Teachers Allan Cameron (left), and Fredi Lajvardi (right), pose with Televise Foundation’s Alejandro Villanueva at the afterparty for the Los Angeles Premiere of “Spare Parts” on Thursday, January 8, 2015. Todd Williamson/Invision/Pantelion FIlms/AP
Fredi Lajvardi and Allan Cameron have 54 years of high school teaching experience between them. They are the celebrated creators of a student robotics program at Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, where roughly 80 percent of the student population lives below the poverty line. Many are undocumented and speak limited English. Despite the odds, the two teachers turned the robotics team into a powerhouse, winning state and national championships and garnering more than $1 million in scholarships for students.
Yet Lajvardi and Cameron are deeply concerned about the state of American secondary education. Teachers, they say, are stymied by bureaucracy and confounded by rigid curricula optimized to produce better test results, not better students.
Lajvardi and Cameron first came to national prominence in 2005, when I wrote about their 2004 robotics team. That story provided the basis for my book, Spare Parts and a Hollywood film by the same name. On the eve of the film’s Friday, I spoke with Lajvardi and Cameron about their experience and what it says about the future of education.
WIRED: How did you come up with the idea of building complex robots at a school where kids need basic math and writing help?
Lajvardi: The kids were bored. That has far reaching implications. They dropped out or learned little because they weren’t finding anything interesting at school.
Cameron: Most kids think school is a lot of work, you get yelled at, it’s regimented. What Fredi and I did with the robotics club wasn’t school. We were just doing something that was a lot of fun.
WIRED: Impoverished immigrants usually enter the workforce on the bottom rung. You’re trying to subvert that. Is it working?
Lajvardi: It better. Machines are going to take those jobs eventually. At McDonalds, there’ll be a tablet for your order and a conveyor belt will bring you your hamburger so those jobs are basically gone. You want to be the person designing the machines.
WIRED: But many of the kids at Carl Hadyen are undocumented and can’t get those kinds of professional jobs. Are you selling them false hope?
Lajvardi poses with George Lopez at the Los Angeles Premiere of “Spare Parts” on Thursday, January 8, 2015. In the film, Lopez plays a character named Fredi Cameron, an amalgamation of the two teachers. Todd Williamson/Invision/Pantelion Films/AP
Lajvardi: Schools across America invest an enormous amount of resources in sports. We help foster the idea that if these kids put in the time and effort, they’re going to have a shot at the NBA or the NFL. That’s the real false hope. The odds against that happening are so astronomical, it baffles me why we pour resources into it. At the end of the day, we end up with kids who are really good at running and catching balls. How does that move us forward as a country?
Cameron: But imagine what would happen if you put those resources into engineering programs? At Carl Hayden over the past decade, robotics team members have received at least twice as many scholarships compared to the school’s athletes. Now even if those engineering students have a legal problem getting a job here, they still have a skill set that is valuable anywhere in the world.
WIRED: You guys have been really successful building an after-school robotics program. Has that bought you room to innovate in your regular classes?
Lajvardi: For every minute I teach right now I’m required to have a script of what I’m going to do. If I have some inspiration during class, and an evaluator catches it, I get marked down. Nowhere in that evaluation do they talk about whether the kids are interested or whether the teacher has a good rapport with the kids.
Cameron: We’re trying to satisfy the superintendent or the principal. Which means we can’t truly focus on the students. It’s completely backwards. The student’s satisfaction and engagement should be the foundation of the system.
WIRED: What would that look like?
Cameron: First, I’d get rid of all the departments. You wouldn’t have a math class or a chemistry class or an English class anymore.
Lajvardi: The learning would be organized around projects, like in robotics. Sometimes they’re learning computation, sometimes they’re doing things with their hands, sometimes they’re organizing stuff, sometimes they’re doing math. I would make it more student-centered and less state-centered.
WIRED: Are schools are willing to adapt?
Allan Cameron. courtesy Allan Cameron
Cameron: No. Everyone will tell you individually that you’re doing a wonderful job. But the next thing they’ll tell you is “This is how I’m evaluating you.” And anything that’s out of the norm gets you marked down. There are all these education reforms out there but none of them address how to realistically motivate the students.
WIRED: Part of the bureaucracy is based on the idea that every kid needs to know fundamentals, like math or the history of the United States. Isn’t that a good thing?
Lajvardi: Dumping information on kids so they can pass a test in a matter of weeks achieves nothing. It may make administrators and politicians feel good but it serves no long-term goal. What’s worse is that the data suggests that what we’ve been teaching for the last 20 years isn’t relevant in an information economy.
Cameron: We need to rethink our entire approach. Instead of requiring kids to remember things that they can look up on Google, we need to teach them how to work with people, how to solve real world problems, how to build things, how to innovate.
Lajvardi: We need to cut way back on the content we’re required to cover and focus on the skills kids need.
WIRED: What if a kid was really interested in robots and all they wanted to learn about was robots?
Cameron: Great! Because they’re going to have to do presentations. They’re going to read and do research. Maybe they have to go find financing. You get them interested in something and learning happens.
Lajvardi: A classroom needs to be a reflection of what’s going on in society if it’s going to be relevant to the kids. If YouTube is big, use YouTube in your classroom. Snapchat, Vines, bitcoin, lets them use it all. Kids already live in that world so we need to pull our heads out of the sand and start teaching things that reflect reality.
WIRED: For the past 15 years, you guys have spent a lot of time every day coaching the robotics team. Have you been compensated for that work?
Cameron: The school district never paid me for helping the robotics team. Actually, my wife and I donated money to the team every year.
Lajvardi: About six years ago, I started getting 50 percent of what the cross-country coach makes. That’s about $240 a month.
WIRED: What could WIRED readers do to help you?
Lajvardi: Elect school board members who aren’t so focused on test metrics.
Cameron: I think it would be really great if professionals around the country volunteered to help after school robotics programs. It would give kids an opportunity to see where these skills lead and be inspired by real people, whether you’re an engineer or are good a presentations or whatever.
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