howdy
[Applause]
I’m the father and I’m a teacher and
these numbers frighten me and you’ll see
why this is a game of Go an ancient
Asian game like chess before more
complex this is lee sedol at that point
in time the best gold player who ever
lived this is a piece of software
developed by deep mind and now part of
Google two years ago they played a
historic match of five sessions and at
that point in time lee sedol was widely
expected to win and win easily he won
one out of only five matches his defeat
sent shockwaves through the community of
gold players and a bed of artificial
intelligence experts you see alphago lee
was this dying design by deep mind to
play go and it was trained by humans
humans trained it by feeding it 30
million moves from high-quality go games
and on the y-axis you see the rating of
a gold player so within about three
weeks of launch alphago lee was able to
achieve and match the level performance
of lee sedol at that point in time the
best human go player so that was an
incredible inflection point of a piece
of software exceeding a human person an
extremely complex effort in this case
playing the game of go the wait it gets
worse for humans you see a few months
later deepmind released a new version of
that software called alpha go zero zero
means
it required no human training it
required no data a previous go Manchus
it was simply fed the rules of the game
of go and allowed to play against itself
many many times and then when it was
pitted against its predecessor software
of goli within three days it defeated
alpha goalie a hundred games to none and
that was announced on October of last
year that’s why these numbers haunt me
more than that
the
nature of alphago the software was
strangely alien experts evigan of go and
artificial intelligence experts both
combina to how the way this piece of
artificial intelligence approach to game
of go was so incredibly strange that it
was so counterintuitive to what humans
believe was the best way of playing this
game and the article released off
october mentioned that it was quite
possible to achieve human superhuman
levels of performance without human
intervention without human training this
to me is frightening because more than
just playing a board game this engine of
intelligence may be machine learning a
form of artificial intelligence is
embedded in a variety of products that I
bet many of us today used today many of
you recognize Facebook Gmail ways some
products are more esoteric like Ross AI
built for the legal industry if these
products now had become indispensable
irresistible to our daily lives and many
of them promised to do more than humanly
possible and so I mentioned I’m a
teacher I’m also a parent why does this
scare me it’s because I think about my
students I teach my own two sons and I
also wear another hat before being a
teacher and before being a parent I was
a human resources professional I work
for large companies and my job was to
identify talent human talent around the
world and bring them into the company
developed them and then deploy them
around the world to serve the mission of
the company back then the talent was
always human today employers have a
choice human talent and machine talent
and so I think about this trend I ask
myself what will my students have to
contend with when they begin to work in
the professional world what do my own
two stones have to contend with
so frequently I asked my students and my
two sons why would
or hire you instead of buying a piece of
software software do not call in sick
they don’t sleep they don’t threaten to
sue you if you mistreat them even better
overnight when you’re asleep best
employer they upgrade overnight so I ask
my two sons Xavier and Fabian
why would employer pay you a salary and
benefits and vacation and your
development when they can turn on or
turn off at will a piece of software
that’s why this is truly relevant to me
as a father and to as a teacher so I
believe in order for our youngsters to
prepare to thrive and compete in the
knowledge world when they graduate from
college is to develop some capabilities
that are rather uncomfortable for humans
to develop such as embracing that which
is ambiguous and complex that’s very
uncomfortable but what make things
simple so asking us to embrace that
which is complex is asking a great deal
of us learning to learn and to unlearn
also is very uncomfortable because for
many of us especially as we acquire age
and intelligence and knowledge we begin
to identify with that which we know we
take pride in being knowledgeable can
you so can you imagine as with someone
with advanced degree or advanced set of
knowledge that maybe but you know is the
one that relevant would you be willing
to discard that knowledge and with it a
large part of who you are and your
self-image your self-esteem that’s very
uncomfortable and we are a country that
celebrate subjects individual
accomplishment just watch your typical
Hollywood movie just one person usually
male the saves the world but we have to
embrace collective creativity so it’s
not enough just to be creative
individually but even more powerful and
more needed is our ability to ability to
help other people work together and be
collectively creative so I believe our
youngsters need to develop these
forward-facing capabilities let’s think
about how our youngsters are brought up
in the family and then at school
those environments are structured
predictable reassuring and comfortable
as they ought to be we need that very
structured and reassuring nests to
develop our young human beings so as
absolutely necessary and good but as we
just mentioned our young people need to
begin to embrace that which is not so
predictable
or structured or comfortable why well
because you can think of the nature of
work as having a continuum this side
that nature of work is very well known
to human beings an example would be
what’s almost tax filing deadlines so
how many of us actually go to a human
being to do taxes now I think very few
of us widely available for about 20
bucks or even free you can buy software
that has embedded in it the collective
human knowledge of how to complete a tax
return for federal government so that
nature of work is so well known by human
beings it can be codified which by
definition means it can be reduced to
computer code on the other extreme the
nature of work is so unknown that we
call that mysterious and somewhere in
the middle are the rest of what we do so
of some examples running a large company
maybe CEO of a company we have some
principles of how to be a good manager
and how to run the company but we also
rely on lesser definite guidelines
called heuristics which means rules of
thumb large vague rules of thumb such as
we have a big problem you can’t solve it
solve a smaller similar problem the
rules of thumb which belies the fact
that we don’t know much about how to do
that work another example dating finding
a lifelong partner some principles lots
of heuristics and also some mystery how
about being a parent a lot of principles
a lot of mystics and some mystery how
about raising a teenager that’s mystery
again maybe beyond that like miracle
right so this is a stand of that which
we know so my belief is that our
youngsters must embrace and be able to
handle work that is less well defined to
stay once the
head of artificial intelligence and you
might be shocked to understand to learn
that much of artificial intelligence can
already handle some very ambiguous tasks
such as recognizing human emotions by
simply watching for different
combinations of facial features that I
would put down as being part of
principles and heuristics already
artificial intelligence is capable doing
that so our youngsters my students mic
to my two sons they have to stay one
step ahead of AI which is by the day
almost mastering more and more complex
and ambiguous work so when and where do
our youngsters today in the typical
classroom get these opportunities
probably not enough by nature of schools
they are highly structures as they ought
to be to be able to scale them and we
produce them and provide high quality
education at reasonable cost schools
must be washed ruptured but syllabi
courses grades schedules and calendars
but think about that the very nature of
school is highly structured so how
likely is it that our youngsters will
develop those forward-facing skills if
you think about the traditional
classroom you have an expert at the
front of the classroom with knowledge to
impart and students largely passive we
have to go way beyond that and most
teachers already do project-based
learning but many of our project-based
learning projects until a solution that
the teachers already know and teachers
are orchestrating the experiences for
students to arrive at that well-known
answer I believe we must embrace a more
extreme version a project-based learning
called challenged based learning Apple
computers word about this type of
challenge but nine years ago in this
type of projects learning called
challenge based learning the teacher
does not know the answer does not know
the solution to solving a problem maybe
no person on earth knows the solution so
it’s a very different type of experience
when the students realize oh my goodness
you mean there is no answer in the back
of the book that mr. Hong knows but even
maybe no one knows this and so
challenging youngsters and drawing them
in his vacuum
be enormously powerful instill in them
this sense of agency of powerfulness
typical classroom for four years in high
school
looks bit like this the subjects or
disciplines are introduced to students
according to a time frame and a
different silos you may have stem in the
humanities the Fine Arts and then maybe
the technical arts and then over the
course of four years students enjoy some
hands-on projects and if they’re really
lucky these projects go beyond any one
discipline so instead of nearly a
robotics or stem based project maybe
students can combine art with stem to
create a steam project these are great
but I believe we need to do a lot more
than this so in my proposal which looks
almost completely upside down the
backbone are not the disciplines but
rather a real-world project to help a
distinct population meet the challenges
of their world it could be going to a
developing community it may be in our
own community in alleviating poverty and
homelessness it’s about embracing a
particular population of protagonists
understanding how they face their world
understanding what challenges they face
and then beginning to solve the problems
along with them and then as the students
progress in solving this world world
problem introduced to them made
available to them or the different
disciplines in small manageable chunks
just in time and Justin context they
aren’t introduced a tool before it is
relevant to solving that problem so if
you compare the traditional with my
upside down scoop raposo it looks almost
exactly opposite and backwards and
upside down in every respect the upside
down school by definition is integrated
across the different disciplines it is
just in time just in context and it’s
focused by definition on the real-world
problems not teaching to the test which
I am guilty of as an AP physics teacher
so in the essence instead of pushing
information knowledge information to
students without proper cons
the students are immersed and have been
invested their emotions in solving a
problem and then they want to find
solutions they want to find knowledge
tools to solve that problem
so rather than we teachers pushing the
students are pulling this information
from the surroundings this is the
Ebbinghaus curve which many teachers
experience firsthand this is a student
learning something and within days
sometimes within hours forgetting it who
can blame them it’s to them irrelevant
without proper context I do it too I
will forget within hours maybe even
minutes so it’s a highly inefficient way
of teaching of developing our youngsters
ok I’ll give an example of a very
different way of learning
my son Xavier when he was 15 years old
developed intervention to create a way
to take warm humid air and produce fresh
drinking water by coaxing the warm air
to go underground where it’s very cold
and the water vapor by meeting the cold
ground condenses into droplets of clean
water but he needed to find out how long
this conduit this pipe needed to be
underground to produce 4 liters of clean
water per day so he realized they had to
estimate and he realized that the
conditions at the beginning of this
conduit and the end would be different
which as the warm air humid air begins
to condense its percent of water vapor
false and its temperature rises and the
ground does reverse the ground
temperature rises after having condensed
water from water vapor so it realized
that he had to do estimates he also
realized that the finally they increment
had cut into making estimates the more
accurate estimate at that point in time
he realized he needed a tool called
calculus imagine of all the youngsters
learned these dollars tools and that
context your way where they’re motivated
to solve a problem in world life and
they draw from the environment a tool
that is instrumental to solving the
problem they care about that would be a
very different world so an upside-down
school we have disciplines and we have a
focus point called design thinking this
is based on the Stanford design school a
five step sequence about first
empathizing with a pop
protagonists understanding their world
their challenges and then defining
specific problems they face generating
ideas put a type of them testing and
refining so this is the lens to which I
believe my school should use and then we
bring in the traditional disciplines of
STEM humanities fine arts technology but
also something I called renewal and
irrelevance these forward facing skills
we talked about a few minutes earlier
these are rather unnatural and rather
uncomfortable but I believe it’s
instrumental to being effective in
surviving against AI so one project what
are the projects here’s some examples I
propose youngsters first solve a local
problem at their school to improve their
school when they get better they move on
to solving a problem as a local
nonprofit maybe the animal shelter after
that we move on something even more
significant helping a local for-profit
business maybe a donut shop and then
after they’ve had that experience they
will embrace a large project which I
call the magnum opus project a great
work for that I propose alleviating
poverty in their local city or town
poverty is between the complex many many
interconnected factors conspire to make
it difficult to address so I believe is
worthy a worthy challenge for youngsters
to embrace so over the course of four
years a sequence of different projects
to give our students a variety of
challenges and the framework as as you
see all tied together by the Design
Thinking model from Stanford Design
School so this whole model is inspired
by the makers movement like Maker Faire
in San Francisco every May or so the
innovation incubators who are designing
and developing new products for commerce
and then the Stanford Design School so
what’s next this one proposing to you is
very very risky right so we can’t start
small try this maybe during the summer
break maybe after school maybe on
weekends and we would not replace our
current existing education system but
simply overlay small increments of this
idea on top of that education model yes
we are on the leading edge
I thank you for your time and I welcome
your conversation about the upside-down
school thank you [Applause]
[Applause]
I’m the father and I’m a teacher and
these numbers frighten me and you’ll see
why this is a game of Go an ancient
Asian game like chess before more
complex this is lee sedol at that point
in time the best gold player who ever
lived this is a piece of software
developed by deep mind and now part of
Google two years ago they played a
historic match of five sessions and at
that point in time lee sedol was widely
expected to win and win easily he won
one out of only five matches his defeat
sent shockwaves through the community of
gold players and a bed of artificial
intelligence experts you see alphago lee
was this dying design by deep mind to
play go and it was trained by humans
humans trained it by feeding it 30
million moves from high-quality go games
and on the y-axis you see the rating of
a gold player so within about three
weeks of launch alphago lee was able to
achieve and match the level performance
of lee sedol at that point in time the
best human go player so that was an
incredible inflection point of a piece
of software exceeding a human person an
extremely complex effort in this case
playing the game of go the wait it gets
worse for humans you see a few months
later deepmind released a new version of
that software called alpha go zero zero
means
it required no human training it
required no data a previous go Manchus
it was simply fed the rules of the game
of go and allowed to play against itself
many many times and then when it was
pitted against its predecessor software
of goli within three days it defeated
alpha goalie a hundred games to none and
that was announced on October of last
year that’s why these numbers haunt me
more than that
the
nature of alphago the software was
strangely alien experts evigan of go and
artificial intelligence experts both
combina to how the way this piece of
artificial intelligence approach to game
of go was so incredibly strange that it
was so counterintuitive to what humans
believe was the best way of playing this
game and the article released off
october mentioned that it was quite
possible to achieve human superhuman
levels of performance without human
intervention without human training this
to me is frightening because more than
just playing a board game this engine of
intelligence may be machine learning a
form of artificial intelligence is
embedded in a variety of products that I
bet many of us today used today many of
you recognize Facebook Gmail ways some
products are more esoteric like Ross AI
built for the legal industry if these
products now had become indispensable
irresistible to our daily lives and many
of them promised to do more than humanly
possible and so I mentioned I’m a
teacher I’m also a parent why does this
scare me it’s because I think about my
students I teach my own two sons and I
also wear another hat before being a
teacher and before being a parent I was
a human resources professional I work
for large companies and my job was to
identify talent human talent around the
world and bring them into the company
developed them and then deploy them
around the world to serve the mission of
the company back then the talent was
always human today employers have a
choice human talent and machine talent
and so I think about this trend I ask
myself what will my students have to
contend with when they begin to work in
the professional world what do my own
two stones have to contend with
so frequently I asked my students and my
two sons why would
or hire you instead of buying a piece of
software software do not call in sick
they don’t sleep they don’t threaten to
sue you if you mistreat them even better
overnight when you’re asleep best
employer they upgrade overnight so I ask
my two sons Xavier and Fabian
why would employer pay you a salary and
benefits and vacation and your
development when they can turn on or
turn off at will a piece of software
that’s why this is truly relevant to me
as a father and to as a teacher so I
believe in order for our youngsters to
prepare to thrive and compete in the
knowledge world when they graduate from
college is to develop some capabilities
that are rather uncomfortable for humans
to develop such as embracing that which
is ambiguous and complex that’s very
uncomfortable but what make things
simple so asking us to embrace that
which is complex is asking a great deal
of us learning to learn and to unlearn
also is very uncomfortable because for
many of us especially as we acquire age
and intelligence and knowledge we begin
to identify with that which we know we
take pride in being knowledgeable can
you so can you imagine as with someone
with advanced degree or advanced set of
knowledge that maybe but you know is the
one that relevant would you be willing
to discard that knowledge and with it a
large part of who you are and your
self-image your self-esteem that’s very
uncomfortable and we are a country that
celebrate subjects individual
accomplishment just watch your typical
Hollywood movie just one person usually
male the saves the world but we have to
embrace collective creativity so it’s
not enough just to be creative
individually but even more powerful and
more needed is our ability to ability to
help other people work together and be
collectively creative so I believe our
youngsters need to develop these
forward-facing capabilities let’s think
about how our youngsters are brought up
in the family and then at school
those environments are structured
predictable reassuring and comfortable
as they ought to be we need that very
structured and reassuring nests to
develop our young human beings so as
absolutely necessary and good but as we
just mentioned our young people need to
begin to embrace that which is not so
predictable
or structured or comfortable why well
because you can think of the nature of
work as having a continuum this side
that nature of work is very well known
to human beings an example would be
what’s almost tax filing deadlines so
how many of us actually go to a human
being to do taxes now I think very few
of us widely available for about 20
bucks or even free you can buy software
that has embedded in it the collective
human knowledge of how to complete a tax
return for federal government so that
nature of work is so well known by human
beings it can be codified which by
definition means it can be reduced to
computer code on the other extreme the
nature of work is so unknown that we
call that mysterious and somewhere in
the middle are the rest of what we do so
of some examples running a large company
maybe CEO of a company we have some
principles of how to be a good manager
and how to run the company but we also
rely on lesser definite guidelines
called heuristics which means rules of
thumb large vague rules of thumb such as
we have a big problem you can’t solve it
solve a smaller similar problem the
rules of thumb which belies the fact
that we don’t know much about how to do
that work another example dating finding
a lifelong partner some principles lots
of heuristics and also some mystery how
about being a parent a lot of principles
a lot of mystics and some mystery how
about raising a teenager that’s mystery
again maybe beyond that like miracle
right so this is a stand of that which
we know so my belief is that our
youngsters must embrace and be able to
handle work that is less well defined to
stay once the
head of artificial intelligence and you
might be shocked to understand to learn
that much of artificial intelligence can
already handle some very ambiguous tasks
such as recognizing human emotions by
simply watching for different
combinations of facial features that I
would put down as being part of
principles and heuristics already
artificial intelligence is capable doing
that so our youngsters my students mic
to my two sons they have to stay one
step ahead of AI which is by the day
almost mastering more and more complex
and ambiguous work so when and where do
our youngsters today in the typical
classroom get these opportunities
probably not enough by nature of schools
they are highly structures as they ought
to be to be able to scale them and we
produce them and provide high quality
education at reasonable cost schools
must be washed ruptured but syllabi
courses grades schedules and calendars
but think about that the very nature of
school is highly structured so how
likely is it that our youngsters will
develop those forward-facing skills if
you think about the traditional
classroom you have an expert at the
front of the classroom with knowledge to
impart and students largely passive we
have to go way beyond that and most
teachers already do project-based
learning but many of our project-based
learning projects until a solution that
the teachers already know and teachers
are orchestrating the experiences for
students to arrive at that well-known
answer I believe we must embrace a more
extreme version a project-based learning
called challenged based learning Apple
computers word about this type of
challenge but nine years ago in this
type of projects learning called
challenge based learning the teacher
does not know the answer does not know
the solution to solving a problem maybe
no person on earth knows the solution so
it’s a very different type of experience
when the students realize oh my goodness
you mean there is no answer in the back
of the book that mr. Hong knows but even
maybe no one knows this and so
challenging youngsters and drawing them
in his vacuum
be enormously powerful instill in them
this sense of agency of powerfulness
typical classroom for four years in high
school
looks bit like this the subjects or
disciplines are introduced to students
according to a time frame and a
different silos you may have stem in the
humanities the Fine Arts and then maybe
the technical arts and then over the
course of four years students enjoy some
hands-on projects and if they’re really
lucky these projects go beyond any one
discipline so instead of nearly a
robotics or stem based project maybe
students can combine art with stem to
create a steam project these are great
but I believe we need to do a lot more
than this so in my proposal which looks
almost completely upside down the
backbone are not the disciplines but
rather a real-world project to help a
distinct population meet the challenges
of their world it could be going to a
developing community it may be in our
own community in alleviating poverty and
homelessness it’s about embracing a
particular population of protagonists
understanding how they face their world
understanding what challenges they face
and then beginning to solve the problems
along with them and then as the students
progress in solving this world world
problem introduced to them made
available to them or the different
disciplines in small manageable chunks
just in time and Justin context they
aren’t introduced a tool before it is
relevant to solving that problem so if
you compare the traditional with my
upside down scoop raposo it looks almost
exactly opposite and backwards and
upside down in every respect the upside
down school by definition is integrated
across the different disciplines it is
just in time just in context and it’s
focused by definition on the real-world
problems not teaching to the test which
I am guilty of as an AP physics teacher
so in the essence instead of pushing
information knowledge information to
students without proper cons
the students are immersed and have been
invested their emotions in solving a
problem and then they want to find
solutions they want to find knowledge
tools to solve that problem
so rather than we teachers pushing the
students are pulling this information
from the surroundings this is the
Ebbinghaus curve which many teachers
experience firsthand this is a student
learning something and within days
sometimes within hours forgetting it who
can blame them it’s to them irrelevant
without proper context I do it too I
will forget within hours maybe even
minutes so it’s a highly inefficient way
of teaching of developing our youngsters
ok I’ll give an example of a very
different way of learning
my son Xavier when he was 15 years old
developed intervention to create a way
to take warm humid air and produce fresh
drinking water by coaxing the warm air
to go underground where it’s very cold
and the water vapor by meeting the cold
ground condenses into droplets of clean
water but he needed to find out how long
this conduit this pipe needed to be
underground to produce 4 liters of clean
water per day so he realized they had to
estimate and he realized that the
conditions at the beginning of this
conduit and the end would be different
which as the warm air humid air begins
to condense its percent of water vapor
false and its temperature rises and the
ground does reverse the ground
temperature rises after having condensed
water from water vapor so it realized
that he had to do estimates he also
realized that the finally they increment
had cut into making estimates the more
accurate estimate at that point in time
he realized he needed a tool called
calculus imagine of all the youngsters
learned these dollars tools and that
context your way where they’re motivated
to solve a problem in world life and
they draw from the environment a tool
that is instrumental to solving the
problem they care about that would be a
very different world so an upside-down
school we have disciplines and we have a
focus point called design thinking this
is based on the Stanford design school a
five step sequence about first
empathizing with a pop
protagonists understanding their world
their challenges and then defining
specific problems they face generating
ideas put a type of them testing and
refining so this is the lens to which I
believe my school should use and then we
bring in the traditional disciplines of
STEM humanities fine arts technology but
also something I called renewal and
irrelevance these forward facing skills
we talked about a few minutes earlier
these are rather unnatural and rather
uncomfortable but I believe it’s
instrumental to being effective in
surviving against AI so one project what
are the projects here’s some examples I
propose youngsters first solve a local
problem at their school to improve their
school when they get better they move on
to solving a problem as a local
nonprofit maybe the animal shelter after
that we move on something even more
significant helping a local for-profit
business maybe a donut shop and then
after they’ve had that experience they
will embrace a large project which I
call the magnum opus project a great
work for that I propose alleviating
poverty in their local city or town
poverty is between the complex many many
interconnected factors conspire to make
it difficult to address so I believe is
worthy a worthy challenge for youngsters
to embrace so over the course of four
years a sequence of different projects
to give our students a variety of
challenges and the framework as as you
see all tied together by the Design
Thinking model from Stanford Design
School so this whole model is inspired
by the makers movement like Maker Faire
in San Francisco every May or so the
innovation incubators who are designing
and developing new products for commerce
and then the Stanford Design School so
what’s next this one proposing to you is
very very risky right so we can’t start
small try this maybe during the summer
break maybe after school maybe on
weekends and we would not replace our
current existing education system but
simply overlay small increments of this
idea on top of that education model yes
we are on the leading edge
I thank you for your time and I welcome
your conversation about the upside-down
school thank you [Applause]
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