From FOIL to Flint: A New Kind of Math Homework

Flint allows students to do analog math at home or in class with AI feedback.

BY ANDREW DAVIS, HEAD OF SCHOOL

“I can’t tell you the number of math classes I’ve watched at the high school level where the first 20 minutes of every class are spent going around to check the homework. So, the teacher is trying to absorb quickly what the students understood. I mean hours, days, weeks spent on that as opposed to meaningful learning, which this tool could provide!”

This was the reaction that a longtime Head of School and MTS Board member shared after trying a Flint AI “homework” lesson on binomials – FOIL for those who remember it. During our recent Board retreat, we used Alpha School as a foil (pun intended) to discuss at a high level where MTS should be positioned on AI. After that discussion, Board members used Flint, an AI platform that we are using with our older students, to complete a twenty-minute assignment. 

I was then able to demonstrate to them how I, their teacher, could begin the next class session with a complex challenge problem for those who had demonstrated mastery and provide targeted instruction for those who struggled with the assignment. Those twenty minutes of reviewing the homework become twenty minutes of targeted learning for all. 

Last night, I was able to watch my own fifth-grade son doing just such a math assignment. As Flint asked him each question, he did the work using pencil and paper and “submitted” his answer using the camera on his iPad. Flint immediately provided the next, more challenging problem when he got one right and highlighted the computational error he had made on another. In his defense, it was a Flint handwriting recognition issue, and Flint acknowledged this when he justified his work. Talking with both of my sons about using Flint for math homework, they agreed (not always the case!) that it was really nice to know immediately if they are getting problems correct or not.

Watching my son work this way reminded me of what I shared in a recent talk to prospective MTS parents titled “Always Human, Always Intentional.” I used Flint homework as an example of one way that AI can super-power our teachers and allow the human-human, in-person learning to be that much more effective. In that talk, I also shared that we don’t see AI “doing the teaching” at MTS anytime soon. Beyond the perhaps significant and largely unknown social-emotional and psychological dangers of AI doing all the teaching, AI – at least to date – doesn’t teach why. It teaches how. We pride ourselves on developing numeracy rather than simply algorithmic thinking skills at MTS, and most AI teaching that I have experienced is the latter. 

I look forward to sharing more at the State of the School in January about how we are thinking about using AI in discreet ways with our older students to inform, engage, and empower our students while centering the human-to-human connection. In the meantime, I hope to write soon about how my older son was much more successful studying for a science test by creating a handwritten mind map than by using a custom, dad-created AI study bot.
 

Flint also provides students with an assessment of their overall assignment and offers the option to create more tailored practice.

TGIAM is the blog of Andrew Davis, Head of School. TGIAM = Thank Goodness It's Almost Monday.