Full Transcript for 43 - Data Education Crisis - Part 1: The Dilemma

at the end of the day, for it to be sticky, you have to be part of community I don't disagree with that and we've said many or I've told you many times before you are glue when it comes to community building, so I'm excited to see what you grow out of the c group. But there's some other self-promotion that you need to do. Charlie Apigian: 6:27 What? No, that was it. What else am I? Charlie Yielding: 6:30 doing the individual coaching. Charlie Apigian: 6:32 Oh, so, yeah, so, as having those conversations with C-level folks, I was asked well, would you be willing to do one-on-one coaching and be the data coach? Right? So I'm not, mr, mr, executive coach, because that's different. Um, but if you feel you need, uh, to get that data acumen and it's different, like if you're a leader and you're, you have use cases today where you need help. Yeah, going through a class is great, but what? Having that person to bounce it off of is really helpful. Charlie Yielding: 7:05 So you're doing a terrible job of selling yourself. Okay, I'm going to sell. Charlie Apigian: 7:11 Go ahead. Charlie Yielding: 7:11 So this summer, charlie Apigian is accepting executives for his data executive program, where he will take you, the individual, through multiple weeks of walking through your current or your existing problems, helping you understand how data can help you get through those problems, and then also teach you how to draw action from the data in the same kind of data mindset. It's the same thing he's teaching out here, but it's one-on-one with you and he will get you through to the other side, so to speak. And so, after you've gone through these executive level data classes or coachings or whatever you want to call it, you'll have a data mentor built in forever, because that's just how Charlie works. That's how I work. He's going to get you to the point to where you understand the current level of data, ai and all of those types of net new business interactions. So there you go, that's what he's doing. He won't say it like that, but that's what he's doing. Charlie Apigian: 8:09 Cut and print the commercial. Thank you, Charlie Yielding. I can't do it yet. I'm not ready to be Mr Self-Promotion, but it's so good to have friends that are willing to do it for me. Charlie Yielding: 8:20 Yeah, well, I see what you do for the people you currently work for and you promote them relentlessly, but then, when it comes to yourself, you're just like I don't know. I don't know if I should brag about myself because it, you know it feels it feels like bragging and that's not natural to you. Charlie Apigian: 8:37 It's not and I don't know We'll, we'll, we'll get into my daddy issues at some point in life, and it's not daddy issues, but I will say this. So, to give you more specifics, I believe that should be a four-month engagement. Charlie Yielding: 8:49 Four months. Charlie Apigian: 8:50 And the first month is really about exploring, getting you to a certain level. The next two are going to really be about how do you do that within your organization or in your personal life or in your community, because I cannot do anything without making sure that you impact more than just yourself. And then that fourth month is me doing everything possible so that you don't need me anymore. And then, like you said, just like last night, I literally went out with one of my former students. Why? Because he called and he's trying to get a job now and wanted help. We went and walked down at 12 South and spent about a couple hours together, and so that never goes away. Yes, and you know, you can walk around with a beer in Nashville, an open container. Charlie Yielding: 9:43 I didn't know that until yesterday. Oh, I took advantage of that one I like. My favorite thing to do was to go down to this place called southern southern grist. Yeah, get a six-pack with a buddy and then just walk through the neighborhood wow it was, it was awesome I, I didn't know that was a thing. Charlie Apigian: 9:58 So he goes hey, let's just go walk around. I'm like we can't do that and we did um, and which, I cannot drink a beer and walk at the same time. I learned that yesterday I just, I just would just like it wasn't my thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was afraid of spilling my nice ipa, I guess. But you know, uh, but yes, I am doing that. There will be more information, uh, about that stuff as I get going um. And you know why? Why I want to do that? Because I want to do that, because I want to do that I do. Charlie Apigian: 10:25 I love this idea. I used to think I wanted to impact everybody at once, and then I realized what I get the most gratitude is working one-on-one with folks. Charlie Yielding: 10:34 Well, you still get the same results, though, because that's one of the things where I feel like you've kind of like your perception of the situation is that you have to touch everybody, like you just said, and as a leader in business and stuff like that, your actual direct influence is much smaller. Yeah, and then that influence carries down the chain, so to speak. If you're looking from the top down, and so you're about to go work with executives and that's going to change their culture, and so you'll touch way more people than you would trying to work with everybody, that's a good point. Charlie Apigian: 11:08 Yeah, I like the way you frame that and for some reason, when I talk to people at higher levels, when I talk, they think I know what I'm talking about and so I'll take that as a good element. I actually was in that was self-deprecation. Yeah, like usual, I was actually in the room just down the hall from here with the CIO counsel here and did a lot of this and I bounced it and it was fantastic. And everybody, when you start talking, you say what's the biggest problem? They don't go to technical. So you've got to fix the culture and the people

first before you start adding on technical stuff. And and I think that's that's the main mission this summer and so for. Charlie Yielding: 11:54 For everybody listening, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask why that's important, and then you try to think about the answer, and then we'll talk about and, and then so pause it right now. Why is it important to change the culture around AI and technology with regards to business? Pause, and now Do I have an answer? Yes, of course. Charlie Apigian: 12:18 Yeah, yeah, there's so many things that you notice and it's not one answer. There's so many you notice and it's not one answer. Um, there's so many. Uh, actually, we, when we were talking about this in the CIO council, I put about 10 different things up that said why do data projects fail? And in in most people? Charlie Apigian: 12:34 Um, they basically go to the wrong spot in the beginning, um, and, and then never have the ability to go back. It's always a people problem. It's always technology does not fix things between you and I. They don't. They don't lead to things and as long as businesses cater to humans, humans will do the action. At this point, right? Um, now are we going to use ai to do? I was, I was at a coffee this morning. It's when is businesses going to embrace AI and we're not going to need us anymore? And I'm like, when AIs are doing business with AIs, yes, but if I'm, the human component is still going to be there, at least for now, right, and I believe it's actually for a long time. So, anyways, all of that to be said, can I completely deflect again? Charlie Yielding: 13:22 No, Absolutely not. So I want to dig a little bit deeper on just that specific situation. The people, part of what you're talking about. Yeah, so people have egos. Yes, right. So if people have egos and it varies by degree based off of the individual executives typically have a larger ego. Yes, and as you go up in a company and this is from my own personal experience people stop telling you you're wrong as much. But what data does is, it's a great equalizer. And so somebody saying something on the top and then a data scientist somewhere in the middle says, hey, that's actually wrong. This is the right thing. That ego is going to get in the way and it's happening every single day. Like I talk to so many people that work in data right now that are saying leadership just doesn't trust us. Yep, leadership won't listen to us. That's right. And then there's other companies that are a little bit further down the road that said that leadership didn't listen to us and it cost them $6 million in one quarter. Charlie Apigian: 14:21 And therefore it's a people problem. So the reason they didn't trust them is the process, it's not the you know, it's, it's not the data at that point, and and. So if you, um, and and people at the highest level need to accept that people underneath them are scared there. If you give them a directive and say, go do this, they go do that. And then they come back to you and you're like that's not what I wanted, it's because you didn't know what you want in the first place, so say that right, but they're not. Charlie Apigian: 14:49 So then it's the person, it's the data person's job to be inquisitive, and I actually love this methodology that I've used as kind of the basis for the dilemma stage. It's called quantitative intuition, it's out of Columbia university and they are fixated on asking the right question, and that is so important. If we ask the right question in the beginning, it changes everything. And if you can not only ask the right question, understand your audience and their pain point and then make everybody part of the journey all the way through, then when you get to the end, they're not going to say they have trust issues because they're part of the process. Charlie Yielding: 15:32 Okay, well, so you just set up a perfect segue To To you no to the education crisis, yes. So what is the question right now? What is the question that they should be asking more than anything else? Charlie Apigian: 15:46 I think it's always a data problem, and we are still basing our education system when we could not assess and use data right, and so everything is Not at scale, not at scale, and so everything has this delivery method you learn, memorize and then give it back to me and see if I can understand it when you are surrounded by all of that data in the real world, right? And so the the education system is not a good reflection anymore of real life okay, and you're talking about primary, secondary, all of them okay you know, and, and so we don't have the answers yet. Charlie Apigian: 16:30 But as things continue to change, we're trying to figure out. People are saying are people going to be dumber in the future because they have ai, and or are they going to be smarter because maybe they don't recall it individually in their heads? These are my students, by the way, saying this they're asking if people are going to get dumber yeah, my, my students, so I've got this amazing class. Oh jeez, the last episode. You got to meet them all. Charlie Yielding: 16:56 Yeah, um they're a good bunch oh my gosh, they're the best. Charlie Apigian: 17:00 And we had an ai conversation and one student in particular, cam Cameron. He just said I'm afraid that everybody's just going to get lazy and dumber and I'm like I understand that. But what if, at the age of 18, you have enough knowledge at your fingertips that a PhD used to have to? You used to have to get a PhD to have right, so that's where I'm at. Charlie Apigian: 17:23 Yeah, and so that is empowering. And now we have delivery mechanisms out there. Where, why do I need bad teachers? Because they're local. Think about all of the different aspects of education. It is about content, it is about experiences and it's about creating that environment of continuous learning. That's

why I believe community is so important as part of education. Now, and as you look at that, how do you create knowledge and experiences? You know, and if we're spending K through 12 only with knowledge, and then 18 to 22, you know, your your normal, uh, higher ed years, dabbling a little bit in experience, but mostly still knowledge, we're, we're, we're now throwing them off the cliff and saying go get a job yeah, and it's just not working it's a, it's a problem for sure. Charlie Yielding: 18:21 Yeah, and I think it like it goes way back to the the moment that somebody said that to to be something other than a factory worker, you need a college degree, because somewhere between where my parents grew up or when my parents grew up and when I grew up, it became a requirement for anything, yeah, and so my degree is in psychology, which is is basically nothing. Charlie Yielding: 18:44 It did help me get my first job, though, and I think I've mentioned this before because, arbitrarily, one of the requirements is that I have a college degree. We got rid of that quickly because the type of work we did it was only making it harder for us to find good candidates, and that's the point you were just making. Charlie Yielding: 19:01 Why would I hire a crappy professor when they're local, when I could find the best professor, but they're in a different state and so so that's that's all like potential resolutions and whatnot, but today we're framing the conversation in your data mindset, yeah, and so, yeah, let's, let's, let's focus on what you need to know in the beginnings of any real problem, and this is a problem, right. Charlie Apigian: 19:25 And and by the yeah, let's focus on what you need to know in the beginnings of any real problem, and this is a problem, right. And, by the way, we're going to give opinions today that maybe in two episodes we're going to completely reverse, right, because we're trying to come up with the real problem. And so a real problem to me is normally not measurable, right, like, literally, education is not measurable. I mean, apart from the same guys testing, we use proxies to measure it. Right, we use other factors. It's kind of like our health same thing we want to be healthy, so we look at weight, we look at A1C levels. If you're diabetic, we look at other proxies. So let's assume the goal is not measurable. So then we're using, we're going to look at other factors. Charlie Yielding: 20:14 So let's talk, just to be a little bit more detailed. So the goal is to become educated and an expert in whatever field you're being educated in. Is that the goal? Charlie Apigian: 20:22 Yes, and we need to define what is education, then right, yes, and we need to define what is education, then right, yes, okay, and so if that's a case, then we have to identify the audience that we're trying to help. Are we talking about the youngins, or are we talking everybody? Are we talking adults? And that becomes really important in this conversation. Charlie Yielding: 20:40 It does, I think. In primary education, though it's compulsory, so it's a little bit different in that you've got a captive audience. But secondary education there seems to be an additional problem with forcing students to do something that's not in their best interest because it's in the best interest of the school. Charlie Yielding: 21:02 That is true, the best interest of the school and so, and so that's. Um, I think there, I think there's. It's okay to say we have two different caveats or two different categories. And and then the third category is, uh, like, uh, adult education, reskilling, all that type of stuff like boot camps and whatnot, because they've even had some, you know the the pandemic like we're getting into the problems and stuff in a minute but the pandemic impacted every layer of education. But then, like I said, with secondary education it impacted a little bit. There's additional criteria. Charlie Apigian: 21:33 Yeah, and let's stick at the generic. Let's assume traditional education is the primary audience, and I say audience because it can be community-based. It could be community-based, it could be individually based, and what we have to think about is the overall objective. What is it that? When we say we're educated? We are, and so I'm going to use a scenario. You got the psychology degree. Did you become a psychologist Negative? All right, but what did it do for you? Charlie Yielding: 22:06 It allowed me to apply for jobs. Charlie Apigian: 22:08 It allowed you to apply for jobs and you did get some problem solving, you worked around, so it was the acceleration of your education. So education is more than technical skills or skills. So for me, to become a decision maker is is part of the my educational process. Okay, but every time I wanted to go learn Python programming, or, if I wanted to, what have I learned lately? I've, I've, I've, I learned how to use what's a? Oh geez, how did I forget it? It's not Adobe Premiere, it's the oh Final Cut Pro. All right, that's a skill. Right, that's different. I don't need to go and get a four-year degree to learn Final Cut Pro, but I might learn it because I'm in, I'm getting my education around how to do all of these other things. So when I think education, I'm thinking problem solving, learning on my own, all of these other skills, and so to me, that's what's important. Charlie Yielding: 23:13 So let me try to wrap my head around the way you're saying it. So education is the ability to look at grass root or grass level stuff or get in the weeds, basically all the way up to the high end decision making, because you understand the entire stack of the subject matter, whereas a skill is something you add at individual layers, like maybe, at this layer you need to be able to program, and it's this layer you need to be able to integrate. This layer, you need whatever, and

so those skills, I see, I see what you're saying now, because skills can be taught independently, but they don't equate to an education, which education is the ability to move in the entire space. Charlie Apigian: 23:48 Exactly, and in a four-year degree. The best part of it is getting an. Education is accelerating, going from 18 to 22,. You go from not fearing being in front of people to I can work in an environment. It's almost like the soft skills. You're working on more of the soft skills than the hard skills. But we also. In the past, the content was not available to us except in school. Charlie Yielding: 24:18 Right, right, right, and that's one of the dilemmas we're about to talk about. Charlie Apigian: 24:20 That's the dilemma is we are so content heavy, because that is what we had to be 20 years ago. Now we're at a point where all of that knowledge is not only available to us, but it's better externally a lot of times, like if it adapts more rapidly, for sure if I'm I'm going to teach python uh programming in the fall for uh freshmen sophomores. Charlie Apigian: 24:43 I'm kind of excited and, as part of that, what do I teach them? First of all? But there's books, right, they're horrible, nothing against them. But let me change it. They're not unique to what I want the students to learn. Sure, I don't want to teach intro to Python. Charlie Yielding: 25:01 Isn't that why some teachers write their own textbooks? Charlie Apigian: 25:03 intro to Python. Isn't that why some teachers write their own textbooks? Sure, sure, and it's why I never use a textbook, because I want to teach Python for data science, python for data Well, what book is out there? So there's this mismatch, and so a lot of times, students are getting the old version instead of what they can. But they're also getting the ability to work in an team environment. They're they're learning how, what happens when it breaks and and how to fix it, you know. Charlie Yielding: 25:31 So they're learning the educational components, but they're sometimes getting antiquated knowledge yeah, so you're breaking my brain with the with this education versus skill stuff. Because like I'm thinking like was I educated, like with it with a degree in psychology, like I did learn some stuff were you more employable at the end of four years of or five years of education? Charlie Apigian: 25:55 uh, not because of the specific content of my degree, but rather that I had the degree okay, I I got a feeling, so I'll use my 25-year-old son right now, who is a civil engineer doing very well At 18, I wouldn't have given him a pencil to draw anything, you know. In other words, I didn't feel he was ready. Charlie Yielding: 26:16 Yeah, but he's going in. He's a professional. He went to a professional school that they're teaching him how to do a specific job. Charlie Apigian: 26:22 Yes, but his problem-solving skills. Because your job as a civil engineer, yes, it's to draw lines. No, that's a designer or that's low-level. His job is you've got to put a road in and make sure it doesn't flood and that cars can get through on that and not be bogged down. That's problem-solving. By 22, he was a lot closer to being able to do that At 25, he's really good at it, nice, you know. And so that education, that part, he needed the three years in his job, but he couldn't have started that at 18. Charlie Yielding: 27:00 Yeah, there's too much requisite knowledge to just jump into it, like not to say you couldn't do an apprenticeship in the same way. But the point of a college or a school or university or whatever is standardized education so you can say, hey, you've gone through this program, so I know you know at least X, y and Z, whereas apprenticeships are great but they're very individual and so one can be awesome and one can be awful and they can exist at the same time. Charlie Apigian: 27:28 So I've never thought of it. So I believe programming skills are a skill. I believe most of the things in technology. If I can learn it online, a lot of times I think of it as a skill, and so I am a 100% self-taught programmer and I've been teaching programming now for 15 years, right? So, um, you can do it, I know you can. Um, what about math? Is math a skill or an education? Charlie Yielding: 27:55 Well, so that's one of the things that I was also thinking about going to my high school days. So I used to say I'm not good at math until about five or six years. No, no, no, I forget, I'm 44. Until about 15 years ago. Charlie Apigian: 28:09 Jeez A little bit different than four or five years ago. It's a bit different. Charlie Yielding: 28:15 When I started to get into my own, I started getting interested in physics, space and stuff like that, and then I started to learn that math is just a language. It's its own language to describe how materials are. You can use it to describe how materials exist in reality and how they move through reality and all that type of stuff. But then you can also get into how they could theoretically be moving through some other dimension and stuff like that. Get into like how they could theoretically be moving through some other dimension and stuff like that. But you and they, they oftentimes get to a point to where they say I can't express this in words, I can only express this in math. Yeah, and so then I? That got me thinking like, well, if it's, if it's like its own language, then what did I learn in high school? All I learned in high school were skills. Yeah, my math teacher did not educate me on math and I feel like that's a big failing with math. Just in general. That's a great point. Charlie Apigian: 29:09 And I cause. I believe math is logic and math is then an educational component, If you get to that level. Charlie Yielding: 29:14 Yeah. Charlie Apigian: 29:15 Like. So my son took five calculus classes. He

would have taken a sixth one if they offered he loved it. You know, and and so, but building, but it's also that's what created the problem solving between 18 and 22 that accelerate. So without having that calculus and the other math courses he could never have started at in his professional job. So a little bit of skill, so it's. It's there's. They're not mutually exclusive like every time. Every time you take a class, you're learning educational components, I hope, and you're learning skill. Yeah, it's just sometimes you're getting more of one than another. Um, and and now you have to identify if skills are available to you. I can, I can now use ai to write code, but why am I writing the code? What is it for? How is it going to be operationalized? What was the question in the beginning? To get me to write code and try to solve a problem right, all of that is still an educational process that that a human, I think, still needs yeah, I, I don't disagree with that. Charlie Yielding: 30:24 But now I'm getting more and more pissed, though, because I wish somebody would have educated me on math to begin with, because it is good, it's fun. It's fun like looking like you know you're talking about your son Like your son can look at a bridge, you know, yeah, and he can see the math. He can see the math in the bridge. Isn't that beautiful? So when the bridge got hit last week in Baltimore, somebody could look at that and see like, oh, I can see where the math made this thing fall apart. Charlie Apigian: 30:51 And it's 100% based on. There's a between one foundational component and another. There is a beam. That beam has a certain weight bearing and it's like he'll talk to me about that stuff, like the gradients going up a ramp and how it has to be a certain amount, and I was thinking about this. It's like in his field. When I was a kid, every road flooded, yeah, and now they don't. Why? Because we have engineers that create roads instead of just people like me. Charlie Yielding: 31:22 My uncle was actually the same type of engineer and he used to tell me that he he built ditches. Charlie Apigian: 31:27 That's what he said, yeah, and then it come to find out he's designing the entire roadway and just the ditches are how? Without ditches, you have flooded roads. Yeah, and that's why there's, all of a sudden, why is there a big pond over there? Well, because without that, you couldn't have that ramp there. Because of all of that. Yeah, so that to me is so. Math is a great example. Yeah, so that, to me, is so. Math is a great example. Charlie Apigian: 31:49 And so now, when we get into the world of data and AI, the problem is we think it's only a skill, it's only a technical thing, and we forget that it's a logic, it's. You know, the only reason we have data is because we're trying to capture reality and we use that reality to help us make better decisions in the future. We've lost that and that's I don't know that we ever had that. Well, I'm trying to create it right, and that's the. If you want to not learn, there's programs and one-on-one coaching that you can get. Look at me, I just did some self-promotion, which I can't wait to do self-promotion for you, by the way, we are going to get to that You're not doing self-promotion for me. Charlie Yielding: 32:28 I do self-promotion for me. Charlie Apigian: 32:30 Well, yeah, you can do that yourself. But what I mean by that is I can't wait to get to updates about you. Charlie Yielding: 32:35 The next time I'll be ready. Charlie Apigian: 32:37 All right, that's good to hear, because Charlie has some things cooking. Charlie, why that is that I'm very excited about for you, I think we're very complimentary in the approach that we're taking towards, towards, uh, what the future is going to look like I, I'm excited, yeah, you know, and uh, well, uh, I don't want to go sidebars, but we'll, we'll just keep going, but I am, I'm interested if, uh, our charlie's in charge episode uh, got you anybody? Uh, uh, did anybody make comments to you about that? Charlie Yielding: 33:09 Yeah. Charlie Apigian: 33:10 Yeah. Charlie Yielding: 33:11 Yeah, it was coupled with me exiting and everything, and so I made a low-key type of announcement about it and a bunch of people reached out and to a message it was extreme positivity. Charlie Apigian: 33:29 Good. Charlie Yielding: 33:29 It was something that I didn't. It was something that I didn't. It's not that I didn't expect it I was. I expected well wishes and stuff like that, but just the people, the people's general and genuine excitement about what I'm doing next. Charlie Apigian: 33:47 Yeah, uh, well, that's good. And I I had a lot of people come to me and just say that they were. They would have never guessed that I went through anything, because I was always. Charlie Yielding: 33:58 Well, you're Chipper Charlie. Charlie Apigian: 33:59 Chipper, Charlie, and always you know nice, and I'll be honest, you know to our audience, because we're close and personal. I came in here today and I was like God, I'm just not in that mood, and then we hit record and it goes away. Charlie Yielding: 34:12 We did a little bit of buttering up beforehand. Charlie Apigian: 34:14 Yeah, we did, we did. So let's get back to buttering up this idea of education. What are some? Charlie Yielding: 34:27 of the things that you feel in the last 10 years, let's say, have impacted education. Well, so, with secondary education I want to go back to the nineties, because the nineties is, you know, like. I graduated in 98 and, uh, the expectation at least then and I don't know how it was for you, you know, a few years earlier but the expectation was that if you want to do anything besides work in, uh, manufacturing, which is just a factory job, which I did, uh, and it was not for me then you had to go to college. Yeah,

actually, my path was went to community college for a semester, took two years off, had to start paying bills, so got a factory job for about three months, decided that was absolutely not for me because I wasn't going to get run down and discarded because manufacturing in Mississippi is terrible, and then went straight to school. Charlie Apigian: 35:12 Yeah. Charlie Yielding: 35:13 Got student loans because they would just give them to me Yep and then paid my way through college while working part-time at Radio Shack on the weekends, and I made good money, but I was also bad with it, and so, even if I didn't need the loans, I still got the loans because I just wanted to be able to be comfortable or whatnot and, like I said, they would give them to me. Charlie Yielding: 35:31 A lot of people gave me money when I was 18 that should not have, so I paid those bad boys off. But that was also in the earlier days of the price increases, where you could pretty much count on 10% year over year. Charlie Apigian: 35:47 The highest inflation rate we have had has been college tuition. Charlie Yielding: 35:50 Oh, absolutely. I've looked at some of the numbers. I feel bad for students these days because it got worse after I went to college. I started in 2009 at G squared and the requirement was a degree, and we didn't get rid of that for two more years. So in 2011 we had a requirement for a college degree, for just entry level as well. Entry, it was entry level is all get out wow, and so that was that. Charlie Apigian: 36:20 But that's just thank you for doing that, because that kept people coming to academia well, that was the mindset. Charlie Yielding: 36:24 Yeah, mindset was like for me, to you know, like and this is I even parroted this early on I was like a degree may not be important, it may not be like what you're dealing with, but it shows that you can commit, it shows that you can get something done. Charlie Apigian: 36:38 And you care about the intangibles, and the only data that you had about a human is do you have a degree or not? A? Charlie Yielding: 36:48 piece of paper? Charlie Apigian: 36:49 Yeah, If you have a piece of paper, at least you finished something. That is literally why people go into debt sometimes. Charlie Yielding: 36:56 Yeah, I mean that's why I went into debt. I went into debt because I thought that's what I had to do. And then there's a lot of other people who went into debt because they think that's what they have to do and in some cases they absolutely did. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is technology and access to information. Charlie Yielding: 37:11 So in primary education, the pandemic really put everybody on their heels because kids went home. Kids still have this hybrid work, you know hybrid situation where they've got laptops that they have to do homework on and they have to take it home. And do they have internet at home matters now, yes, and that used to not matter. So access to internet or to the internet has become much, much more important than it was before, because that's literally how some people are getting educated. So that. So you introduce that technology and that remote aspect to it. Well then you go to colleges and this is just my outside perspective. They don't want people going home. They want people to come to their fancy brick and mortar stuff that they've been spending the last 15 years building up, and you know like they. They want people there. Charlie Apigian: 37:56 Well, certain ones do, certain ones do, that's true. Charlie Apigian: 37:59 Yeah, I mean, I definitely I mean a private university that gives a top notch educational opportunity for people experience. But you got to be on campus to do that. You got to be on campus to do that. You got to be on campus to do that Right. And I will say Belmont is an amazing, amazing place to be on campus. My son is finishing his first year. He loves it, loves it, he's learning, he's in a great program in nursing and that's great. But that doesn't have to be every kid and, by the way, that is a lot of money, a lot of money that I would not have spent If I wasn't working there. Charlie Yielding: 38:38 Oh yeah, yeah, you said your son, you mean your daughter. Charlie Apigian: 38:42 I've got two kids going there. Charlie Yielding: 38:43 For nursing. Charlie Apigian: 38:44 No, no, my son is a freshman in nursing. My daughter is finishing her doctorate degree in occupational therapy. Have I ever told you how freaking proud I am of my kids? Yeah, you don't know how many kids I have still to this day. How many do I have? You've got four. I've got four. Charlie Yielding: 39:02 Three boys and one girl. Charlie Apigian: 39:03 Yes. Charlie Yielding: 39:04 And you've got a mechatronic, you've got an engineer I didn't know. The youngest one was a nursing student and then you've got the occupational therapy. Charlie Apigian: 39:11 And then occupational therapy, and then my middle son, who's going to my former school, who I don't get any tuition breaks because of me. That's the mechatronics kid. He's got a full ride there and is going to spend the summer in Germany doing a research internship with nanotechnology for semiconductor manufacturing. Charlie Yielding: 39:33 Oh, he's going to be. That dude is going to do it. Charlie Apigian: 39:35 Yeah, that's big. Charlie Yielding: 39:36 So now that we've got a big old chip act like Intel's got billions of dollars from the government to get chip stuff going here, I don't think Intel should get that by any means whatsoever. Anyways, I digress. Sure, it's a very good place for him to be, but he's also in one of those jobs that he's going towards, a professional degree, which I think universities Absolutely should be doing professional degrees and if you're a university that requires

those folks to come to campus, that's great, but that's also something that's not necessarily you know it's, it's a part of the dilemma. Charlie Yielding: 40:12 It's not necessary anymore. Charlie Apigian: 40:15 Yeah, so let me, I'm going to take a step back from that for a second. Um, you live one life, right? Charlie Apigian: 40:24 So I hear um, you get done at 18, uh, fifth high school, and if you went right into a job, that means at the age of 18, you are now on your own learning skills. Hopefully you're going to be around people, but it's a tough go at the age of 18 in this country. It just is you mean out on your own and whatnot. Out on your own right If you have the opportunity to go to a university or go to an environment where you're around people your age, you're having fun and I believe you're accelerating the education process in those four years. So I think everybody gets educated throughout their life, I believe between 18 and 22. Charlie Apigian: 41:06 Right now, I don't know another way that accelerates it better than a university, except there's probably some jobs where you get to do a bunch of different things, but most of the time if you get a job of 18, you're not getting the skills, all of the skills, that you need to be a well-rounded person. A university tries to give you that. You take writing, you take communication. If it's a liberal arts style, I love that. I love the ability to take another science class and all that. So the problem is if doing that puts you behind for the rest of your life because of debt. I don't know if that's the right approach, but if you have the means to do that, I would 100% encourage any family, any individual to go do it. You know why it's the best four years of your life if you do it right. Charlie Yielding: 42:00 Yeah, I don't disagree with the fact that a lot of people have really good experiences in college. They mature a lot more. A lot of people have really good experiences in college. They mature a lot more. They get their hands into some messy situations. From an interpersonal perspective, I think that they can learn a lot in school, but there's a lot of I mean in the workforce, but there's a lot of freedom that comes with. Fellow students Like you can be friends and classmates, whereas in the workforce like, if you go crazy a little bit, too much in that time frame, you'll lose your job. Charlie Apigian: 42:35 I've had many friends that have had to. I was usually the person taking people home, mr, but if that was a colleague I'd be like the next morning going. If I saw some of my fraternity brothers do certain things, I don't know if I would want to work with them the next day. Charlie Yielding: 42:49 Well, that's the, that's the. It's the give and take of the of of learning those things Like. Not every lesson is an easy one, and so getting that out of the way, which you know it's a, it's also a reason I'm glad I didn't have a cell phone that took pictures and videos and stuff was dumb oh, we, we, we all. Charlie Apigian: 43:07 And you know what, though, but don't just smile every time you think about that. And it was, it was, it was good. Now, um, if, instead, you do an online degree and you're you're taking courses and you're you're having to do that on your own, that's a different experience. It's also you're not getting the educational experience that I would want you to have. If, if you, you know, because I do believe that as long, I do believe that being around people doesn't have to be every day, doesn't have to be every class, but being around people rounds out that educational process, because what I care about is normally the ability to work with others. Charlie Yielding: 43:45 Yeah, so let me, let me ask you a question then, uh, in the workforce, when we went home, uh, we went like we had the we'll call it the water cooler moments, uh, where two people were having a conversation and you arrive at some point of inspiration because two people connected ideas to create a new idea. Yeah, uh, and it doesn't have to be anything major, it could just be like I was dealing with this problem, this problem. It's like you were dealing with this problem, this is how I deal with that. And they're like, oh, holy crap, that's awesome, I'm gonna start doing that. And then they're like, oh, that's great, and you know, so it's a sharing of ideas and that's what you're, that's what you're kind of getting at. So we went home and all of that kind of happenstance stuff went away, because brainstorming went away. Charlie Yielding: 44:26 Well, it became a proactive effort, like you couldn't randomly brainstorm because you had to physically connect to another person, which means you have to call them, and if there's one thing that we don't like nowadays, it's calling people, and I'm even in that boat. Charlie Apigian: 44:41 If you call me, I'm not answering. Charlie Yielding: 44:43 I'm not. Charlie Apigian: 44:44 Except if you're my mom or dad. Charlie Yielding: 44:45 Yeah, yeah, certain people get a pass. But if you're going mom or dad, yeah, yeah, certain people get a pass. But if you're going to call me, you just be like hey, I'm gonna call you in a minute. All right, then I'll feel good about it. Charlie Apigian: 45:02 I always answer my phone, to be sure, but it's sometimes it's just to berate the person. So why are you calling me? This could be a text message. Yeah, yeah, well, I may be. Charlie Yielding: 45:07 So maybe, maybe there is a situation where we we under emphasize phone calls because we didn't need it and we were doing all this thing in her personally, but now, uh, so like one of the things that one of my former coworkers came up, came up with, is the concept of a shared space on the internet. So we've got a call basically open all the time and people can just drop in and out of it as they want, and then

they're, uh, they're setting it up. Charlie Yielding: 45:30 They actually pitched this and they're setting it up after I'm gone and so I'm curious to see how it went. But, um, it's, uh, there's specific topics that they have, you know, different days, and then they have like little games that they're putting in that they can play back and forth and stuff, and so it's, it's creating that community in the hopes that the same type of water cooler in things will happen, you know, in that environment, cause it's not just chat, it's, it's, you know, you can jump in on your voice, and so it's a group of people talking. It's a little bit different with your cameras off and stuff, because it gets hard to not jump over people and whatnot, but it feels like in the same way that education has a crisis with that. I think we're all dealing with that same type of how do I create what used to be in this new thing? Charlie Apigian: 46:20 Yeah, and there's so much to that. And then, of course, in the academic well, the pandemic during that, the academic pandemic, the academic pandemic it was. And of course, K-12 struggled because they were not ready for that. They were not. Charlie Yielding: 46:38 Healed beds for all of the teachers and administrators. Charlie Apigian: 46:41 You know, and most public universities have a pretty large online component. Charlie Yielding: 46:48 Yeah, I'm thinking about high schools. Charlie Apigian: 46:49 Yeah, no, I'm just going to the four-year online component. Yeah, I'm thinking about high schools. Yeah, no, I'm just I'm going to the four-year education stuff. Yeah, I was surprised but now I'm not surprised that most private schools had almost no online presence. Oh, yeah. Unless it was intentional. But you know, the point of a lot of times a private university is to get an on-campus experience, so they were encouraging you to be on campus, yeah. Charlie Yielding: 47:19 And I saw some of that and not on the Belmont side, but I saw some of that with other universities here where their encouragement was like look, teacher, I know you're sick, but just put a mask on and come teach this class. Charlie Apigian: 47:32 Yeah, and so I in thinking about that now, we've now created bad education and and it's it's well, let me, let me change that. Charlie Yielding: 47:44 Yeah. Charlie Apigian: 47:45 Education is about more than delivery of skill-based information, right. So we all of a sudden lost that part. So I think our kids that missed that year, whatever they were with that COVID year, missed out on some of the education stuff. Maybe not the skills. Maybe they got more skills. Charlie Yielding: 48:07 I think it was the opposite. Charlie Apigian: 48:09 Do you think so? Do you think they stopped listening to the skills part or didn't have the ability to learn? Charlie Yielding: 48:15 it so with my kids. They didn't have the ability to teach the younger kids the skills that they needed because there's so much. I'm working directly. Charlie Apigian: 48:25 Yeah, yeah, yeah, the comprehension experience part was missing, but we know of, like, the Nashville Software School here in town. They went completely remote and haven't come back yeah, but they teach skills A lot of times. They take educated people and help them pivot into a new career yeah, and that's a great, great thing to do. Well, what do you need? You need skills. Charlie Yielding: 48:48 You need skills, but in their case you need. You need skills and skills, but you also like, in their case you need community too and they do a good job of creating community as well I have heard people say that pre-pandemic community was better than post-pandemic community well, yeah, but they were also full-time in person. Charlie Apigian: 49:03 Yeah, um, of course that's better, which is the dilemma. Charlie Yielding: 49:06 Yeah, it's like you. You you spent like because in their, in their, in the n, because in the NSS's case specifically, they got rid of space to help with overhead so they could educate these folks during the pandemic, and now to come back into person, they'd have to reinvest, like a significant amount of capital to be able to come back in person, just to rebuild the experience they had before. So they let go of something that's hard to pick back up. That's true. Charlie Apigian: 49:33 That is true, and once you make that commitment, it's so much easier to focus and on doing good there. Charlie Yielding: 49:39 Yeah, right, and so but I think universities, or some universities, have the opposite, like they didn't do enough remote, and then that requirement to come back has like it doesn't feel like it's either, or it feels like a blend is like maybe the way to go, like maybe you're we'll get into that later but so so, as far as like the uh to get back to what you're saying, so they are capable of teaching skills at in secondary education to remote students, but the overall education is suffering if you're just 100% remote. Charlie Apigian: 50:13 Sure, sure. I mean you know working in a team environment is different, like it's good that they're learning those skills, but we are not creating that same environment. That is a normal remote working environment. Yet Now some universities might be doing a better job than I know of, but if you're in a company and you're fully remote, you're utilizing Slack, you have all of these other things that's hard to do in a 15-week class, and then start it over and over and creating those bonds and stuff like that, or having the every week stand up. You have class, but you and then you're having class where. How engaged are you like for real, when you're sitting at home and somebody's just talking on the screen, versus if I'm in the classroom? Charlie Yielding: 50:59 Yeah, and we'll get into this when we start talking about the data. But

there's there are some people that thrive in that. They work their best, their best lives, are at home alone all day long, and I love them for that. But the majority of us are not good. That's right. We're not going to be proactive enough. We're not going to be like we need to be managed. Charlie Apigian: 51:18 And remember, you're talking about work and we're still talking, and it's education. No, no, no. Charlie Yielding: 51:22 Even in the education world, most people need to be managed and that's like did you do your homework, Did you do this other stuff? Like I'm checking on you and I'm going to be watching you because I know you need that help. Do you need to be managed, or do you? Charlie Apigian: 51:41 need a way to focus as somebody that is, is that not the same thing? Well, I don't need somebody to manage my focus, I need to focus, and what I mean by that is me at home with my three dogs is not an optimal place to focus. But if I go somewhere and that's why we were talking about coworking space earlier today I need that right now, and it's not going because I'm doing stuff that's not my university. I don't feel comfortable going there to do it Right so, but doing it at home, I lose focus. So it can be environment, it can be self-discipline, it can be an individual, or or it could be a manager over over you as well, but so so people do need to be managed or they need the environment to focus. Charlie Yielding: 52:27 Well, what I mean by managed is also in the education realm. Is is like the giving of the giving of work to make sure that you're keeping up with everything that you need to, to make sure that when you take that test, you get as good a grade as possible on that test and go ahead nobody. Charlie Apigian: 52:45 If people will say all the time, well, I'll just go on the internet and learn. Okay, learn what. One thing about education, if done right, is it takes you through a path that gives you the skills you need today for something you're going to learn tomorrow. Because it's standardized, that's right. And so we're teaching you statistics today so that you can take that analytics course in the future. That is really powerful. Charlie Apigian: 53:11 One of the problems that I ran into when I was trying to learn on my own, and what a lot of us do, is we go to what's cool and we don't have all of the background in it, and so we have a lot of holes in what we're learning. Charlie Apigian: 53:22 And so there's a lot of data science, people that learned a task. I mean, there's a ton of people in AI right now that are learning by whatever the cool new thing is and don't realize there is math behind that. There is a methodology, there's a reason you use certain techniques over others, but they've never had the chance to learn that. So, like somebody was with me yesterday and they're like well, you're going to use a neural network for that, and I'm like, no, I'm going to use logistic regression. It's not big enough to be a neural network, and so I went into everything. It's like I thought you use that neural network for everything and I'm like, no, there are times, yes, you do, but there's times you don't. And so how did I learn that it was through experience and good mentorship, or or, or you know a, a, a faculty member back in my PhD days or education. Charlie Apigian: 54:14 And it was education. Yeah, so when I say mentorship, I was talking about a professor in that case. Charlie Yielding: 54:19 So let me uh like one of the one of the analogies I used to use with uh coworkers, cause when, when somebody started, we put them through 16 weeks of training to make sure that they knew, we educated them on how to be a mobile expert. And the reason not the reason, the way I put it is just think about yourself like a piece of Swiss cheese. You've got gaps in your knowledge that you don't know about and whatnot, but when you put all the pieces of cheese together, you've got a solid block and you know. You know maybe a piece down here has a different hole than down here, but in the end you get the full coverage because you've got the ability to uh, to network your idea. And so is the important thing the networking of ideas, or is the important thing being in person when you're networking ideas? Charlie Apigian: 55:14 I think it's the networking of ideas. That's a great way of thinking of it, and you know I always call that the aha moments, the Swiss cheese moments. So you know, like a lot of people in the Excel world know… 30% of Excel, honestly right, and that's if you're really good, right. So every time I would teach them oh, I know how to do that, and they're like you can do that. And what's Power Pivot or whatever? The newest thing is that you can do with it, and so there's a lot of that out there. Charlie Apigian: 55:45 But I think that is education, is the ability to connect all of these different things you've learned and problem solve or do this other stuff. That takes time, that takes but it really just takes a hyper focus, which is years to get there of understanding what your real goal is. And so, if I'm going to bring it back to dilemma, goal is, and so if I'm going to bring it back to dilemma, so there's usually when I, when I think of dilemma stage of any data project and we're using that methodology here, the dilemma to me is understanding my audience. It is understanding the real goal that we're trying to achieve, cause I haven't, I can't measure it yet, cause I don't know what data I have. Um, at the ideation stage, I also always care about the pain point for people. So my audience, what's their pain point? And then you get into limiters or opportunities. So we just have limiters lack of resources, lack of people that can teach or whatever it is. There is a limitation, limiters to our education process. Charlie Yielding: 56:56 So I like the example of the good professor. So a

limiter of pre-pandemic college was access to professors that are willing to move to your city, and last time I checked, half the universities, if not more, are in boring cities. Charlie Apigian: 57:15 Very much so yeah yeah, half. Charlie Yielding: 57:18 It's a lot more than that. So the first time I came across that concept was actually when I was up in BDSU and they called the-. Charlie Apigian: 57:26 Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, ohio, my alma mater, my undergraduate degree go Falcons, yeah. Charlie Yielding: 57:34 Heck, yeah, with that awesome brown and orange. Brown and orange I hated that. So the folks there refer to the locals as townies, sure, and so that's because there ain't much to it. And so if you've got a brilliant professor and you're trying to bring her across the country to this place that has townies but she wants a bit of the city life, then what are you going to? What are you going to do? You're just not going to get her, and then you're going to have to go for your second choice, whereas the pandemic and this, you know, this new way of thinking, could open up different choices, and and so I. So I just don't want to make it seem like it's all bad. There's definitely silver linings to the current dilemma that education is facing, yeah, but it takes a mindset change to be able to achieve that stuff. Charlie Apigian: 58:23 Yeah, and you know, today's not about solutions. Yeah, but my mind always wants to go there, absolutely but my mind always wants to go there. And as you said that you know there's a lot of I'll use a low, you know, even just Tennessee Tech, it's in Cookville, tennessee. Without that university there, there's no Cookville, you know, or it's not the same. You know, knoxville for University of Tennessee. In Knoxville, that university is what is the life of that town. Middle Tennessee State University is the largest employer in Murfreesboro. Charlie Yielding: 59:00 Yeah, and Starkville is the same way for Mississippi. Charlie Apigian: 59:02 State, oh gosh, yeah, and so you have a lot of that and that's good, bad and different, but there's a lot to that in the fact of you want local people. The whole point of a university, a public university, is to educate your community so they can be brought up. That's a public university approach. Charlie Yielding: 59:27 That's their mission statement, right, right. Charlie Apigian: 59:29 I mean literally Middle Tennessee State University, where I used to work. Their job is to educate Middle Tennessee, and a lot of times that's not Nashville, it's the surrounding areas of Nashville, and I think Middle Tennessee did a great job of that. It wasn't maybe the same experience you'd get at a private university that could offer 50 different events every night, but for a quarter of the price, or actually even less than that, you got a pretty good education for a job in your region. Charlie Yielding:

1:00:04 Yeah, I think most of the natives I know either went to MTSU or they went to WKU. Charlie Apigian: 1:00:13 Yeah. Charlie Yielding: 1:00:13 But Western Kentucky University is the same kind of situation. Absolutely, it's meant to educate Western Kentucky. That's right. If we go north from here, that's basically Western Kentucky. Charlie Apigian: 1:00:22 That's why there's directional schools, right. It's like, literally, they're talking about the location that they're, and it is and it is, uh managed by the state government public universities. So there will not be another university that comes down to murfreesboro. That's public. Because why would you, why would you do that and steal from you, know, your current store? Right, because that's like having a store. The thing that's, though, is they're still all independent and they're competitors. Charlie Yielding: 1:00:54 Of course they're competitors. Charlie Apigian: 1:00:55 You know, so we get. We're now at this point where knowledge can be disseminated more standardized. Charlie Yielding: 1:01:05 In standardized ways, but you get way more options as well. Charlie Apigian: 1:01:08 Way more options, and there is, I know one, at least one good person in every state that can teach a topic right. All right, I want to learn from them. I don't want to learn from the person, at whichever school. Charlie Yielding: 1:01:20 I want to learn from the best. You want the best education. You want it. Charlie Apigian: 1:01:23 I want delivery of knowledge from the best person that does that, and I think I can get that through an online environment, but I will take somebody local to help reinforce that, to help manage it, to be a facilitator. See where I'm going now, and so now I didn't want to go to solution, but what I'm trying to get to is can we think different about our education space, knowing that knowledge can be delivered differently, but experiences sometimes still have to be in? Charlie Yielding: 1:01:51 person you know, and we have our cake and eat it too. Charlie Apigian: 1:01:54 Yeah, yeah. And this idea of a masterclass with reinforcement locally, is, is, is has been rattling in my mind for a while. So I know we're not supposed to go solution today, but but it allows. Here's why you talk solution though you don't. You don't start with solution, but thinking of possible solutions helps you frame your dilemma. Charlie Yielding: 1:02:14 Yeah, yeah. Charlie Apigian: 1:02:14 And so you know what's the real pain point. The pain point is but what is the real pain point? It's better to ask you You've got kids coming up through the system right now If you were to say what is your main like, what really riles you about the educational process for your kids as they move up? Charlie Yielding: 1:02:33 Which level. Charlie Apigian: 1:02:35 All the way through undergrad degree? Let's not. Why don't we

talk graduate stuff today? Charlie Yielding: 1:02:40 So it's just a secondary. Well, the high school stuff is like High school through college. That's a department education thing. That's a government and politics type thing. Not that government and politics don't play a role in universities, but universities are more businesslike and independent in their transactions and whatnot. So my my thing, like my biggest concern right now, is that I feel like schools are working against their students' best interests financially and and I think that they're like look guys, we've got this stuff and we need you to come to it, like we, you know, meaning we've got this campus and we need you to come to it, even though it's going to cost you more money and it might keep you from getting the best education, like you were just referencing. Charlie Yielding: 1:03:22 Because what am I going to do? Am I going to and this happened a lot during the pandemic in the business world Am I going to come to school to do remote calls? Charlie Apigian: 1:03:30 Yeah. Charlie Yielding: 1:03:31 Like is that what you want me to do? Come sit in the classroom and do a remote thing with a teacher, just so we can be in the same classroom. That teacher is who facilitates the community in the group or in the room. Now, not having that, having said that, we'll get into more of the solutions Like do you have a local facilitator, but then the education is coming from this premier mind or whatever. Charlie Apigian: 1:03:50 And that actually. So, before I left MTSU, I proposed a data science curriculum for K through 12. And that was the proposal. The proposal was to create facilitators with a master content that I would create for high school teachers to be able to teach data science. And the state bought it, and we got $2.6 million, and then I left, and so, boy, I wish I would have done that. I really wish I would have had the opportunity to create that master class that could have then allowed the track coach to teach data science right, because I would be teaching them asynchronous. And then their job is to make sure that the students are doing the exercises, that when they do have a question, they have the ability to get an answer. They don't have to know it. That's where we keep failing is. We are still wanting teachers that know everything and, as a professor, developers, yeah, and I'm good not knowing everything as a professor these days. Charlie Yielding: 1:05:00 You shouldn't. You should have an area of expertise. I mean, like you know in elementary school and stuff like that. It's like you can know everything because you don't have to go deep. That's right. But then at some point you've got to go so deep that maybe two disciplines is working, but three is too much. And from a high school student perspective, I think we typically do a good job of breaking out the specific skill sets. But we're also. Charlie Yielding: 1:05:25 My biggest concern when it comes to my kids' education in high school is that they're unseen. We've got the teachers working so hard that they can't like they might as well not be in person because they're not getting that education. That's a good point. And so my son's fourth grade year that was his year after the pandemic and he just had a burnt-out teacher. I felt so bad for her because she worked so hard for two years and every single time she turned around she was just getting another slap. Charlie Yielding: 1:05:57 And what I mean by that is it's like hey, here's this other thing that you need to do. Hey, here's this other thing that you need to do. So she had all the ESL kids. She had a classroom full of children that were just in her classroom all day long. All the other teachers got a break, like they got to switch subjects, they got to switch classrooms and all this other kind of stuff, and then for her all day, every day was just the same. Let's run her down to a nub type situation and then she is like at the last, you know the last semester, we'll call it. She was just checked out. Charlie Apigian: 1:06:27 Yeah, and so you just brought up one of the biggest problems in the k-12 space burnout not burnout. Charlie Apigian: 1:06:34 Burnout happens because of and um. So the goal of a teacher is to educate their kids. We don't have a good way of uh measuring that, so we came up with a standardized way. You know where I'm going now to measure it, and that standardized way missed the mark. I'm sorry it misses the mark it does. I don't think there's any standardized test that will be able to measure right now what the real goal is, which is an education. Charlie Yielding: 1:07:07 Do you know what the deal is right now with TCAP and third graders? Charlie Apigian: 1:07:10 Yes, and it's a huge, huge problem. But go ahead, and people outside of our state are going to be shocked. Charlie Yielding: 1:07:17 So TCAP is the standardized testing for the state of Tennessee. That's right. So the pandemic happened. And to address slippage, what they said, or what they being the Department of Education, the board, whatever it is they said that since we can't measure how good the students are doing, we're going to up it. And so ELA is English Languages Arts. It's just what you call English, now, yep, so in English the kids have to get a better than average score to not take summer school. Charlie Apigian: 1:07:46 Better than average means that that's less than 50%, though right, that's technically what a distribution of that is. Yes, they're passing, they're better than. How does that happen? But go ahead. Charlie Yielding: 1:08:00 So it's equivalent to making a C on a test and then being counted as failed yeah, counting as failed. And so one of the big things that the teachers and again I feel so bad for them and the administrators had to deal with last year is the state's like hey, this is happening.

Charlie Apigian: 1:08:16 Yeah. Charlie Yielding: 1:08:18 And you've got to tell all your students. And so what a lot of school districts did is they said, hey, administrators, tell your student population. And then the administrators were like, hey, teachers, tell your people. And I talked to a teacher from a rural school and she said that they were forbade from bringing it up until it happened. Wow and a lot of kids went to summer school. Charlie Apigian: 1:08:41 Most kids, most third graders. So there's a reason why third grade and we may have mentioned this before, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna reiterate it so at the end of third grade is pretty much the end of your education, where you don't have to know how to read, so in, so you learn to read up to third grade and then you read to learn, starting in fourth grade. Um, so that idea we hear it all the time it's actually they're doing this because of a data thing If you can't read in third grade, you are more likely not to graduate, and that's like. The number one indicator of future success is third grade reading, and it makes sense now if you think of it that way. So they're harping on it. So they have now taken that one data point and changed everything Changed. Charlie Yielding: 1:09:35 an entire policy for an entire state, off of one data point. Charlie Apigian: 1:09:38 One data point. Charlie Yielding: 1:09:39 And it's not even a good data point. Charlie Apigian: 1:09:41 It's one of many that lead to success. Charlie Yielding: 1:09:45 Well, it's not a good standalone, but so the criteria that they're measuring is you have to be above average, just to be normal now. Charlie Apigian: 1:09:51 Yeah. So the criteria that they're measuring is you have to be above average just to be normal. Now, yeah, and that, yeah. So that is. That's a great example of it's missing the goal, and too often in education we try well, it is our job to get everybody educated. We want everybody to get a high school degree and to do that you have to have standards, but it's so hard to figure out standards, even for, I mean, administrators that have been doing it forever. You are, you are taking every possible uh uh person and and and life and every situation and trying to get them, them to a certain level is really hard. And I believe, if you think about this, if you could standardize the knowledge part, even, you know if you could stay home two days. Now we want people to go to school because it's great daycare right A lot of times, I mean you're not lying. Charlie Apigian: 1:10:47 Well, I mean, it literally is daycare for us. But if you could learn online two days a week and then facilitate two days a week, I still think that would be a better education than five days a week in a school. I mean, the truth is, especially your last year you waste most of the time that you're in school. You're going between classes, you get to class you got to set up and then you're there for, uh, 50 minutes. How much of that is real learning in those 50 minutes? Charlie Yielding: 1:11:25 well per class, right? Yeah, I remember in high school 50 minutes lasting a lot longer than it actually does, and so it seemed like a long, long time for me, but then I've also tried to teach things things in 50 minutes. It's impossible. Charlie Apigian: 1:11:40 We can't even do a 50 minute podcast on like anything that's right, um, and because you start, you have to ramp down, and that means you only have about 35 minutes to actually learn something, and then mikey in the background is acting up and you get completely off track and all of a sudden you're down to 20 minutes of actual learning time, and so you can see how it's not the conducive environment that we want. Now, again, I don't. We today is about talking about the dilemma. So we are negative because we're trying to identify a problem, but these are things that we anecdotally see, and now we want to go back it up with data in the future episode. Charlie Yielding: 1:12:19 So a part of the next one, or my takeaways from this one, are how can we have our cake, which was remote learning, and eat it too, which is, you know, checkups, whatnot? It's the same reason we're talking about working together in a shared space is because we would work like just being together in the same space, even though we're working on separate things, is conducive to to a better product in the end, because I'm like, hey, what do you think about this? And it's, two minds are just better than one. Charlie Apigian: 1:12:48 That's just how it works, I mean most of the time, two minds are just better than one. That's just how it works. Always, Always, I mean most of the time two minds are better. Well, I'm always better talking out an idea, yeah, and so for some reason, Squish these days is not responding to me talking about data, and that's my English bulldog. Charlie Yielding: 1:13:02 To be honest, she doesn't look like she would come up with a lot of bright ideas Squish is smart Frank, on the other hand. Charlie Apigian: 1:13:09 come on now. Charlie Yielding: 1:13:10 That's more of like judging a book by its cover. Let me finish, then. The second piece is with primary education. Like, I feel like the politics behind the TCAP scores and stuff like that aside, how do we grow our teacher base in a quality way that induces the type of education that you're talking about, rather than the skill sets? Because, like I want my, I want my kids to have a math teacher in high school that explains, that, educates them on math, rather than teaches them how to do uh, you know, like, uh, how to set up a parabola, or like what's right, cosine and tangent are. I want them to say, hey, all of these graphs and stuff that we're dealing with is math for physical space. You see that curve out there. There is a number that's associated with that curve and in that

curve there's a pressure point and all this other type of stuff. I feel like that's more just opening them up to the concepts that math isn't just sets of equations that you stack up until one day you're like I know math. Charlie Apigian: 1:14:15 Yeah, I think you grow the teacher base by shrinking it. Charlie Yielding: 1:14:21 I don't disagree with that, and that'll be a part of the interesting thing that we're going to be talking about next time is, like how many quality teachers do we need that teach data science? Charlie Apigian: 1:14:32 Yeah? Or do you only have to say that you know it's as simple as math, right? And so if you were to say how many people are teaching math because they're a coach at the school and they need a job, versus people that absolutely have more physical science? Charlie Yielding: 1:14:47 Yeah, not the college physical science. Charlie Apigian: 1:14:49 I will say my no, he was a history teacher. Some of the best teachers I had were my coaches, by the way, or coaches, I should say. Charlie Yielding: 1:14:56 So I should not say that coaches are bad teachers, my coaches, the coaches that taught me in high school were bad teachers. Charlie Apigian: 1:15:02 Well, I can go back to Mr Chrissy at Plymouth Canton High School who was a baseball coach and was the best best history teacher I ever had. He would tell stories that he was a storyteller, really, really good, and he would come behind you because I was one of his students and he would grab your shoulders and just give you a little bit, like you know. He would engage you and I was like, oh, and of course it didn't hurt, but and it was not, it was not abuse, but he, you know. So I have great fond memories of certain ones. But there's definitely teachers that are uninspired because they get into it for the right reasons, like everybody right, and then they're teaching to a test. Charlie Yielding: 1:15:45 They just finally realize it's not for them right and in some situations it's like, hey, this student's just not getting it, and then the administrator administration at the school's like too bad, pass them yeah and I think the pressure to know it all is not fair, like oh, no all to know all yeah and so, so maybe you're growing the teacher base by enhancing their toolkit, and that's where data and AI and all of these other sources you know in the past, like Code Academy is a great or Khan Academy they're both really good out there. Charlie Apigian: 1:16:21 They're really good now. Charlie Yielding: 1:16:23 They're structured remote learning, but you still don't get the community though. Charlie Apigian: 1:16:26 But I would be happy if that was used in a classroom environment and then when there is a question, you can get it answered, because now we're to that point where I should be able to ask why can't I get this to work? And it would not only show you where it's wrong, but it will tell you why

it's wrong, and then that teacher over time will get good at that and instead of teacher why is this wrong? And they'll be like I don't know, because it's really hard to look at code for somebody else. Charlie Yielding: 1:16:55 Well, you're hitting on the elephant in the room as well, because AI is a thing now and domain specific AI is something that you've been interested in. And what's to say that the best you know, that best remote teacher isn't domain specific ai, that then the, the facilitator in the room, uses to teach the class, and maybe it's accompanied with some materials, if you will, you know, like some videos and stuff. So I feel like the not only are we talking about these dilemmas, but it feels like you're working towards what that future model should look like yeah, I I do do believe the future of artificial intelligence is a mixture of experts. Charlie Apigian: 1:17:36 It is smaller, efficient, large language models that work together, and so the idea is what if you had an AI teacher in all of these different disciplines, that could talk to each other too, right? So if you're asking a physics question, that's really a math question. It can bring that part in. And so this idea is it's not going to happen this year, but we are moving more towards that. The way I look at it is if I had a room of 50 individuals, would I want that room to have 49 dumb people and one really smart, or would I rather have 50 pretty intelligent people that all communicated very well together? Charlie Yielding: 1:18:23 That doesn't seem like it's a decision that even takes a second to. Charlie Apigian: 1:18:28 But that is literally what we're thinking when it comes to large language models. One large language model is not going to solve everybody's problem. But what if you had 50 that were domain specific? That there's going to be one engine? That's the the logic of how. Yeah, that does all of that, but then, um, because then what happens when there's a 51st discipline? Do I have to retrain that model? That costs a half billion dollars? Can I fine tune it? But then I'm fine, you know so. Or can I add it as another? Charlie Yielding: 1:19:01 AI. Charlie Apigian: 1:19:14 Well, I mean, it's a modular approach to AI approach. Now taking that to education, there is no reason why any student should not have almost like a digital twin available to them at all times so they have something to ask a question. The best thing you can do for education is instant feedback, and we now have the ability to have it, and we're struggling with how to use that. Charlie Yielding: 1:19:29 So you know, GPT has like a talkback feature and so I've talked to it and used it as education on small subjects, where I just like it'll tell me something and then I'll ask all the questions I have, just like it'll tell me something and then I'll ask, I just ask all the questions I have. And then I felt like each time I've done that, at the end

of the conversation I feel like I know more and I'm not asking it like metaphysical concepts or anything like that or questions. I'm more like how does this thing happen? How does that thing happen? And it's filling me in on the holes. You know the holes in my Swiss cheese, yeah, All right, so we're at about 120 ish. Charlie Apigian: 1:20:10 Um, let's recap what a what dilemma we have, uh, talked about today, and, and obviously, education is a data problem right now. Um, it is, and, and so this is a data crisis in education. Um, it's an inflection point, is what it really is. Whether it's a crisis or not, we have done okay up to now, but the game is changing. Charlie Yielding: 1:20:34 Yeah, a new and better way to educate is coming it has to, and so everybody has to be open to the fact that that's going to happen. Charlie Yielding: 1:20:40 That that's going to happen because just in the, just in the state of Tennessee, we have to educate every single teacher from third grade up on uh technology and data, because in the year 2028, every student that would have graduated at that point has had some sort of comp side data science class in high school. And there. But right now we don't have people to teach it because the people that can teach the coding, the computer science and all that type of stuff, they just go get jobs where they make twice, two, three times as much. Charlie Apigian: 1:21:10 Oh, of course, and as long as those jobs are out there, you're not going to get a domain specific teacher in the tech field consistently at every high school in every state across the country. So we have. It is amazing how I keep saying this and I'm like we can't assume the old system will work for the new environment we're in and all you hear is how do we get more teachers? How do we get more teachers? I'm like I've been hearing it for 20 years we're not going to get more new teachers in highly technical, highly sought after skills. But can we create facilitators? You know that might be different. So we are starting to see this idea of you know what that could look like if there was a way to disseminate that information. Charlie Yielding: 1:22:03 Well, I haven't seen how you teach your classes to disseminate that information. Well, I haven't seen how you teach your classes. I feel like you play both roles effectively, because you create the materials for your students to ingest on their own and then, when they come to class, that's your instant feedback. I'm not going to spend my time teaching you the concept, that's right. I'm going to be answering, or I mean you are, but you're not explaining it to them point blank. In the moment. You're not wasting that time, that interpersonal time, just going over stuff that they can learn online, that you're taking that time to use the individualized approach to educating that student and then that student over there and then just the class at large, because you're communicating with

them, you're hearing what they have to say, and that's what a facilitator could be, more than just somebody talking at a classroom. Charlie Apigian: 1:22:49 Yeah, most teachers are caring, and you think about this. Out of 10 people, how many of them are good on camera? Charlie Yielding: 1:22:57 Maybe one. Charlie Apigian: 1:22:58 Okay, I feel I'm that one Like I'm good on I do okay with video. I've been doing online classes since 2005. There's still many classes at my former university right now where people are hearing my voice. I can make videos that teach people. I've been doing it for a while, yeah. What about the other nine? Why are they creating the videos then? Right, because they have to, and they have to and they're told to, and so my son right now has a class where he can't understand the professor. Charlie Apigian: 1:23:31 My wife had that with one of her physics teachers, yeah, and it's like they should be getting something from me or somebody else that can communicate really well. And, by the way, in the classroom, my son loves this guy and he's caring and he'll spend extra time with them, but then he has to watch videos from him and he's like I don't know what he's saying, and that's just not fair. He has a terrible mic. Why should he have to go buy these beautiful mics Like you know? He shouldn't. You know? It's not fair to the teacher to become a videographer. Charlie Yielding: 1:24:04 Well, that's, but that's the same motif that we've been talking about. It's not fair to the teacher to require them to be everything all at once. Charlie Apigian: 1:24:11 That's a great point. Charlie Yielding: 1:24:12 Especially when we're not going to pay them to be everything all at once. Charlie Apigian: 1:24:15 So that's part of the dilemma then. So, if we go back to the dilemma, the audience is still those that are educated through a traditional space, and whether it's K-, 12 or K through undergrad, it's all of those components. I then think about that pain point. A lot of the pain point still comes to me. It's a misalignment between a goal and the objective or the measurable objective. Charlie Yielding: 1:24:40 Well, you get on this all the time. It's like I'll say what my goal is and you're like that's not a goal. Charlie Apigian: 1:24:45 That's not a goal. Yeah, yeah, it's because it's not you just say it the same way. Charlie Yielding: 1:24:48 you always say it, I do. That's not a goal. Charlie Apigian: 1:24:50 Yeah, and I got to get better at that, because I keep making people defensive when I say things like that, but people will tell me all the time. I've got some major examples on that. We'll use for another episode, but I think that's a component of it. Now we understand there's definitely some resource limiters, but there's also some major opportunities now with AI and other technologies. So there's opportunities that we see. We do see the resource limiters. We understand the pain points. There's also pain points for the teacher. Charlie Yielding: 1:25:23 Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So the teachers are required to know everything all at once. Administrators are trying to figure all this out, while in some cases, again, they're working against the student's best interest, because they require the student to fit an antiquated model. And so that's you know. Charlie Apigian: 1:25:40 And to add to the teacher part, I bet you the teacher knows what that student needs to get educated, but they're told to do something different. Charlie Yielding: 1:25:48 Yeah, it's like we had a conversation earlier this week with a guy who did quality control at a manufacturer and there's two different ways to think about it. Like the QC engineer, people know best and the line worker doesn't know anything, and then the other. The other way is the line worker sees the machine and knows the machine, and so the person doing pushing the pencil in the background doesn't know anything, when the reality is it's a bit of both yep it's a, it's a mixture of knowing the person working and doing the job, which is the teacher, and then the people administering the job, which is the admin staff. Charlie Yielding: 1:26:26 like they have to get together in a way that that doesn't seem like they work together right now and in the situations where you and I have talked, it very much seems like they're at odds because there there's like a, there there's a lot of inter, there's a lot of politics in it that I would and and you know it's it's almost like saying centralized versus decentralized. Charlie Apigian: 1:26:47 you know kind of approaches and so you get that in a lot of different environments. But yeah, I 100%. I feel sorry, mostly for the teacher. Now I know a lot of teachers. Every one of them has an amazing heart, but every one of them feels burned out and overwhelmed. Charlie Yielding: 1:27:08 I hate that. I hate that some of the most important people in our society are treated like second-class employees. Charlie Apigian: 1:27:16 Well, think about this. I'm going to cut your pay by, let's say, 60% by, let's say 60% and to get ready for the next day, you have to stay after and write your plans to be ready for the next day. Oh, the thing that gets me. And, by the way, you want anything Go buy it yourself. Charlie Yielding: 1:27:36 That's the piece that gets me more than anything. It's like, hey, you want to decorate your room or no, no, not. Hey, you want to decorate your room. You've got to decorate your room and get it ready for the kids, but with no money. Yeah, go get your own materials, or you can solicit parents for materials and that's also on you. Charlie Apigian: 1:27:53 Well, that's always the case now, and luckily there's a lot of parents that are willing to help out. Charlie Yielding: 1:27:58 Yeah, but that's not always the case. That's how

you get these schools that are like parents make the difference in an elementary school and then in high school too. But elementary and middle schools, 100 percent. That's a good point. Like parental participation gets the teachers so much further so. So like my wife is always a room parent and so she brings work home and we're literally like like tearing pieces out of a math book and making a 10 page little thing that the kids are working on. Tearing pieces out of a math book and making a 10 page little thing that the kids are working on. It took me and her, it took she and I, uh, two hours to do that one thing. Charlie Yielding: 1:28:33 And if we didn't do, it the teacher had to do it, and if it took us two hours it would have taken her four hours, and she can't do that during school hours. Charlie Apigian: 1:28:38 Yeah, and then. Then you add in all of the parent uh problems, or that you add into that. Charlie Yielding: 1:28:46 Oh my God, you know, there's a reason. I'm not a teacher. Charlie Apigian: 1:28:48 Yeah. Charlie Yielding: 1:28:49 Like a teacher in school. Charlie Apigian: 1:28:50 I'll tell you, professors are a lot easier than K through 12,. You know, because they're adults, you're not convincing me about that. Well, I've had issues lately. Yeah, that's a good point, that's okay, all right. I feel we I have a lot better idea of the dilemma after this conversation than I did at the beginning. Charlie Yielding: 1:29:09 And so now, as far as the uh, the data mindset model goes, we're going to go find the data and see what the data says. We don't have an like. Our outcome is to to maintain education in a way that fits in the new uh, the new way of looking at things. But right now we're in the data discovery. Charlie Apigian: 1:29:30 We're moving into data discovery Now. Data discovery can be more than just go find data. It could be go find good use cases where they're doing it right, and that would probably be like Switzerland or Sweden. There's other-. Charlie Yielding: 1:29:42 Determine how good it is, based off the data coming from it. Charlie Apigian: 1:29:45 That's true. There has to be a metric that we have identified. I also think we need to, but, but because of the dilemma that we've identified, it's more than one metric. It's it, you know. Yes, there's student metrics that we can look at, but now, what is? What is? What is the going rate for a teacher? You know what is so? There's aspects are how many open positions are there? Charlie Yielding: 1:30:10 Well, there's going to be a lot of good information on that, because just in the United States, there have been several states that have set minimum wages for teachers. Tennessee is, surprisingly, one of them. Wow, but it's not what it should be. Yeah, and I want to say it's either. It's one of those West Coast states that I think they set a minimum teacher salary at $70,000. Wow, and I would imagine that they've got a few more people ready to educate than we do here. I want to say that they set ours to $45,000 or $50,000. Charlie Apigian: 1:30:39 Which is a lot better than I would think it is. Charlie Yielding: 1:30:41 Just having a floor Like Tennessee surprises me in some ways and doesn't in others, because we're traditionally a conservative state, which means that we don't want to spend money on public programs. Yeah, and so Department of Education is a public program. That's why we've got this whole voucher mess that we've got going on right now. Charlie Apigian: 1:30:58 Sure. Charlie Yielding: 1:30:58 Or not, but it I lost my train of thought. Charlie Apigian: 1:31:06 Well, we've been paying teachers, but part of the way you can't just up everybody's salary, right, because that is a huge cost. But can you be more mindful of who are your teachers and make sure that you have teachers that are teachers and pay them? Charlie Yielding: 1:31:24 Yeah. Charlie Apigian: 1:31:24 And then have facilitators. There could be different rules there and then what is the best way to deliver content and knowledge and what is the best way to create an education? Those are two complementary things, but not the same thing. Charlie Yielding: 1:31:40 Yeah, I think that if you're teaching a high school biology class, that the state, every, every single classroom in the state, should have access to the best biology curricula and videos and all that type of stuff, and then the in-room facilitator goes off of that. Charlie Apigian: 1:31:55 Does the labs and everything and make sure you don't blow anything up. Charlie Yielding: 1:31:59 Right, right, Now, if you want to, yeah, and that puts that takes a lot of stress off of the the the room to have all of that extra stuff too, because right now they just have to do everything all at once. And it's just too much. Charlie Apigian: 1:32:12 So next one in the data crisis will focus on data discovery and then, after the data discovery, we will focus on solutions that are based on Charlie and Charlie. It'll be our personal opinions, not our professional ones, but it will be based on data and a dilemma, and we will do our best to do our due diligence in the data discovery phase of that. I think we've spent enough time on this dilemma. Charlie Yielding: 1:32:41 I believe so. Charlie Apigian: 1:32:42 I really want to thank again the Nashville Technology Council for this wonderful facility and if you're interested in the course, I believe so. But if you want to know more about us, we are dataforallio and you can get all of the information you need, and please subscribe on your favorite podcast and on YouTube for us and for the Data for All podcast. I'm Charlie Apegian. Charlie Yielding: 1:33:16 You didn't ask me if I was done yet. I know, but this time I'm not done. Okay, you forgot something. What did I forget? You forgot charlieapegiancom. Charlie Apigian: 1:33:24 Yes, I do have charlieapigiancom and I have a fancy picture of me up there. Charlie Yielding: 1:33:29 Do you have the ability to sign up for consulting there? Charlie Apigian: 1:33:32 You have the ability to connect with me directly. Charlie Yielding: 1:33:35 And that's where it starts, right now, right. Charlie Apigian: 1:33:37 That is the funnel. Charlie Yielding: 1:33:38 Yes. So if you're an executive out there and you're wanting to grow your vocabulary and understanding of data and how it relates to business intelligence and AI, go to charlieapigiancom and reach out to him. Charlie Apigian: 1:33:53 Thank you so much for that, charlie, and thank you for this incredible conversation. It's meaningful. It's meaningful to talk about data we're getting somewhere and education, and so again, I'm Charlie Apigian. Charlie Yielding: 1:34:05 And I'm Charlie Yielding. Charlie Apigian: 1:34:08 And until next time.