Building Better Tools

About one week ago, I finished out five years as an online high school math teacher. I absolutely loved it. I was blessed to teach such great students, to be mentored by such amazing teachers, and to be managed by such great administrators.

These last five years made me acutely aware of the deficiencies in online public education. Not with our teachers, or our students, or even curricula, but with our technology.

Online public education is still trying to get to parity with the classroom, and even that is seeming like a far-off goal. Something as simple as writing out math formulas and symbols in an intuitive, fluid way is the first baby step in a math classroom, and yet that can be such a big hurdle.

There are countless dollars currently being spent to create the next AI teacher. From what I’ve seen and used, it is a great way to practice and a horrible way to learn. However, truly novel work is being done in tooling for educators by teams like Desmos. We get to design the technological world we are building for our children, and I want that world to be more interconnected, and more human. This Is The Way. These are the solutions our teachers desperately need to be successful in this decade.

I’m leaving teaching to be part of that solution. I believe the best thing I can do for the next wave of passionate educators is to provide them better tools.

This is my first step.