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Shameless plug
Alright so,
you are
really
a dynamo, and I think
you should take a seat. (Thank you, and why don't you, Matt... I'm gonna take up some of your Mountain Dew again over
there.) Okay
Why don't I get that for ya? (Here let me put this in your pocket here. Let me give you this. This is the magic. You know there's a lot of math
behind this?
It's like a wizard thing.) Which button do I press? (This one right here.) Alright, fantastic.
So, let's see. What are we doing today in class? Oh, we have
a quadratic function again.
um...
Well, what? Oh, we want to find the vertex and the x intercepts. Who can help me
do that?
Anybody want to help me with that one? (When are we ever gonna use this anyway?)
Excellent.
Well, one of the things is that,
as I talked about before,
we've got many many things in our lives
that have grown
over time,
and that tool box that we have of small things
leads us to
fantastic inventions, and one of the things that I would uh... that I try to talk to
my students about is that, at this point,
when they were born, so I teach high school students, when they were born
this device
was not in everybody's pocket.
And if it was,
it did one thing.
It made a phone call.
In their lifetime,
it can now
take a picture,
videotape, as what's happening back here,
it can
uh... as we were driving over here to Springfield uh... from Champaign,
had we done this
in 1993 when most of these... when most of my kids were born in
the early 90's,
we had to
get a map.
Maybe we looked it up on the internet, but the internet was pretty...
it wasn't really there at that point in terms of helping us with that. So, I'd go to a gas station, and I'd get my
big map of Illinois, and I'd find it, and
I'd probably have to call the hotel and say, "Can you give me directions?"
And so, we're pulling into Springfield,
and uh...
I said
wait, what hotel are we staying at? 'Cause I didn't know, 'cause Joe took care of that for us, and
he said, "Oh, well, here, I have the address." So, I type the address into my phone,
and it told me where to go.
There's so much mathematics behind the inventions that have occurred just in our
kids' lifetimes.
there's no way we can know what we're gonna prepare them for,
and I think they need to understand that
this wasn't commonplace,
and that things like laptops
that are now just common, and we have... how many laptops we have in the room right now? Four
or five.
And I don't know how many of you are probably carrying them in your bags.
To think that we
could move from little punch cards
to be able to do... for some of you old-timers our there, right, that were
had to do that with... and you had stacks and stacks and stacks of them. So, today,
my phone right here is more powerful
than the computers that we had twenty years ago.
So, we don't know what we're preparing kids for,
and so, they have to really kind of think about that.
And so, something like Facebook,
which is up there
some of them have probably gone out and seen the movie about Facebook.
The guy who created this idea of Facebook, maybe he didn't use mathematics, but he had to have
somebody help him to create the code, to put all that together so that something like,
if Jenny and I are friends on Facebook, which we are,
if she's friends with somebody, and
I'm friends with someone, and I'm not friends of her friends, but then I find out she's friends
with ten people.
Then, I realize, "Oh, I think I know that person."
So now, I'm friends with them but how did that happen? Well, that all comes up through Facebook.
This is something that the kids understand. They're like, oh I meet somebody new, and all of a sudden
they realize, Oh, their friends with all my other friends. Well, how did Facebook figure out that they knew that they
were friends with them?
And so, these things occur, and
and uh... maybe you'll be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and you'll be a billionaire by twenty five
years old.
There's no saying that that's not going to be one of the kids in your classroom.
And so, as we look to the future,
we don't know what we're preparing them for,
but the mathematics that
Zuckerberg learned and is now a billionaire
is not much different than any of the mathematics that was taught
by any of us in the room.
So he had the building blocks to prepare for that,
and that's the same for most anybody that... that we can point to that is
earning millions and millions and millions of dollars or more.
They all started in... at some place in the same way. They learned algebra. They learned geometry, we hope.
Some of them are drop-outs, I think.
uh... but
It's the idea that we don't know what we're preparing students for, and um, they need to know that also
so that they can see that... that... it is going to be important to prepare them for the future.
(In the middle here, we got this door opening.
I think some language we can use is you wanna keep your doors open.
You know where you're gonna be ten years from now?
You know where you're going to be twenty years from now?
Like what Matt said , you know how much the world has changed these last twenty years? Unbelievable. You know what the world is going to look like twenty years from now?
I don't.
By doing well in school, by by trying to learn mathematics, by keeping up
with with things you're you're gonna make sure there's more doors open to you.
The more school you have, the more things you can do, the more doors that will be open to you. You wanna keep
open doors?
Then keep learning math. Keep learning, keep learning what we're doing in school.
That's gonna be important so you have the option going through use doors that you want.
Alright. Thanks. Is it back on the tie
Alright. Well, I think we're down to the last one.
Here we go.
Let me put this back on.
One more...
one more.