Hello and welcome to the Designing with Love podcast. I am your host, Jackie Pelegrin, where my goal is to bring you information, tips, and tricks as an instructional designer. Hello, GCU students, alumni, and educators. Welcome to episode 36 of the Designing with Love podcast. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Craig Hane, also known as Dr. Dell by his students, and an expert in the education field and mathematics. Welcome, Dr. Hane.
Craig Hane:Thank you, Janet.
Jackie Pelegrin:Thank you. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Craig Hane:Well, I've been around a long time, and when I was a young man a boy I had a homeschool teacher, my uncle, jack Davis, who was a barber and a builder, and he taught me practical math, and I was always ahead of my students and my teachers because of him, and so I started. I actually had my first teaching experience when I was five years old. He had taught me how to count and none of the other students had been taught how to count, and so my first grade teacher enlisted my aid in helping them to learn to count. My first teacher experience he taught me all sorts of practical math. He was not a math teacher, by the way, he was a builder and a barber and I learned things that most people don't know, like if you want a third of a square angle, how do you do it with string, and it's called the one-two rule. Most people don't know that, and things like that. I excelled at math through the eighth grade, when I was a freshman in high school in Greencastle Indiana.
Craig Hane:I took algebra and I did not do well in it. I got a pretty bad grade. I didn't flunk it, but I got a bad grade. I didn't like it and my principal and my counselor told me Craig, you're not college material, you're not going to go to college, because if you don't do well in algebra in high school you can't go to college. They recommended I take shop industrial arts, which I did. No one in my family had ever gone to college.
Craig Hane:Then I got saved by two wonderful teachers. I had a geometry teacher my sophomore year and she taught great geometry and I did really well and I loved it, just like Uncle Jack. Then I had the algebra teacher again in my junior year. Didn't do good again, but now I was a troublemaker. I argued with him a lot. Why is this true? Why is this true? Where did this come from? Don't ask that, just do it Didn't get a very good grade. My senior year Ms O'Hara recommended I go to DePaul University in Greencastle and take college algebra as a special student and I did my senior year. By the way, I was the youngest kid in my class. I was 16 years old when I did it. When I entered Dr Clint Gass, who was the chairman of the department was my teacher and I took college algebra and he was a good teacher and I got an A.
Jackie Pelegrin:Wow, that's amazing, whoa how could that happen?
Craig Hane:Right, he became my mentor. He got me enrolled in the number one liberal arts college in the United States at that time Oberlin College. I could get there on a Pennsylvania railroad up near Cleveland. I'm from Greencastle, indiana, went to Oberlin, majored in math and English. Then I taught and, by the way, I tutored students all through this time. Now I made a good living tutoring students and as a tutor I never had a failure.
Craig Hane:The year after I graduated from Oberlin I taught high school for a year in Western Reserve High School, wakeman, ohio. All four grades of math. And now I had students failing because they couldn't keep up and I couldn't slow down. I had to be on a schedule and for the first time ever I had students fail. I felt terrible. I couldn't do anything about it. I had other students who were bored because I was going too slow, couldn't do anything about it. That's when I realized there's a real problem with classroom teaching and math on a schedule. Right, I wanted to do something about it. Well, anyway, that was one year.
Craig Hane:I went back that next year back to Greencastle and Dr Gass had me teach math at DePaul while he went on sabbatical. He wanted me to teach their most advanced theory that I learned at Oberlin. They didn't know so at age 22, from having been told I was not college material when I was a freshman at age 22, I'm teaching the most advanced math at DePaul. He then said why don't you go to graduate school? Because I didn't know what I wanted to do. I'm an adventurer. So I went to Bloomington, indiana, down about 40 miles down the road to Indiana University, enrolled as a grad student. Well, it was fun. I loved it. So I hate tests. By the way, I didn't take the master's degree exam. I don't have a master's degree, but it turns out what's important is doing research and a dissertation. And after four years they said okay, craig, here's a PhD, now go be a professor, you're out of here.
Jackie Pelegrin:Wow, that's awesome Now at age 27,.
Craig Hane:I'm a professor. For seven years I was a professor. I went to Terre Haute, indiana State University three years, rose-hulman Institute of Technology, four years. I also then began to apply math, practical math. I'm really an adventurer. I've never done any one thing more than a few years of my life. And one of the things I did I built the world's first, the best eighth-mile drag strip action dragway in Terre Haute, and it was practical math that. Let me do it. Then I invented.
Craig Hane:I did some other things too, lots of other things, but the big thing I did. I invented what I call the dynabrain to monitor racing engines as they were being tested on water break dynamometers for racers, for racing, oh wow. And NASCAR became my number one customer. The NASCAR teams Hustle and Racing was my number one customer, and they had the best racing engines because they could test them using my dynabrain. And, by the way, all I needed to develop all that was practical math. I didn't need advanced topology and Hilbert spaces and all that which I've been teaching at the advanced level. I just need a practical math. And guess who my first racing customer was in? I was also racing and they had a racer named Daylor I forget his name, marcus. They fired him. They hired had a racer named Dale. I forget his name, marcus. They fired him. They hired a new racer One day.
Craig Hane:Ronald Locke, the general manager, was standing out back and he said we've hired this new racer. He said he's a crazy guy. No one else would hire him, but we think he could be a pretty good racer and we don't know. We're going to try him and we've told him. And to try them, and we've told him and he called him up, introduced me to him. He says this is Craig Hayne. He's the guy that got the DynaBrain. That's why we got the best racing engines in NASCAR. You know, you got to go out and win races. Craig, meet Dale Earnhardt.
Jackie Pelegrin:That's awesome, that's great.
Craig Hane:I met Dale Earnhardt before he ran his first race, and on and on and on. Well then, I thought I was going to get rich. On the Dynabrain. They quit making the processor that I needed to build and Intel couldn't make it. So I ended up forming a training company called Hain Training, and we trained skilled tradesmen for the military and utilities and the big three automakers and Caterpillar, and on and on, all across the United States, and I hired people to help me do it. I had lots of instructors and all that, and we ended up with about 50 different workshops and every one of the workshops technical workshop depended on practical math. We teach them just enough math and they go. Why didn't somebody teach me this 20 years ago? Sorry, and here's the reason. When I teach practical algebra today and I do it online now I have an online program how many lessons do you think you need for practical algebra? Maybe 16 weeks, Maybe 16?
Craig Hane:weeks About 16 weeks, maybe 10 lessons, and you're going to go through them in about two weeks.
Jackie Pelegrin:That's it. That's all you need.
Craig Hane:Now, how much math have you had in your life.
Jackie Pelegrin:Let's see, I got through algebra.
Craig Hane:Okay, do you remember the quadratic equation?
Jackie Pelegrin:Barely because I haven't used it much yeah.
Craig Hane:You've never used it.
Jackie Pelegrin:Yeah, no, no.
Craig Hane:You've never used it except for your test.
Craig Hane:Now that's an example, and I can take a typical freshman Algebra 1 book and 90% of it shouldn't be in it. It's either obsolete stuff you'll never use or it's theory you'll never use. For example, the square root of 2. What kind of a number is it? You were taught that in algebra maybe probably it's in the books, and the answer is it's an irrational number, meaning you can't express it as a fraction. Now the question is who cares? No scientist cares, no engineer cares. There's no irrational numbers in the real world. It's a theoretical concept that only theoretical mathematicians care about, and so it's full of that.
Craig Hane:So I teach 10 lessons in algebra, then I apply it to geometry and I have 19 lessons for geometry. How long is something, what is the area, what's the volume? Now that doesn't deal with angles. You now need trigonometry, but for practical trigonometry it's only seven lessons. Now all that's explained in this book how and why public school math is destroying the USA. There are no textbooks that do what I'm telling you. I have a program online that does it, with tutorial videos which is me coming from Amazon Web Services 24-7, notes and exercises that you can buy. You can either print them out yourself from a PDF or you can buy them very inexpensively from Amazon Amazon is my cheap printer Right and you can learn practical math now in about one semester to a year, and that's the basis. Now there's a six-tier system and that's the first two tiers. Now let's talk about science and engineering. You mentioned that your school has a lot of science and engineers.
Jackie Pelegrin:Correct, yes.
Craig Hane:Now you need math at a much deeper level. You need trigonometry. Trigonometry is a huge subject and you need it at a much deeper level. Algebra you need it at a much deeper level. Algebra you need that at a deeper level. Analytical geometry at a deeper level. Complex numbers All that Historically, when I taught it at an engineering school. It would take a long time to get through that properly Because there's a lot of manual tools. Here's the thing about math. There's two things there's concepts and there's tools. The concepts can be easy to learn, but you have to apply them with the tools. And the manual tools are difficult. They're difficult to learn, they're difficult to do. Well, for example, if I gave you a number today 397 times 296, I said tell me what it is. Would you do it manually?
Jackie Pelegrin:No.
Craig Hane:No, you take your calculator, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's the answer. Right, okay Now, and I teach the calculator back in the practical math. That's the first thing I teach. But now you need other tools, manual tools that you need to learn to use, that are difficult, and they've now been replaced, because what happened was in the year 2009, a new I'll call it AI tool augmented intelligence tool was introduced to the world. It's free on the internet. It's free on the internet. It's incredible and it does all of the math you need now for science and engineering for you. It does the tools for you. You need to learn the concepts and you need to know how to learn to use it, but it does it. The name of that tool is Wolfram Alpha Wow that's great it came out in 2009.
Craig Hane:Now I could spend the next 10 minutes telling you how it all came about. I won't because you probably don't have time for that. Steve Wolfram is the guy that did it, and he developed a programming language called Mathematica in 1988. He and Steve Jobs worked together. By the way, mathematica was bundled on Steve Jobs' next computer and that was what was used to create the World Wide Web by the guy in Churn, john Berners-Lee. I don't want to get too much history here. Anyway, 30 years later, he was able to write a program in mathematics. It's so powerful that you can ask it a question about some math problem. If you understand the concept, know how to ask the question and bingo, it gives you the answer.
Jackie Pelegrin:Wow.
Craig Hane:Unbelievable. Now. A scientist or an engineer today can learn all that pre-calculus I just talked about very easily in a year and that's what I teach in Tier 4. It would normally take two or three years to learn it manually. Right? I teach a lot of things that they don't even teach manually. It's just too difficult. Now, once you've learned that pre-calc, you need to learn calculus. There's differential calculus and there's integral calculus. Calculus 1, differential calculus is a relatively easy manual tool because it's just taking derivatives and using them to find maximum minimum of functions. It's not easy, but it can be done. Integral calculus applies the fundamental theorem of calculus. What that means is if you have a function it's not easy but it can be done Integral calculus applies the fundamental theorem of calculus. What that means is if you have a function, you want to know the area under its curve. You've got to find another function whose derivative is the given one you've got. They call that an antiderivative, very difficult to find manually. That flunked more students out of engineering school than any other thing, that particular problem.
Craig Hane:you probably never took.
Jackie Pelegrin:that too, you probably never went that far, very few people have.
Craig Hane:If you're an engineer or scientist, you go back and think about calculus to integral calculus and you'll remember how hard it was and how you almost and it was hard for me when I took it. I mean I took it way before these tools. I had to learn it manually and it was very difficult at Oberlin College I had to really, really work hard to learn it and a lot of students just give up. It's just too darn hard. Well, wolfram Alva does it for you and it goes beyond that now. So I now teach them calculus with my tutorial videos and I have a notebook, of course, using Wolfram Alpha. Both calculus differently One semester, 30 lessons Done.
Jackie Pelegrin:Can you believe that? Wow, that's amazing.
Craig Hane:Now the workhorse of science and engineering. If you know science and engineering, some of your customers might are called differential equations. You set up a model of something with a differential equation the solutions of function. Solving a differential equation is not easy at all. It's very difficult. It's even harder than integral calculus and so that's usually taught by sophomore year in college. Very difficult, most students hate it. They just get through it.
Craig Hane:Wolfram alpha makes it easy peasy wow that's an amazing tool, yeah oh so if you're, if you are teaching scientists and engineers at any level, but let's say college, and you're not using Wolfram, Alpha or some other equivalent tool and there are others but they're not easy to find you're doing your students a disservice If you're. All calculus books today are obsolete, all calculus books because they use the old manual tools. All differential equation books are obsolete. The two best differential equations, the best differential equation book ever written was by George Simmons, Dr George Simmons, Great book, but it's obsolete because it's all manual tools. Calculus same thing. He wrote the greatest calculus book, Dr George Simmons. There's lots of calculus books out there. There's tons of them. They're all the same pretty much.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right, not much difference yeah.
Craig Hane:And so today I'm trying to reform math education with my sixth year program and I'm trying to go into the high school level. I have students now at age 16 and 17 that have been through differential equations and they know it better than any ordinary high school graduate.
Craig Hane:Wow, that's amazing If you go to MIT and you've been through a public school, a good public school program, say through calculus, and you're sitting next to one of my students who's been through my program. You're at a big disadvantage. My student knows a lot of math you don't know and can do a lot of things you can't do with that tool. You got to catch up. That's the world we live in Now. Your private school doesn't have to follow the norm. It can be a good school. Your math teachers won't like it because what they're teaching is obsolete.
Jackie Pelegrin:Wow, that's amazing. And I think it would even help with the kind of work I do as an instructional designer, being able to know those tools so that way we can create the best curriculum possible right for the students and for the faculty to teach. Because if you don't have the tools you need as an instructor to give to the students, then how are we creating the best education and the best curriculum?
Craig Hane:possible. But on top of that, you can't teach in a classroom One-on-one, one-on-one. There's two things about math education to make it successful. First of all, the most important thing is the psychology of the student. The student has to not be afraid of math. They don't have to love it, but they've got to not be afraid of it and they've got to want to learn it and they see the value of it. Right, that's an extrinsic motivation is to see the value. An intrinsic motivation is to understand that they just love it.
Craig Hane:Now what's it take to do that? Pedagogy and content. I've been telling you about content, but pedagogy is equally important. I call it spike pedagogy. I made up the acronym S-P-I-K-A. It's got to be self-paced and every lesson the student has to be ready for. You can't be skipping lessons and you can't assume the student knows something they don't know. So you've got to go through and I start them at the beginning, even an advanced student. I make them go through my program at the beginning and if they know the math it's a review they go through it real fast.
Craig Hane:If they don't know it, they've got to learn it Because view, they go through it real fast If they don't know it, they've got to learn it because they're going to need it later on, right, and I mean, if you don't know the law of cosines, you're stuck. I mean you can't, there's all sorts of things you can't do. So if you somehow didn't learn the law of cosines, well, you can't learn advanced math. Then You've got to. It's kind of like learning to drive a car but you don't know how to use a brake.
Jackie Pelegrin:Yeah, see what. I'm saying you can't move on, yeah, you can't move forward without, so I move all the way through it.
Craig Hane:Now Tier 3 I didn't tell you about. I told you about Tiers 1 and 2 and 4, 5. Tier 3 is the closest thing I come to teaching ordinary, the way it's done in school. It's called getting people ready for the SAT and ACT. Tier three and I teach them a bunch more math. If they're not going into science and engineering, they'll never use it, but they need it for the test, For example, a quadratic equation. Yeah, you've got to teach them. You got to take a test and I tell them up front half of the things, two-thirds of the things I'm teaching now, you'll never use if you're not going into science, engineering, if you're not STEM, a STEM student. But you got to learn from the SAT. The SAT is a horrible test, so is the ACT? It'll prove a damn thing. But in fact some schools are quit using them. They realize that.
Jackie Pelegrin:Yeah, gcu doesn't require the SAT or ACT to enter, so I think they're realizing yeah, that it's obsolete, they're horrible tests yeah, absolutely.
Craig Hane:They don't prove anything but Tier 3, I teach you how to do pretty good on them, just in case you've got to take them, that's true. And then I tell you a lot of stuff I'm teaching to her through. I'm teaching the manual way of doing things now, once you get into her, for you can go back and review that and do it with wolfram alpha, go and say, well, why didn't you do that back in tier three? Well, you can't use wolfram alpha on the sat right, I won't let you do that.
Craig Hane:Why? Well, the sat would be a meaningless test if you could rule from alpha. It's a meaningless test with what? If you know how to use wolfram alpha and you take the sat or the act.
Jackie Pelegrin:It's a joke you score 100 on it, right?
Craig Hane:wow, that's the world we live in today yeah people don't. People don't like it. Well, you need to learn these old manual, these old manual tools, because that's how you learn math bullcrap yeah, bullcrap, especially today with the technology that's available, you know we need to harness that and use it.
Craig Hane:Yeah, that's absolutely, and that's what I did. Now I have, I've gone beyond math. Now I've created something called the triad math army, and what I've done is over the many decades of my life. I'm like everybody. I've had a lot of problems, I've had a lot of challenges, I've had bad habits, I've had bad addictions, but I've had opportunities. And so what I've done is, over the course of my life, I've acquired what I call wisdom tools. And here's what a wisdom tool is Any action you take will have consequences, short-term and long-term, good and bad, depending on how you define them Right. The problem is, too often you take an action and you don't know what the consequences are going to be. Then you've got to live with them. So a wisdom tool is understanding what will be the consequences of a specific action. Once you understand that, you can decide. Well, now what action do I want to take? This action may have a short-term consequence. That's good, but a long-term consequence is bad. So maybe you don't want to do it. Smoking cigarettes, good example. I smoked. You ever smoke?
Jackie Pelegrin:No, thankfully Good for you.
Craig Hane:I did. I'm an old guy. Back when I was a young man, everybody smoked Not I'm an old guy. Back when I was a young man, everybody smoked, Not everybody. A lot of people smoked. When I was 21 years old, I dated a girl that smoked. Loved her she's a great girl but she smoked and I couldn't stand to be around her if I didn't smoke. She stunk so I smoked her cigarettes so I could be around her. We broke up and guess what? I was hooked. I didn't know, I was hooked.
Craig Hane:Nicotine is a very addictive substance. So it took me 10 years. And, by the way, I cough a lot when I smoke. I didn't like smoking, but yet I do it because I wanted this. The nicotine hit. I would like Mark Twain. I quit a thousand times.
Craig Hane:It's easy to quit smoking 10 years before I quit. And, by the way, if I hadn't quit after ten years, you'd never heard of me today. I wouldn't be around, and on and on. There was a time in my life when I drank a quart of whiskey every day. Well, I learned that that wasn't wise and I quit, and I could go through lots and lots of examples of that.
Craig Hane:I've had a lot of health problems over the years, but I learned what it took to overcome them, Both mental and panic attacks. Learned how to overcome them. Do on the lawsuit learned how to overcome it. On and on and on. So these wisdom tools are now available to the Triad Math Army members. So not only do they get all the math, they get all the wisdom tools. It took me decades to learn and every one of the wisdom tools helped me improve my life. Would it help you? I don't know who knows Right. Different tools, different people. It was decades and decades I learned. I learned from other people and then I put them in. I explain them in videos, what they are. Tell you the book if you need to go read it. A lot of times you don't. So that's in a nutshell. That's what I've got. So today, if your listeners want to know, you can go to my website and I've got lots of free stuff on my web craighanecom, C-R-A-I-G-H-A-N-Ecom All kinds of free stuff on it that you might enjoy A bunch of books like this book.
Craig Hane:you can get a free PDF copy of it. There's a free PDF. You can buy it on Amazon for less than $5, but you get a free PDF copy. Okay, and I got a bunch of other books Now on my website. I take you to. I say, if you want to improve your life, I take you to the TriMath Army webpage. It explains the TriMath Army. Of course, $30 a month to join. $30 a month, but the first month you join it and if you don't love it we don't charge you. It didn't cost you anything to have. Yes, that's everything for 30 days for free.
Jackie Pelegrin:Wow, that's great, I love it. Yeah, so you can meet people where they are and help them improve their lives. So it goes beyond math.
Craig Hane:I love that, absolutely, absolutely, and there's a forum on it for the tri-math army and you can ask questions and you can talk to each other and so on and so forth. But no, if you have a lot of STEM students at your school, you'll definitely want to put me in touch, probably with the head of your engineering departments, because I want to tell you what in most schools maybe not your school, but I know some engineering schools and the engineering departments and the science departments don't like the math department. They don't like each other, but they're both tenured and they do what they want to do, and the engineering departments know that their students aren't learning what they need to know and the math department won't teach them.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right. So then the engineering students struggle right with that. That's the point?
Craig Hane:exactly, yeah, and so what you need to do is you need to have the leader of your university put together a team to analyze it, and it needs to be probably the chairman of, or the some leader at, each of the engineering schools and the math department. They need to be able to make their arguments, and then you get me involved with them, and they don't. They can't stand a chance against me. I'll ask them what calculus book are you using? And they'll show me. I'll say okay, now tell me this. Are you teaching this in this book? Well, yeah, well, why it's obsolete? Why are you teaching this? And on and on. I get into a lot of detail. I'm not going to deal with you on this podcast Right, but you do a deep analysis of finding out what
Craig Hane:they're doing right and what they're not doing right. I just tell them I go through any calculus book today and point out things in it that are obsolete, difficult to learn, difficult to do, and that's particularly true when we get into integral calculus and then differential equations are even worse. Wow, my goodness See, in 1972, I was teaching engineering school, and the first scientific calculator in the world came out. Then it was called the HP35. If you look, packard, 35 keys, hp35. In today's dollars this is 2025. In today's dollars it was about $2,500. No professors bought it, but some of the rich students had it at the engineering school. They had a lot of money. The students did some of them and so they had this thing. I didn't know what it was.
Craig Hane:We used to use slide rules, trig tables, logarithm tables, trig tables. They were put on slide rules, trick tables, logarithm tables, trick tables. They were put on slide rules and that's what we taught everybody. I didn't. I was teaching advanced theory, but that's what the other professors were teaching. So I asked this student. I said show me this thing. He showed me it In 15 minutes. I knew that slide rules were obsolete, trick tables were obsolete. Trick tables were obsolete. Log tables were obsolete. Why? What takes you 10 minutes to do with that you could do in one minute with this calculator. So I go to the math department meeting.
Craig Hane:We had a meeting once in a while and I said what are you guys going to do now that your slide rules and log tables and trick tables are obsolete? What are you talking about, hayne? Have you seen this new tool? Yeah, but it's expensive. Students can't afford that. We can't afford it. I said industry could afford it, and do you think any industry is going to let an engineer waste time on a slide rule when they can do it in a tenth of the time with a calculator? Right?
Craig Hane:of course a year, hewlett packard thought they would sell out 10 000 of these to engineers. They sold a hundred thousand oh, wow they lowered the price half price down to 195. It was 395 and 72 to 195. But then texas service came along. They built a better one, easier to use.
Jackie Pelegrin:Under $100.
Craig Hane:And today they dominate that market and today they just kept getting better, better and cheaper and cheaper. Now the TI-30XA is way better than those original scientific calculators and much. It's great. It's very easy to use. If you're taught which that's the first thing I teach young students Seventh, eighth, ninth grade first thing I teach is a calculator. I only teach the things we're going to use. A lot of stuff you'll never use and I don't teach that. I teach the stuff we're going to use. It's wonderful. It's the world we live in. Now, as we go forward in this world, there's going to be more and more AI tools. You know about ChatGDP and Grok and all that. Well, if you know the basic math that I teach, that makes it easier then to learn these AI tools. After all, an AI tool is only as good as what you ask it. Wolfram Alpha is an AI tool. It's not worth a damn thing if you don't know how to ask it the right question.
Jackie Pelegrin:That's true. Yeah, you have to learn to learn.
Craig Hane:Our students today that are going to be successful in this world are going to learn to use these tools, so they've got to start with basic math. By the way, they only need my practical math. They don't need to go through calculus. They only need my practical math. They don't need to go through calculus. If they're not in science and engineering, they don't need calculus. You need it in science and engineering, you don't need it anywhere else, but you need to know how to learn. Learn to learn, and that's one of the wisdom tools I talk about. How do you learn to learn? Because you're going to be learning to learn the rest of your life, I don't care what tool you're using today, it'll be obsolete in five years It'll be a better tool, right Absolutely.
Craig Hane:And that's going to go on and on and on.
Jackie Pelegrin:It doesn't matter what industry you're in, right? No?
Craig Hane:no, no, there's no escaping it.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right.
Craig Hane:That's true. There's no escaping it.
Jackie Pelegrin:Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up the AI technology, because even today, some of the students that I teach for the instructional design program they're educators, they're in K-12 education or they're in higher education and some of them are math teachers. So it's kind of neat to have this conversation and they don't bring up the AI technology and I'm like, but it's in every facet, every industry, so we need to embrace it.
Craig Hane:The reason they don't. There's a reason they don't what I'm talking about in my program. There are no textbooks that teach it, none. You cannot buy what I teach. The closest thing you can get. In tier three I start using the greatest high school math textbook in my opinion. I start using the greatest high school math textbook in my opinion ever, written by George Simmons. Dr George Simmons called Precalculus, mathematics in a Nutshell Algebra, geometry and Trigonometry. And guess how much that book is? It's 119 pages. It costs $20. No school has ever adopted it. It's still in print.
Craig Hane:I do use that textbook as a minor part of what I do because it's really good, but I don't use it until tier three. It's of no value. In the first two tiers I use a little bit in tier three and I use a little bit more than in the upper tiers. But I have to go way deeper than that textbook because there's all sorts of things that I go that are not in that book. But no, the math curriculum today that your college is teaching. I could be wrong. Obviously they could show me what they're doing. And, by the way, if you go to my website, craighaincom, I got my syllabus all six tiers of syllabus is all there, you can go down and look and see everything I teach.
Craig Hane:Wow, that's great, because if you're going to tell me about your math program, I'm going to say send me your syllabus.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right.
Craig Hane:And if you don't have a syllabus, well, what the hell? How are you going to tell me what you're teaching?
Jackie Pelegrin:Exactly, you need to see it yeah.
Craig Hane:Well, then give me your textbook. That's just as bad as the syllabus. So then I go and the problem is what the teachers have been taught and what they're teaching. Most of it's obsolete.
Jackie Pelegrin:One of the tools that's commonly used in the math courses is SPSS. Do you think that that's a valuable tool for statistics? Because there's a lot of math and statistics, so do you think that's a valuable tool?
Craig Hane:I don't teach statistics specifically and I'm not familiar with that tool, so I don't know, okay, okay, that's good to know. Yeah, what I do is statistics in a very generic way, is that I teach that when you have a set of data spread across some sort of a scale, it'll have some kind of a distribution.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right.
Craig Hane:Now here's the problem that a lot of statisticians have. One of the distributions that's very common is called a Gaussian distribution, the normal distribution, the bell curve, right, okay, and then they got versions that weren't slightly limited. But it's the bell curve. You got an average and you got what's called a standard deviation Goes out. Now a lot of distributions don't aren't a bell curve, but if you start taking samples and taking average of samples and creating new distributions, eventually you'll get a bell curve. That's called the central limit theorem, and so a lot of statisticians always want to make everything into a bell curve. The problem is there are certain distributions that that should never be done for. For example, you might have a bimodal distribution where you've got a bell curve here, a bell curve here and not much in between. Well, don't make one big bell curve out of it. You've got two, but the big one is this it's called the power law distribution and that's like this oh right.
Craig Hane:The power law distribution, which a lot of distributions today, very important ones. Standard deviation doesn't mean a damn thing in a bell curve. A standard deviation means something, and if you have, you wouldn't have eight sigma, for example, in a bell, in a bell curve, but a power distribution you do. And so they try to do a standard statistical analysis to this and you can't do it. The power law, now that's just a theoretical thing I'm telling you about. So, whatever statistics you take, you make damn sure that you study the power law quite differently.
Craig Hane:And, by the way, there are companies today that didn't do that, that have lost billions and billions and billions of dollars. It's a real problem today because a lot of things are parallel and you can have an eight sigma or a 10 sigma. Well, a good example would be incomes of American people. That's not a normal distribution. Don't try to make a normal distribution out of that. That is a parallel distribution and if you try to make a normal distribution out of it, your analysis is no good. Now, I'm not a statistician in terms of I don't get into the nitty-gritty of it and I don't teach that.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right.
Craig Hane:But I know that and so that's what I do Tell people about statistics. I'm not familiar with that tool you had. I don't know the tool. What was the tool called?
Jackie Pelegrin:SPSS is what they normally use. I don't know how far up they use it, but it's similar to Excel, but it's used for statistics.
Craig Hane:Well, Excel's a good tool if you know what you're doing. You know what the formula is being and all that. But I don't know that tool, so I can't comment on it.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right, that's okay. Yeah, and they, of course, as you know, statistics is taken in a PhD level and things like that, so I don't know.
Craig Hane:First, question I ask a statistician tell me the difference between a Gaussian distribution and a parallel distribution. Explain the difference, yeah, in general terms.
Jackie Pelegrin:General terms. Yeah, that's important. Wow, I love that you've created the Triad Math Foundation. So the Math Foundation that's part of the army right? Is that the umbrella?
Craig Hane:No, there's not a foundation.
Jackie Pelegrin:Oh, there's not a foundation. Okay, so there's just the.
Craig Hane:Triad Math Army. Well, not yet. There's not. One day there probably will be, but there's not yet.
Jackie Pelegrin:Okay, good to know.
Craig Hane:But what I've done is I've created the Triad Math Army.
Jackie Pelegrin:Okay.
Craig Hane:And when you join it you have access to all the math, all six tiers, and you and your family do Not just you, but your family. So if you've got an advanced math student, they can go in and get into some of the upper tiers pretty quick. But if you've got beginners, they just start at tier one. But it's also got all the wisdom tools. There's a bunch of those and those will take you years to use. I mean, it took me many decades really to learn them and use them. So different ones, you need different ones at different times and uh, but there's a lot of. You know, how can you be a good salesman? How do you deal with practical, difficult people? So I have to do that things like that how do you not lose an argument?
Craig Hane:I?
Jackie Pelegrin:never lose an argument.
Craig Hane:I don't always win an argument, but I never lose one. I love that, but there's a way to never lose an argument.
Jackie Pelegrin:Yeah, I love that, and by the way.
Craig Hane:The reason is, if you have an idea about something and you believe in some fact that you believe, to prove it you got to go all the way back to your basic assumptions, your basic fundamental beliefs.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right.
Craig Hane:And if you've got certain fundamental beliefs, you're right. But if you have different fundamental beliefs, you're wrong. And different people can have different fundamental beliefs. So one's right and one's wrong. So I want to find out what are your fundamental beliefs. So if you and I have an argument about something, I start asking you questions, trying to get back to what's your fundamental belief. It's kind of like proving a theorem. You've heard of the Pythagorean theorem, right, yes, You've heard of the Pythagorean theorem right.
Craig Hane:Yes, it's a theorem about if you've got a plane, a two-dimensional plane Pythagorean theorem. The question is is the Pythagorean theorem always true?
Jackie Pelegrin:Hmm, that's a good question. I would say probably no. Why that's a good question? I haven't used the Pythagorean theorem in a while, so I'm trying to remember. Yeah, that's probably why, because I probably didn't fully understand it when I first got it.
Craig Hane:If you have a plane that has zero curvature, the Pythagorean theorem is always true, and that was the implicit assumption of the Euclideans. So when you talk about Euclidean geometry, it's a plane with no curvature. Now, if you have a plane with any curvature in it, the Pythagorean theorem is not true. So, for example, we live on a two-dimensional plane surrounding a sphere Right. The Pythagorean theorem isn't true, and that's true of any. So any plane that had any curvature to it, the Pythagorean theorem is not true. Now, I didn't understand that for a long time, but I finally came up with a proof one day. The first proof of the Pythagorean theorem that people are aware of is in Euclid's Elements, proposition 47 of Book 1. And it's the damned most difficult proof I've ever seen of the Pythagorean Theorem. I don't know anybody that could reproduce it without going back and studying it based on what's called the windmill diagram. It's very difficult, so people came up with simpler proofs.
Craig Hane:There are many, many proofs now of the Pythagorean Theorem for a flat plane. I came up with one that's only three lines long, and it also demonstrated why the Pythagorean theorem was only true on a flat surface. I was so proud of that. This was about a few years ago and I thought man, I've never seen it anywhere. I've never seen a proof anywhere. Surely somebody else has done it. I can't believe I'm the first one to do it, but I've never seen it before. And I said well, it turned out there was another guy that did it. This proved it this way. His name was Albert Einstein.
Jackie Pelegrin:Oh, wow.
Craig Hane:And he understood curvature Right and a lot more than that.
Craig Hane:And, by the way, albert Einstein was not a great mathematician, he was a great physicist. He learned his mathematics from some other great mathematicians and he applied it to create a model that he believed would be true, based on basic assumptions. So now, in special relativity, time depends on the speed of something. If something starts going faster and faster, the clock slows down. Right, in fact, if you get up near the speed of light, the clock will stop. A photon traveling at a speed of light. If it had a clock in it, the clock is zero. A photon that started a billion years ago by our time still the same time today. That's special relativity. Then he discovered special relativity. The math's not too hard. Then he got general relativity 10 years later. That takes into account gravity and that really blew away. Physics, newtonian physics. And did you know that if you got two watches here and that really blew away? Physics, newtonian physics? And did you know that if you got two watches here and if you take one watch up, 10?
Jackie Pelegrin:feet in the air. It slows down. I'm sorry it speeds up. It speeds up. Oh, okay, wow.
Craig Hane:And that's all in his theory, his math theory. And if you didn't have the speed, it slows down. If it goes faster, it slows down. If it goes less gravity, it speeds up. If you didn't have those two correction factors, we would not have GPS today. You used GPS, right.
Jackie Pelegrin:Right, yeah.
Craig Hane:You couldn't make GPS with Newtonian physics. Most things you could do in Newtonian physics. That's an approximation of Einstein's physics. In ordinary situations it's very close. Life's interesting, isn't it?
Jackie Pelegrin:Wow, it is. It's fascinating and.
Craig Hane:I'm just beginning to tell you stuff.
Jackie Pelegrin:Wow, that's great. I know that my listeners will love all of this, especially the ones that teach math and teach science the STEM, like you mentioned, those on it and designing curriculum and being able to impact those that do teach and also the students as well. So it's a labor of love, right, as they say, when you're a teacher and when you design curriculum, it's a labor of love.
Craig Hane:Well, if they read this, yes, it is labor of love, that's right. I call that intrinsic motivation.
Jackie Pelegrin:Yes.
Craig Hane:And you should do in your life things you're intrinsically motivated to do, and hopefully some of them will make you some money. Right, and by the way, I talk about in my wisdom tool money. The good, the bad and the ugly. Financial freedom and all that. I achieved financial freedom when I was 17 years old.
Jackie Pelegrin:I'll tell you how it is. That's amazing.
Craig Hane:Now, this book I explain a lot of that my history. The first three parts are a lot of my history. Part four is what's Wrong with Public School Math. Part five is my New Program. So you get this book and then at the end there's a special offer a link they can go to to get a special offer, a link they can go to to get a special offer and the special offer will enroll them in the Army for $30 a month, but the first 30 days are free if they don't love it, that's great and once they're in the Army, if they recruit other Army members, I pay them to do it.
Craig Hane:You can actually join the Army if you're a good communicator, you can get other people to join the Army and get paid to do that and you can make.
Jackie Pelegrin:There's no limit on how much you can make, depending on how many people you could recruit, wow, so there's a benefit to bringing others in to the program that's right, wow, that's great. I'll make sure to link all of your um your website and also at the army as well, and and link everybody to that so that they can make sure to check that out, because I think that's wonderful. I've been on your website and, yeah, it's amazing.
Craig Hane:I love it. What's the website? I've got lots of them. Which one?
Jackie Pelegrin:Your Craig Hayne website yeah.
Craig Hane:Go to the video library. If you're interested in math at all, just go there. There's all kinds of videos about math. It's not training, it's just interesting things about math. By the way, there's three videos that are the concepts of calculus about an hour.
Jackie Pelegrin:You learn the concept of calculus about an hour wow, oh my goodness, that would be amazing, because I think now I have uh, I'm not afraid of math anymore after talking to you, so it's great.
Craig Hane:No, you won't be as a matter of fact. And then what I do with people, I have what I call the million-dollar gift. If somebody really believes in the TriMath Army, I have them deal with me directly and they go through, at least through tier two of the math and then some of the wisdom tool, and then if they want to go out and really promote it as an affiliate to make money I hope I'm do that. In fact I'm I'm looking to have someday somebody become financially independent as a triad math army member just by recruiting other members wow, that's amazing.
Jackie Pelegrin:I love that maybe that'll be you. Yeah, you never know, you never know so yeah and I think that we can stay in in touch with each other and and definitely and I'd love to have you back on again and we can talk about some other things too when, when it comes to the army, the math army and things like that, because I think it's really amazing.
Craig Hane:Yeah, I love it. Well, we can talk about that. And then I can tell you some things about you might want to do a special program on theoretical math. I can just tell you a lot of things that intuitively will blow your mind, I'm sure, about theoretical math, and to me it's just mind-blowing. And then we can talk about a lot of other things. There's all sorts of things we can talk about. Tribalism is a big thing today. I love talking about tribalism and, by the way, I have published a book by an author whose pen name is T Ruth Galore, on an inconvenient lie. You know Al Gore's book An Inconvenient Truth.
Jackie Pelegrin:Yes.
Craig Hane:Well, it wasn't. It was a lie, an inconvenient lie, and I explained why. The book explains why I don't do it. It's not me, I'm not the author, but I've read this book and published it on Amazon and I think it's true. So we can talk about that sometime if you want to.
Jackie Pelegrin:That would be great. I'd love that. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And I love that. You're making a difference all around. It seems like you're making a difference in the world too, because you're helping students and individuals to not be afraid of math anymore and to also have those wisdom skills that they need in life. So that's great.
Craig Hane:I love it. That's my mission. That's why I live today. I've traveled the world. I've had an exciting life. You can tell how old I am looking at me right. How old do you think I am? Just take a quick guess 70, maybe. That's a good guess. By the way, I have no aches, no pains. I don't take any medicine. I'm very active.
Jackie Pelegrin:I love it.
Craig Hane:I was born, my third birthday was one week before Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor happened one week after my third birthday, so you can figure it out.
Jackie Pelegrin:Yeah, we can do the math. I love it All right.
Craig Hane:Thank you, dr Payne, appreciate it. Thank you.
Jackie Pelegrin:Thank you for taking some time to listen to this podcast episode today. Your support means the world to me. If you'd like to help keep the podcast going, you can share it with a friend or colleague, leave a heartfelt review or offer a monetary contribution. Every act of support, big or small, makes a difference and I'm truly thankful for you.