Every once in a while, a special person enters your life. That is what happened to me when I met Jami.
Jami's life and professional experiences have been very different from mine. But we quickly found that we shared the same Audacious Aspiration - to reimagine education.
Jamie is one of the most courageous people I have ever met. She needs to be, in order to drive change in a system defined to control.
We began to meet together, through a Hangout, once a week. These meetings would start at 7:15 in the morning and would often stretch over an hour. I learned more deeply about her world as an educator and she learned about my world as a technologist. We found our worlds had different vocabularies; I learned her's and she learned mine.
Over time, we dubbed these sessions our "Innovation Therapy" - a time that we could come together and, in a trusting friendship, explore new ideas.
We started talking about how we might test this learning experience in a core class. She wanted to first pilot something in math. Dayton had some of the lowest math scores in the county.
Jami knew that the confidence that a student has in their math skills directly impacted their graduation prospects. And that math, more than any other academic area, has left many adults scarred by shame.
So we dived into our next experiment.
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