screen that long, and we don’t seem to recognize this. And so the rush, the headlong rush, the Elon Musks of the world who are doing their synthesis, synthesis is math entertainment. Okay, it’s math, entertainment, and it’s cool and it looks fun, and all the graphics are cool, but all you have to do to prove the point is to give the kid a white sheet of paper and say, “Show me what you know.” And you’re going to discover that they’re not picking up all that.
But while programs like mine that are slightly more expensive have to compete now with 30 different companies that are driving this with AI as opposed to actually looking at children, which means that we’re in the sort of a death spiral of, “Gosh, we know the right thing to do and we’ve got to hold on until we can get somebody to really pay attention to what we’re doing here.” That’s where we are at this moment. We’ve got the right idea.
Jim: Yeah. Sounds like it.
Loribeth: We’ve got to figure out how to keep it alive.
Jim: Gotcha. And, of course, AI will keep getting better and better. So you want to look into how you can get AI to work in your program too.
Loribeth: How is AI going to pick up this? Wait, stop. You can’t see this right now, but okay, you probably can’t see that. Okay, so I’m in an acquisition position and my foot is moving. Do you know what that means? That’s a kinesthetic subdominant processor. The AI is not going to read that. So when a child tells you they know-
Jim: It could if you had a camera over there or motion detector or something.
Loribeth: Well, so the child will look… They can fool you. They can look like they know it. But if you still have the proprioceptive motion in the body, that’s actually your marker, that’s your tell. Because the tell tells you that there’s still a cortisol response in the body. The shoulder pull is a cortisol response. The foot is a cortisol response. All these are cortisol responses. AI is not going to drive that.
Jim: At least not today. But once they get good enough to drive a car, they might be able to. They’re getting close.
Loribeth: Yeah, and then people get trapped in them and they’re burned to death.
Jim: That’s true too. This has been a really great conversation. I’m really glad we had it. And I would look forward to checking in with you in a year or two and see what you’ve learned and where you’ve gone and what’s going on. This has been a fabulous conversation. Loribeth Jarrell at Sumplicity Math. And check out the links on the episode page and we’ll have some links to some of her stuff.
Loribeth: Thanks so much, Jim. Take care.
Jim: Very good.