HOW TO CREATE GENIUS KIDS IN OUR FAILING SCHOOLS

➡ Dave Hodges, host of the Common Sense Show, discusses the benefits of using AI in education, citing the example of Alpha School in Texas. At Alpha School, students study for only two hours a day using a personalized AI program that adjusts to their learning pace. The rest of the day is spent exploring their passions, such as art, music, or even starting their own projects. Hodges believes this approach fosters curiosity and creativity, and helps students to learn more effectively and enjoyably.
➡ The text discusses the importance of personalized education, where children are encouraged to follow their passions and set their own goals. It criticizes the traditional education system, comparing it to an assembly line that stifles creativity and passion. The author suggests that schools should leverage technology, like AI, to individualize learning and move away from the one-size-fits-all approach. The text also highlights the success of children who are allowed to pursue their interests from a young age, and the need for a shift towards this type of education system.

Hello America! Dave Hodges here. I’m the host of the Common Sense Show. We are the show that’s freeing America one in slave mind at a time. And let me show you who is bringing us this great show. And we’re going to cover a great topic today. Look at these wonderful three pack products here. The Nana Soma Spray. Saved my life. I really mean this. It boosted my immune system to where I overcame stripped lung linings. Then we have the Nana Soma Gels. I started to get back in the gym to be the most I could be.

I had pain in my knee and other places and I’d rub the gel on. And in a few weeks it was all gone. This erases fine lines and wrinkles together. They’re the three pack. They’re on sale. Brief time. 15% off. Go to Iwantmyhealthback.com slash Dave Hodges. Iwantmyhealthback.com slash Dave Hodges. Alright. You know I’m not a fan of AI across the board. But there are instances where students and other professions they can thrive if they learn how to use AI properly. You think I’m kidding. You think, Dave, that’s kind of a departure. No, it’s not. AI has its place in certain elements.

It doesn’t have its place in command and control. But when it comes to education, let me take you to the Alpha School in Texas and show you how well this works. Pretty simple. Alpha School right here. Let’s get into what they’re going to teach us about what education should be. This is Alpha School, where teachers are considered guides and students study for only two hours a day and supposedly they’re learning twice as fast. You can dance like a six hour normal school day into only two hours. And it’s not like with a teacher sitting in front of you.

You hear that six hours to two hours. Let me project this outwards to high school. I believe starting in your sophomore year, maybe your junior year, you should be able to choose professions you’d be interested in and go apprentice at those places. You go to school from eight to 10. Actually, sleep patterns say it should be nine to 11, so nine to 11. And then from 11 to two, a little brief lunch in there, you go and you apprentice. And then all of a sudden, kids are focused. They don’t go to college and major in philosophy.

They don’t waste their time. They’re focused when it comes to advancing their education and choosing their career path. Two hours, amazing. It’s with an A.I. app that’s personalized to skills that you need to learn in the grade level. Students begin each day with a group activity to build connection and focus. Then for the next two hours, students spend their time on an A.I. program that custom builds their learning path in real time. It’s a personalized A.I. driven experience. I want you to notice something here. Do you see any kids on their cell phones? Do you see kids engaging in small talk? You see kids fully engaged in the medium of which they’re accustomed to being in.

Lecture is not their natural medium. With one-on-one virtual tutors that adjust instantly to the student’s move in public school, I had something like this in seventh grade, a tutor that adjusted to where I was at. I’m lucky in my education undergrad and then post grad and beyond. I was a speed reader. Doesn’t mean I’m talented. It just means I had really good education. What they did in speed reading is you’d do an initial test, you’d find your speed reading, and then they’d try to move you up about five percent a week. It would be like taking an I-test.

You’d have a projector, and the words would come in through the projector and be displayed on a screen. There were different screens in the room, so you didn’t have 30, but you didn’t have to wait in line 30 times for 30 people. You would eventually begin to read. Then you’d take a test, and they wanted you to be at 80 percent comprehension before they’d move you up. Pretty cool, huh? Then they coupled vocabulary with it, too. Then you’d have vocabulary words, and you’d learn them, and then you’d move up according to your proficiency in vocabulary.

Not only did I learn to speed read at an accentuated phase, and this was a program as I found out later, and this was in my seventh grade reading class. This was a program that was actually federally funded. It was an experiment, and I was the beneficiary of it. I looked at where some of my classmates ended up, seventh grade. I kept in contact with about half of them for a number of years, and three or four later on. They were all wildly successful. It was incredible, the success levels they experienced. Well, go to my high school, and they hired a new language arts teacher for my senior class, and we did some literature, but we did it in the context of speed reading.

So it was the second time I had it. The third time I had it, I figured, you know, I’m going to get credit for language arts, and it’s above a 100-level class, so it’ll count towards my graduation. So when I was a freshman, I took it again, because I didn’t know what I was going to do for sure, but I didn’t want to spend endless time reading the same thing over and over and reading slowly. I wanted to be. In fact, actually, when I met my wife, and I was in graduate school, sometimes we’d drive on vacation, and she would drive so I could read.

And she couldn’t believe how I was flipping the pages. She goes, are you really learning anything there? And I said, well, I’ll tell you what I just learned, and I would start reciting things. She goes, she was always amazed by that. She didn’t have the benefit of having speed reading three times. This is what they’re doing across the board in this program. But they’re not just doing it in reading speed and comprehension. They’re tailor-making the curriculum at the level the student is at and then pushing them forward. That’s exactly what we did in my seventh grade class.

You very much just teach a blanket lesson, and you just hope, and you cross your fingers, that kids catch on. Because the AI learning only takes two hours, the rest of the day is open for exploring their passions, like swimming, art, or even launching their own startup. Some dive into music. One student, he’s building a cleaning robot. When I build it, I program it to clean. You’re going to program it to clean stuff? Yeah, like tiny stuff. After lunch, it’s not academics. It’s just the workshops, the teamwork, the doing your passion project. And so for them, I think that’s why they take it so seriously, because they have that understanding of, this isn’t a traditional school where I’m going to be doing this for the entire day.

But I know that if I’m going to condense an entire day down into just the morning, then that’s what has to get done. If you get an epic day, if you get nine masteries, well, you don’t have to do your computer anymore. You can paint, make stuff. So what do you think about your guides here? They’re nice. They don’t tell me the answers. They just give me resources. And they light up when they talk about them. You know what we do in education today? And this started, oh gosh, in high schools about two, well, it was during the Bush years.

No child left without a behind. No child left behind. That’s what I called it. That was the worst thing that ever happened. Education until Race to the Top came along and made Bill Gates filthy rich because we had to use his computers. That’s a true story. I mean, I’ll begrudge a man making profits, but really, how about bidding for the lowest bidder? But anyway, those two programs killed education in this country, killed interest because what it became was rote learning that you could spew back on a state standardized test. Your administrator’s jobs depended on them getting an A or A plus school rating.

And that was dependent upon the kids getting good test scores. So the teachers were taught to teach to the test, not to appeal to a student’s passion for learning. We want to learn. Curiosity is inborn in us. It’s just that in public schools, we kill creativity. We kill curiosity. This school fosters it because here’s your curriculum and we’re going to tailor make it to you. So you’re experiencing success. How many kids today get discouraged and stop and they drop out a lot? These kids don’t feel that frustration. They’re being worked with at the level that they’re at with a programmed tutor.

And they have the guide to assist them. You notice they’re not calling them teachers. They’re calling them guides. So they don’t have the frustration. And what do they do at the end of the two hours? You’re going to see it’s fascinating because they follow their passions. They equate learning with fun. This is how you produce brilliant people, people who maximize their learning to get close to their potential. They just feel like, you know, this is the person who really cares about them and leans into who they are as a person. They just get to know that kid and they try to help motivate them through the things that they love and help guide them.

They never will tell you that you can’t do something. So over time, then you develop that mindset. And so just like the environment from day one has always been like, you can do anything if you set your mind to it. Did you pick up on those subtleties? Setting goals? Kids have no idea what they want to do today. Very few of them have any idea whatsoever. Although we did have a relative just graduated from high school with a diploma in a system veterinarian. Yeah. And she wants to go on to become a vet. That’s the exception.

It’s not the rule. These kids know what they want. And they’re able to pursue it. And they’re not limited. No, you can’t do that. How many times we heard that in our life? You could never do that. I started to learn motivation. I spoke to Sarah and who really made a deep impact on me. Oh, I love that. When I walked away, I text my son, just met a six year old who used incentive correctly in a sentence. My son who just turned 11 says, what does incentive mean? So that to me was like instantly verification that it’s working or something is working.

I feel like public schools need to have an open mind and really start leveraging the power of AI and individualizing. This runs against public school background in the creation. And let me explain this very, very clearly to you. When Rockefeller, Carnegie, and all these people, they started the Dewey system and all this and education. It was designed to take the massive amounts of immigrants coming in from Western Europe in the beginning and training them how to work in the factories. And as Carnegie once said, we want people smart enough to do their job, but not so smart that they’ll question authority and try to take over.

These kids are being taught to maximize their potential and follow their passions. And so education on the Rockefeller, Carnegie model became an assembly line process. Period one, you’re in a room, you get immersed with something. Period two, you go to the next immersion. And so it’s like an assembly line of education and it kills creativity and that kills passion for learning. And this is why our schools suck. Now, some teachers are so talented, they can overcome this crappy system. And make their curriculum interesting, relevant, meaningful, and push kids to a higher level. But that takes a special gift.

And not all that enter teaching, most that enter teaching don’t have that gift. This makes that gift unnecessary to some degree other than when you’re mentoring, you’re the guide, then you can bring those skills into play. But the program is set and programs the kids for success. This is absolutely fantastic. I can’t think of a better, better system. Some of you have done great jobs with your kids. And I’ll pat myself and my wife on our backs here for a second. We had our kid reading at three and he was a preemie. We had him on the computer and doing Doc Fox and these other cartoon characters.

And they were teaching them games like how to read a little bit about math. And by the time he was five, he was performing at the third grade level. And he was always in advanced classes so I’ll brag just for a second here. Graduating high school as one of two kids and never had to be and went through a really good university. Never had to be graduated with honors top of his class. This because we stimulated him at a young age and let him follow his passions. We had a run in once with a really unenlightened principal in his final year of school.

And he said, I want to learn how to build a computer. I’m going to take that class. And I know I want to go focus on law. So I don’t need to have advanced calculus. And he had always done really well in math. His math teacher said how gifted he was. But he wasn’t interested in that. He was interested in learning how to build a computer to do things he wanted to do. He had music as a fashion. He built sound cards and stuff like this. Okay, so he wanted to take how to build a computer class from a gentleman named Basilio.

Great guy. Great, great teacher. And my son loved it. His math teacher began to call him names because he didn’t sign up for their advanced calculus class. And the principal abused him too for the same reason. Oh, dad did step in and stop it. But see, this is about letting kids fulfill their passion. If they know where they’re going in life, isn’t there a point when they get to choose their path? This is what these kids get to do. They don’t follow someone else’s dream for them. They follow what’s right for them. And those of you that have young children or grandchildren, appeal to what their interest is and take it from there.

The origin of this is actually the Montessori schools where kids would learn about what their passion was. But the criticism was it wasn’t organized curriculum that would really propel you into college. This does. Two hours a day of excitement as opposed to six hours of crap. And let me share something with you as a coach. I learned this a long time ago. You never, never, never, never, never practice longer than two hours. That’s as long as you’re going to keep their attention. I don’t care how things are. You’re going to make it worse if you’re trying to correct the negative after two hours.

Isn’t it funny they arrived at that same discovery in these schools? Two hours and then let’s go have fun. And you notice what these kids are pursuing? Intellectual activities. And it doesn’t preclude sports or anything else. And like I said, it sets up apprenticeships and mentoring programs in high school. This is where we need to go. Desperately need to go here and get rid of the assembly line process. [tr:trw].