Jo Boaler: How to Learn Math | Lex Fridman Podcast #226

Conclude in general, we've to work hard swallow struggle and find good mentor

Can you go from being literally simple as in counting with your fingers but having interest in science and other things knowing it's a necessity at 41 years old to grasp the highest levels of maths

good interview. Needed this. University classes start again soon and am taking Intro to Discrete Mathematics, Calculus 2, and Physics 2 in tandem. Am very overwhelmed and self-doubt is certainty there. Will do my best, have high-expectations and will not/can not settle for less than an A in all 3.

As a math teacher of 22 years, I highly recommend Barbara Oakley's approach to help students find success and satisfaction in Math. Algebra matters. Quality direct instruction matters. Systematic practice matters.

It’s amusing to me how this episode has such a low view count

As documented in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as a website by Brian Conrad (Stanford professor of math -- actual math), Boaler has a pattern of misrepresenting data and published studies. She'll claim that "according to neuroscience, your brain grows when you make a mistake," and the actual neuroscientist she cites will say "our study didn't say that, and we didn't even try to study that question." And she doesn't back down or apologize for repeated misunderstandings and misrepresentations like this. Sad to see.

Thank you for bringing her to your podcast. I just bought her book.

Say I don't want to learn math. What's wrong with that. Just leave me be.

I remember a 7th grade teacher who told me I wasn't cut out for mathematics. I ended up getting a B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics.

Lex takes soooo long to make the most basic points. Surprise Lex people are here to hear the guest speak.

This woman talks like a politically correct bureaucrat rather than a genuine educator who shares insights for better math-learning. "Don't give up," "Believen in yourself," "Embrace the hard work," "Make good friends." Image that she were introduced as a bio, cs, or even literature educator, it'd make zero difference in the message she sent. What a waster of an hour and a half of my time!

Creative math is best.

Just give them coloring books they'll love math or maths or mathematic

My child had a visual issue called convergence insufficiency. The ability to memorize verbally was huge and she was very good at it. So, the 2-minute memorization of times tables was easy and could do it the first time but the struggle with mathematics, especially geometry, was huge due to a struggle to visualize. Vision therapy helped but her eye communication to the "brain wiring" as you mentioned was impaired. As a result, she was learning entirely by hearing. This is an area that neuro-science, teachers, eye doctors, etc. need to better understand. Both my husband and I are extremely well-educated and spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what the issue was (which we finally figured out when she was 10) and the school system was not helpful. Lots of math would have made her life miserable but a different way of teaching someone with her issues would have been huge.

Unfortunately Jo Boaler has some idiotic opinions when it comes to advancement in math. Rather than let students proceed at their own pace, she has become obsessed with forcing everyone to do the same thing and causing major problems in mathematics education in California. She has great ideas about the details of how to teach math, but it boggles the mind that she can't handle some 12 year olds learning calculus.

Her work on the CMF in Cali is disturbing to say the least and she has been charging School Districts $5,000 an hour for her "expertise". Read the article below from the Stanford review.

For Jo Boaler, Professor of Mathematics Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, criticism can be a touchy subject. In 2006, she actually left her post for multiple years after a mathematician, James Milgram, exposed the shoddy methodologies she used in her work. She returned to Stanford in 2010, and since then, her influence on public education policy in the United States — particularly in California — has grown considerably.

Recently, she has served as one of the authors of the California Math Framework (CMF), a document that will set the direction of math education for California’s millions of students for years to come. As Editor Emeritus Maxwell Meyer ‘22 wrote in Pirate Wires, the CMF is loaded with nonsense. Among other things, the CMF criticizes the “rush to calculus” and even the offering of algebra in middle school, which has been standard for decades. The CMF further promotes the use of several labor-union themed mathematics lessons, in which eighth-grade students are taught to advocate for a “living wage” and actually learn from union activists in the classroom.

One of the more controversial ideas propagated in the CMF is Boaler’s assertion that gifted children are a “myth.” The CMF says, in its opening pages: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents.” And the policies it sets forth reflect this position: it is an outright attack on high-standards math.

Not surprisingly, then, the CMF has produced a strong backlash in California, especially among mathematics professors, Asian-Americans, and even some progressive politicians like Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents much of Silicon Valley in Congress. Several Stanford professors have published their own response to the framework; petitions have garnered thousands of signatures from professors across the country.

One person who criticized Boaler quite strongly was Jelani Nelson, a CS/EE professor at Berkeley. His criticism was twofold: first, he criticized the CMF for having low standards; and second, he exposed Boaler’s $5,000/hour consulting fee charged to public school districts and questioned whether she was really doing right by minority students.

Today, April 5th, Prof. Nelson tweeted an email that he received from Boaler last Friday, April 1st, in which she suggests that she had contacted the police because of the posts.

Twitter has since removed several of the posts, which Boaler accused Nelson of using to share “private details” about her. To the contrary, these were public records taken directly from the website of the Oxnard School District. Those records expose that Boaler charged tens of thousands of dollars to public schools in California, which makes censoring them a top priority.

Read the full email from Boaler to Nelson below:


So, in case you’re thinking of criticizing Prof. Boaler, a few reminders based on her message to Prof. Nelson:

Publishing her consulting fee of $5,000/hour is “misinformation.” Do not republish this information (that her consulting fee is $5,000/hour)
It’s also harassment
She will send the police and lawyers after you
You must take down the post and act more “collegial”
Got it?

Nelson, for his part, fired back at Boaler on Twitter, saying: “It is horrifying that the CMF claiming to uplift black children was co-authored by a person who finds police intimidation against blacks acceptable. I encourage concerned alumni and members of the Stanford community to express your concern to the university administration.”

As a matter of principle, we don’t believe in administrative action against professors, even for sketchy actions like this; we only wish Boaler believed the same. After all, it is the same First Amendment and academic freedom that protect her rights to a public tantrum as Nelson's right (and ours) to criticize her. And for what it’s worth, we find no evidence that Boaler brought the police into the situation because of Nelson’s race, as he suggests. Her long history of responding poorly to criticism shows that she is an equal-opportunity critic basher.

Here’s the reality: Boaler has been exposed over the past year as a charlatan whose ideas are not only disastrous for children, but a political liability for left-wing politicians in California who need parents to keep voting for them. And now, she has been exposed as a rent seeker and a cheap scammer, and is lashing out at the person who posted the evidence.

Boaler’s sad attempt at censorship has already failed, but we want to make sure it really fails, so we’re republishing the evidence here, all public records from the OSD Board.

First is the original contract that Boaler signed with the Oxnard School District in November 2020, in which she agreed to provide eight hours of consultation across four sessions at a rate of $5,000 per session ($20,000 total)


But as it turned out, $5,000 per session wasn’t nearly enough for Boaler. She had meant to charge $5,000 per hour, i.e. $10,000 per session, for a total bill of $40,000. The OSD agreed to that amendment in August 2021.



Maybe the sickest part of the whole affair is that the OSD contract was paid with a block grant designated for “Low Performing Student[s]”. How could it possibly benefit low-performing students to fork over twenty grand – and then double it! – to Jo Boaler for a few Zoom calls? Unfortunately, this is just the status quo in California. As long as you present as woke, you can siphon money intended to help struggling students and the State will nod its head.

Here are some shocking numbers that demonstrate just what a scam this is:

If OSD had contracted Boaler for one additional two-hour session at $5,000 per hour, they could have hired a new teacher for a year – $50,722. Maybe that would have helped those students in need a bit more?
The average K-12 public school teacher in California earns $84,531 per 180-day school year. That means that Boaler is demanding over two weeks of average teacher pay per hour that she consults for public schools.
At this rate, California high schools will be compelled to cut calculus with or without the new framework – after Boaler is done collecting her consulting fees, there won’t be any money left to pay the teachers!

As a result of Boaler’s attempt to suppress the evidence of her grift via intimidation and legal threats against other academics, the Stanford Review believes that it is our job as an independent campus newspaper to step up. Accordingly, we will be investigating how many other public school districts Professor Boaler has fleeced in the same manner as Oxnard. Just how much taxpayer money has she amassed for herself in the name of helping California school children? We’re going to find out and report it fully; and like Prof. Nelson, we won’t be deterred by threats of police action.

Very good conversation. Thanks Jo and Lex.

One day I will definitely learn math

... I sometimes think of pure maths as logical fiction ... (I'm in maths so I'm not trying to be disrespectful here) ...

Love the idea of learning through collaboration.

Great Interview, as a Math College Educator I was agreeing with Jo way too much, or is that a good sign?

Fridman can't help himself: name drops Eric Weinstein - who's turned out to be a physics/math quack - on a podcast about learning math. He also puts forward the idiotic hypothesis that there's a problem with parents not liking their kids to be better than them at maths (his guest, who is wonderful, gently dismisses the idea). Fridman has so many idiotic takes.

singing off this bullshit

complete bullshit...good parents spend time with their children to make them great

5th grade shitty school systems, shitty teachers, and shitty parents

Great video, great links to information. Absolutely, if you feel the possibility to get inspired, just go and follow the links to the classes and go ahead and do the kids stuff too. This video is a great launching point.
I'm surprised by the slightly low number of views, this may be Lex's most underrated video of the year.

Physicists also miss out on a lot compared to math...

I have never been able to solve algebra problems. this is very frustrating

One question I have is let's say someone is over 40 and they hadn't spent much time or energy on math so far. Is it too late for them to jump in and start from scratch and keep going?

I like to visualize and play with math through knitting and crochet.

She it's fabulous!! I wish I would have had a bad teacher like her when I was younger.

This woman is behind the state of California's new "woke" math framework.

Anyone seen the scathing report on Jo Boaler. Sad to say she's a scammer. Stop giving her underperforming kids grant money to teach what exactly? $5000 per hour? Even worst she's not even American👎
And I'm a numbers geek btw

when I was a sophomore in high school I almost failed math and at the end of the year my teacher shook my hand and went, "you didnt have a fun year... but I did :)"

I’m very good at math and love it, but I really struggle helping my son with math. I end up getting really frustrated, because he doesn’t get it. I can’t help him on his homework. He wants me to do it for him, not to help him. He’s in 5th grade. I’d rather him fail than have me doing his work for him. When will it end if I do his work for him?

i feel like lex interrupted too much in this convo while offering no particularly good insight or observation any time he did, which is sad

still, good enough, I learned a lot and will hopefully put it into practice

I would love to watch an interview about the best ways to lean math as an adult. I, as well as some non natural gifted that i know, struggle with it and it would be really enlightening to know if it's possible and what is realistic goal to a non-gifted person to achieve in his/her learning.
*Unfortunately, at least in my personal experience, the more the teacher or the reasercher that is trying to teach math is naturally gifted the less (s)he understand how is not to be gifted.

And then she went on to use all her political influence to take out maths (algebra) from children's school curricula. Because nothing teaches you better maths than not doing it.

Mathematics is beautiful if you understand it.

This may be my favorite interview so far. Teachers and mentors are so, so important.

I would “talk math” with my children when ever we were driving in the car from the time they could talk and count. All the way through high school. I’ve had to re teach myself advanced math through the years, and my children are great at math. One of them is a senior in high school and planning on being an engineer.
I did similar things with English writing, science experiments, music and history.

Here Is how i, a guy Who hated math Is now doing computer science with perfect score on all the math subjects. I studied all math over from aritmetics to integrals, and did every exercises of the books. I Also created a sort of note book of all the themes with all the formula, so i can look It up when needed.

Math Is like a Building, if you are weak on floor 3 you Will have problem going on floor 4 or 5 dice you dont fully understand or Remember floor 3.

To Remember math what you have ti do Is practice. When you are studying the theory you only get to know the big picture. To get good you have to solve a lot of problems, only this way you Will get to see cool tricks One problem May have.

Math Is like going to the gym. Be consistent, progressive overload = harder problems, frequency.

Hope It helped.