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The October that I was eight I drew a nice, circular pumpkin for an art project in second grade. I only remember a bit else about that year – monkeybars, a burgeoning romance with baseball, some arithmetic. I don’t even remember the pumpkin, really. I just remember the compliment from my teacher. That was 38 years ago. 

If you’ve got kids in your life, find a way to compliment them. You might be surprised at how long it lasts. 

But at least it ain’t one.

Unpaired problems don’t exist – they are always a 2-for-1 special. When my students recognize a problem – whether in writing, math, or their overall thinking – we look for its pair. There is never only one thing wrong because that’s not how systems work. A disturbance in the force *over here* will always have some sort of effect somewhere else. The worst possible state is to see only one problem, because that means there’s at least one more somewhere and you don’t know about it yet. 

Off the bat we should clarify that “problem” here means both an actual mistake and the symptom of that mistake, and the mistake and the symptom are usually pairs. I don’t separate symptoms versus mistakes with most of my students because it feels cumbersome and a little preachy, so we just think about all of them as problems. The “wrong answer” is a problem (technically a symptom), as is the sloppy decimal work — the mistake that created that problem. This is the real benefit to showing work mathematically: so that if a problem arises, finding its pair is easy and quick. 

Finding the second problem comes up a lot in writing. Here’s a typical sentence I’ll see: “When camping in lake tahoe one of the biggest dangers is bears there’s a list of things that you should and shouldn’t do.” Clearly there’s more than one problem happening here. The student told me that it felt “long”. Okay, that’s a symptom. We went back to our writing checklist and he discovered a few additional problems: 

• Capitalization needed
• “Things” (vague)
• No actual subject (who’s camping in Lake Tahoe?)
• Run-on sentence (and likely the pair to “long”)

After some iterations, he settled on a much improved, “Bears are dangerous, however there are some precautions you can do to keep you safe.” Perfect? No. But so much better! 

Problems often coexist on the same tier, however they can also be hierarchical, and this takes some bigger thinking. I steal from Eisenhower’s “enlarge the problem” principle here, and we zoom out until we find the other problem. A simple example, and one that shows up waaaaaaay more than you want to believe: a student gets a math question wrong and just cannot figure out why. He shows me all of his steps, which are perfect. He’s entered the answer correctly on the digital platform. He’s included units. What’s the (other) problem? He answered the wrong question. 

For myriad reasons (problems), this sort of analysis isn’t often taught in school. I wish it were. For me, this is one of the actual take-aways for complex math and a decent answer to the famous and fair question, “When will I ever use this?” Finding the roots of a quadratic w/out a calculator? Probably never. Applying a systematic approach to discovering flawed work? All the time. I use paired problems when I examine inefficiencies in my business, when my wife and I face behavioral challenges with our kids, and when I fly. 

It’s terrifying to be 5000 feet up in a small plane and discover only one problem. Yesterday my instructor and I were coming in to land when we heard a rightfully distressed pilot radio in that he needed to immediately return to the field because he had a blown oil cap and was purging oil. Two problems right there! My instructor, without missing a beat, looked at me and said, “That means a seized engine isn’t far behind.” We were happy when the distressed plane touched down a couple of minutes behind us, mostly because it meant that the pilot and passengers would be ok, but also because it meant one less problem. And that really meant two. 

I love a well-written email – I read so few of them. I offer Exhibit A from a middle schooler, sent to six people. Here is the email in its entirety:

“I was going to study for the quiz and write down my answer now but we can’t. The choir people said we would get a extra day is this true?”

Over the past few years I’ve spent more and more time teaching my students how to avoid the above confusion by crafting effective emails. Like much of the changes in my work over the past three years, I’ve stolen from aviation. 

Radio work is one of the more challenging aspects of flying, at least in the beginning. Unlike writing an email, you’re communicating with someone while dozens or potentially hundreds of other people listen. It’s scary, and you can always tell a fresh pilot by how terrified they sound on the radio. One of flying’s rites of passage is sounding like an absolute idiot at least a dozen times. 

What’s wonderful about the system is that there is a prescribed way to work the radio calls, and once cracked it becomes a lot easier. The formula: who you are calling, who you are, where you are, what you want. That’s it. I might call Modesto with, “Modesto Ground, Skyhawk 5286 Charlie at the ramp, request taxi to runway two eight.” No frills, no confusion – a great system.

I’ve modified this concept for my students. The formula: Hi-Why-Want-Bye. That’s an introduction, why they’re writing, what they want, and goodbye. Many students (and adults!) bury their ask amid a clutter of confusion, or they weaken it: “I was wondering if I could retake the test?” is not *actually* a question. “I didn’t do well on the recent science test. May I retake it?” is way better. 

The next step, in both radio calls and good emails, is to anticipate and address what’s coming next. If I call Modesto Tower and tell them I’m ready to depart, and there’s someone coming in to land, I certainly hope I won’t get a takeoff clearance. Yet. But it’s coming, and while that traffic is landing I am getting prepared both to take off and to respond to Tower when they give me the go-ahead. 

Our above email about retaking the test was decent. It gets improved by thinking about what the response will be. Some of the time, teachers will say, “Sure. When would you like to take it?” Now we’re in a back and forth about scheduling, and who knows how long that takes. So we add to the initial email, “If so, does either Tuesday during lunch or Wednesday after school work?” And then we sign it and send it. 

Aside from its brevity, what I like about Hi-Why-Want-Bye is that it forces the student to define what it is they want and then ask for it. Alerting a teacher to the fact that a grade was input incorrectly is not the same as asking them to fix it. I’ll typically spend some time showing the student how to do this, and then over time that skill becomes baked in and they start corresponding with me that way. So in addition to likely getting the teacher to change the grade, we also get some practice in precision of language and straightforward requests. And that’s stacking functions…which we’ll save for another day. 

AI is here and damn is it exciting. Maybe, like me, you’ve messed around with ChatGPT and dreamt of the implications this will have on education. When I asked it to write me a college-level history thesis outline on Ralph J. Gleason’s impact on Bay Area politics in the 1960s and 70s, it spit out a fully competent and logical outline in about 15 seconds. Wish I had that tool in 2001. Sure beats the countless hours I spent with notecards strewn on my kitchen floor, agonizing over structure and flow. And, as you’ve figured, kids are going to start using this yesterday. Tons of students are already popping prompts into ChatGPT and submitting the answers as their own. Unlike snagging pre-written essays off of the internet (the modern version of copying the summary on the back of the book), ChatGPT synthesizes existing works and produces original content, meaning these pieces will pass standard algorithm tests for plagiarism. But is it plagiarism? Well…

Using GPT-3 or ChatGPT to generate text is not automatically considered plagiarism. However, it is important to properly attribute any text that is generated using these tools and to ensure that the text is not used in a way that passes it off as the original work of someone else. If you use GPT-3 or ChatGPT to generate text, it is a good idea to clearly indicate that the text was generated using these tools and to provide a link to the source. It is also important to ensure that the text is not copied and passed off as your own original work. Plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s work or ideas as your own without proper attribution. It is important to always give credit to the original source of any information or ideas that you use in your own work.*

*All essays on this subject are required to have a portion of it written by ChatGPT, and the above paragraph was written by the bot (in 7 seconds) in response to this prompt: “How is using ChatGPT for writing not plagiarism?” If you were reading carefully, you probably noticed how bland and slightly off this paragraph felt. That’s pretty standard for ChatGPT’s output – it typically moves from general to specific, ending with a tie-in to another general theme, along with caveats and warnings. We see that here. Succinct, general response to the prompt (not necessarily plagiarism), followed by guidelines to avoid plagiarism, then a definition of plagiarism, then a connection to an immutable law of writing (credit your sources). You’ll also notice that it doesn’t really answer the question. In this regard, it’s strikingly similar to many students’ work…! Lots of words and tangential ideas, but the actual question was never really answered. The bot told me how to avoid plagiarism, but not why using it wasn’t “automatically” considered plagiarism. It didn’t support its own thesis.

The big question for all of us is not if we should use ChatGPT, but how we should use it. Just as a calculator assists our math or a backhoe assists our digging, AI can assist our writing. It’s still a tool, though, and not a replacement for thought. For a calculator, you need to know what to ask of it and how to interpret and contextualize the answer. A backhoe needs to be told where to dig. For ChatGPT, we need to know how to prompt it, and then how to refine that prompt to get at useful information. 

I told ChatGPT I was unhappy with its answer, and after an apology (always with the apologies!!) it gave me something pretty useful: “Using GPT-3 or ChatGPT to generate text is not considered plagiarism because it is not someone else’s work that is being used. These tools generate text based on the input that they receive, so the resulting text is not copied from someone else’s work.”

Ahh, ok, now we’re getting somewhere! “So it’s about copying vs not copying, yeah? Are you suggesting the work is in the prompt itself?” 

“Yes, that’s correct. Using GPT-3 or ChatGPT to generate text is not considered plagiarism because it does not involve copying someone else’s work. The text that is generated using these tools is based on the input that is provided to them, which can include a prompt or other information. So, in a sense, the “work” that goes into generating the text is in the prompt or input that is given to the tool, rather than in the text itself.”

The tool does the work it’s directed to do. (Not included here in my back and forth are the numerous admonishments ChatGPT gave me to make sure I credit others’ work and never pass it off as my own.) Coming soon to a classroom near you: AI-assisted essays. If I was going to submit an answer to the above prompt using an AI assist, I’d probably start by mashing together the various answers I got from the AI. Something like this:

Using GPT-3 or ChatGPT to generate text is not automatically considered plagiarism, which is the act of using someone else’s work or ideas as your own without proper attribution. It’s not plagiarism because it does not involve copying someone else’s work. The text that is generated using these tools is based on the input that is provided to them, which can include a prompt or other information. So, in a sense, the “work” that goes into generating the text is in the prompt or input that is given to the tool, rather than in the text itself. However, it is important to properly attribute any text that is generated using these tools and to ensure that the text is not used in a way that passes it off as the original work of someone else. 

Then I’d expand on the answer, since “plagiarism” in the strictest sense doesn’t capture the essence of the question, which is really about dishonesty. Next I’d comb through and try to put it in my voice, getting rid of the mechanical, computerese style that ChatGPT employs. For this I’d actually re-type stuff, just because that’s how I can best get a feel for the language. Many students will likely skip this stage. My final draft would would be “my” work, despite my use of ChatGPT for both ideas and structure, and would read something like this:

Using ChatGPT to help with writing is never plagiarism, because that would require copying someone else’s work, and that’s not how ChatGPT functions. It’s a tool, and like all tools, it can be helpful or harmful, depending on how it’s used. A lot of the benefit of ChatGPT is in formulating coherent, well-structured answers to specific questions. This means that there has to be a clear, well-formulated question to answer. If a student uses the bot to generate ideas, examines the responses for flaws and gaps, adjusts the prompt, and then uses those responses to help structure an answer, that’s a tool well-used. If, on the other hand, the student simply types in a prompt from a teacher, copies and pastes the response, slaps their name on it and submits it, that’s academic dishonesty. It’s not plagiarism, but it’s not the student’s own work, and it defeats the point of the assignment. As AI becomes more prevalent in our lives, we’ve got to figure out what “our own work” really means. Glasses help us see, computers help us navigate and calculate. AI can help us write. 

I count actions. Recently I boycotted – and nobody seemed to care – the electronic sign-in process at my daughter’s daycare. Why? It involved 13 distinct actions. Unlock phone, open app, sign in, confirm plan to attend, check covid protocols waiver…and we’re not even halfway there. So needlessly clunky.

This is not a new trait of mine, this impatience with a poorly designed world, however I didn’t have a name for it until I read an excerpt from a book by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) about how he organizes his tools. His basic premise is that you should never need to move a tool to get to a different tool, a perspective he dubbed “first order retrievability”. 

To retrieve a plate in my kitchen, one must reach up to where the plates are and grab one. That’s it. There are no cabinets to open, nothing on top of the plates to move. You just take a plate. Surely you’ve been in houses where the plates are in a cabinet, under smaller plates. That’s five steps. Open cabinet, move smaller plates, retrieve large plate, replace smaller plates, close cabinet. Every now and then I’ll be in a kitchen that has coffee mugs hanging down in front of the smaller plates, so you need to remove (and replace!) those. Seven steps.

I organize much of my life with first order retrievability in mind. High use items are either accessed with only a single action or, if that’s not feasible, the route to them is as streamlined as possible. After sufficient admonishing, my six-year-old has finally stopped using the lid of the garbage can as a shelf. To my ongoing chagrin, my mom still uses her magnetic bottle opener to pin things to the fridge. This is like storing a hammer as a window prop rather in the tool box (or better, hanging on a wall). Want to open a beer in my mom’s kitchen? Find some place for the CVS receipt/random photo while you do it, and then put it back. 

Much of the struggles I see with my students relate to first order retrievability – or more accurately, ninth or tenth order retrievability. Need to start on homework. Have to clear a spot on desk. Where to put big pile of stuff? Bed too messy, floor has cords and assorted junk. Hallway? Maybe sister’s bed. Ok, now for paper. Where did that go? Probably in binder. Binder in backpack; backpack downstairs. Maybe there’s some in this drawer? Drawer stuffed with random drawings and Pokemon cards and candy wrappers and gum. Is blank printer paper ok? No pencils in sight…none of these regular pens seem to work…I guess I’ll just use a sharpie? 

It’s painful to watch, and I don’t care how good your mathematical reasoning is, when you turn in a printer paper/sharpie combo, most math teachers aren’t impressed. 

This is obviously where I come in, and where other adults can step up as well. Most of the 12-14 year old boys that I work with (and a fair amount of the girls) lack the ability to self-organize. Nearly all of them, once we set up a clean workflow, are deeply relieved. A well-organized binder, a well-organized desk – it’s not that they disdain these, it’s just that they lack the skills to set these environments up for themselves. As some semblance of order is usually required for actual work to take place, this is a great opportunity for adults to help. The trick is knowing how and when to offload some of this organizing onto them. A decent analogy would be band-assisted pullups. If you lack the strength to do a pullup, no amount of encouragement (or lecturing!) will help you. You need to build those muscles, and a band is a great step. For now, we’re the bands. As they see how it works (successful modeling), over time we can give them more and more responsibility for self-organizing. There are a ton of variables here (age, maturity, gender, learning differences/ADHD), so we take it incrementally and with the appropriate balance of challenge and support. As the (executive functioning) muscles grow, we remove some support to keep the student positively challenged. 

The same concept applies to mental retrieval. Far too many of my students haven’t memorized their arithmetic facts or basic formulas. If you’re allowed to use a calculator for everything and use notes for the formulas, you can maybe get by – until you switch schools or teachers or take a standardized test and they take it away. There’s a different argument for whether we should be letting kids use calculators for everything, but as full calculator access isn’t yet a standard of American education, kids should know their multiplication tables. Getting stuck halfway through an algebra problem because you need 15 seconds to figure out what 9×4 equals crushes the mathematical spirit. We need those math tools quickly retrievable so that they don’t hold up the actual mathematical reasoning. 

One of the first actions I typically take with new students (especially for test prep) is to see how well they know their formulas. Rarely do I have a student who knows them as cold as I’d like, so we start there. Then, when the situation arises to use the formula, they’re shocked at how easily they’re able to execute it. The tool is right there for them, with first order retrievability. 

The scream was long and it was loud. It slammed at the windows of my car, banged against the doors, built on itself in my eardrums. When the screaming stopped, the echoes remained. First the actual echoes, then the other, more salient ones. A burning in the back of my throat. A sharp, painful ringing in my ears. A severe shortness of breath. Outside the car, traffic glided calmly through the San Francisco night. Inside the car, the pain quietly left my body, but the agony of failure stayed for the ride.

For the past twelve months I’d been learning to fly. What I had failed was an in-house check ride – a flight with someone who’s not my instructor to determine if I was ready to advance to the next level. Clearly, despite the hundreds of hours I’d spent studying and flying, I was not. In-house check ride failures are common and carry no negative repercussions. Further, they help point out deficiencies that once addressed may, some day, save a life. And, as I look back now, from a few months ahead and as a freshly certificated pilot, I see what we all know I’m supposed to see – the gigantic benefits of failure. 

Still, in the moments after my failure had sunk in, I was overcome with rage. I specialize in the process of learning – how had I become so angry? 

When we talk about learning, and the increasingly popular growth mindset, we often forget how much failure hurts. And damn does it hurt. It’s important to get up and try again, learn from failure, celebrate failure. Failure failure failure. But failure threatens our sense of self, our sense of worth, and, despite how much benefit we eventually derive from mistakes, experiencing actual failure sucks. 

All of my students deal with this. The more they care, the harder it hurts – and they all care. In his groundbreaking book Lost at School, Ross Greene notes that “Kids do well if they can.” Which, he admits, doesn’t sound very groundbreaking, until you think about the inverse and compare it to popular (mis)conception that kids do well when they want to. If they aren’t doing well, according to Greene, they must be lacking skills, not desire. The moment I read those words my tutoring work improved dramatically. I have never seen a kid who doesn’t want to succeed. What I see are kids who lack the skills to succeed. But do they care? Big time. And when they fail, do they cry, or shut down, or maybe even scream in a car all by themselves? Oh yeah.

It often falls to me to disabuse my students of the idea of easy, immediate results. “Memorizing” a list of forty vocab words by skimming over them once or twice, and then being mystified when they bomb a test. Sitting down for 45 minutes to write an analytical essay without any outlining or a strategic approach and then pulling a C minus. Many students haven’t yet connected the level of work required to achieve a desired skill. Success in these cases feels magical and miraculous and almost always unattainable, a sort of alchemist hope that in the dim light of a late night study session they may somehow turn lead into gold. 

The actual science of success is straightforward: it equals hard work multiplied by time. The caveat here is that the hard work must be smart work – it’s got to be a solid approach. Earned success – not getting lucky, or benefitting from the (misplaced) generosity of an English teacher who can’t bear to give yet another bad essay grade – feels amazing. Getting good feels good. But it takes a long time – this is why we have movie montages. 

These relatively coherent, reasonable thoughts were not in my mind when I failed my check ride. It was only much later, when the sting had subsided and I was able to rationally appraise the situation, did I think about how success is achieved. Had I put in the consistent, hard, smart work? Not quite – there were certainly areas where I was lacking, and the check ride found them. 

I’m on the other side of the official FAA check ride and, true to purpose, every single screw up from before paid big dividends when it counted. Those dividends came from another countless set of hours running emergency protocols in my head (while doing the dishes), articulating how fuel systems work (while folding laundry), performing pretend take-offs and landings (while sweeping the house). Shoring up any areas of potential weakness and making sure I knew my stuff cold. 

The FAA private pilot check ride is a six hour test – half oral exam on the ground, half flight test up in the air. When my FAA examiner shook my hand and slid my certificate across the table, I didn’t leap up and shout for joy. I didn’t let out the opposite of an anguished scream. Instead, a calm warmth spread throughout my body. It stayed with me on the quiet drive home, and its echoes still ring in my ears.

I banked the plane gently over Livermore and stared down at the small specks four thousand feet below: cows. It was the first time in twenty or so minutes that I’d really taken a hard look at the ground, and it surprised me just how high four thousand feet really wasn’t. Sure, the sound was different – none of the city noise, just the hum of the propeller and the air rushing past at 120 knots – but the cows weren’t that small, and as I leveled the wings and brought my gaze back inside, I became suddenly terrified of all that awaited. And it hit me so clearly in that moment in a way that it never has before: this is how my students feel.

I’ve been learning to fly, and the first thing I figured out is that flying a plane is easy. It’s the doing anything else with it that’s so difficult. Starting, taxiing, communicating, taking off, navigating, and, critically, landing – these are the areas that baffle. My cow experience came on my first flight, and while I was technically flying the plane at that point, I was doing the absolute easiest thing you can do – straight and level flight. When my attention returned to the inside, with the dozens of dials and instruments I did not understand, I realized that were my instructor to ask me to do anything remotely difficult with this plane – like land it – I would panic. 

Most of my students feel the same about standardized tests, school, or both. The stakes are high and the enormity of the challenge is daunting. And while bombing the SAT or failing chemistry won’t result in death by fiery crash, it feels like it will. Their whole, young lives up in flames at the edge of the runway – that’s how terrified they are. 

Learning to fly is all about incrementals, small pieces that snap into place through practice. Now, six months into the process and on the eve of my first solo, the hard parts of flying are, if not easy, at least understandable and manageable. I still practice my traffic patterns while doing dishes, and more than a few times I’ve walked around late at night doing a pre-flight inspection of an imaginary plane in our living room. But the terror that seized me over Livermore has subsided, replaced with a calmness that comes from a strong knowledge base and the trusted guidance of my ex-Navy flight instructor. 

It took me 9 hours of flying before I even tried to land a plane, and after 20 hours we started doing 7 or 8 landings every time I went up. Last lesson I notched 10 landings in a pretty heavy crosswind, and it’s because of the fundamentals and the long game. So many students think they need to “land” at the outset. Nope. It’s about running the simple, easy stuff nonstop until it’s burned in. Taking things that you “know” that take 45 seconds to do and whittling that down to 5. Knowing the procedures and processes cold. Or, as my instructor says, putting in the groundwork. 

Flying is more fun than the SAT, though it requires about as much math. And I’m lucky to have an instructor to whom I literally trust my life. If your teen is terrified of standardized tests, remind them that greasing the landing comes at the end. Now is the time to practice the simple stuff, and to do the dishes.