‘When are we ever going to use this?’ – a teachable moment with Merlyn

“When are we going to use this in real life?”

It’s a question Chicago math teacher Gayle Woods has heard a lot in her 25 years in the classroom. She heard it once again not too long ago. 

Ms. Woods was introducing one of her middle school classes to slopes. Just like a hill can be gentle, steep, or somewhere in between, so too can a line on a graph. The measure of how much a line goes up or down – the “rise” – over a certain amount of horizontal space – the “run” – is called its slope. 

Like so often happens when there’s a disconnect between a mathematical concept and the world around them, some of her students got a little restless about slopes. 

“Why do we have to learn this?” they asked. “When will we ever need to know about slopes outside of school?”

In the past, Ms. Woods says, she might have answered by making a loose connection to architecture or graphic design. “It would have been more general,” she says. 

But this time she asked Merlyn. 

Ms. Woods is one of 20 teachers at Chicago Public Schools using Merlyn Origin, the AI voice assistant for teachers. Merlyn is the only AI solution offering safe and secure voice control of classroom technology, including generative AI that can provide classroom-safe answers to factual questions.

“The fact that I can speak into Merlyn and an answer comes right up, that was perfect,” says Ms. Woods.

In an instant, Merlyn rattled off a bevy of real-life careers that rely on slopes. 

Civil engineers and urban planners use slopes to design roads, bridges, and drainage systems, Merlyn said. In economics, the slope of a curve can represent inflation rates and supply-and-demand. Financial analysts use slopes to interpret market trends and predict future movements. In environmental science, slopes play a vital role in mapping, assessing erosion risks, and understanding ecological systems. And coaches and sports scientists analyze slopes to evaluate an athlete’s performance over time. 

Merlyn went deep, says Ms. Woods, and the students were inspired. And thanks to our appropriateness model that filters prompts and responses, she could be confident that the answer Merlyn gave was safe for her students.

“It was so instantaneous,” she says. “Some of the jobs were computer-related. Some were technical. It brought up jobs the students had not even heard of. Then they were asking, ‘What was this?’ and ‘What was that?’ They were a bit amazed.”  

And Merlyn’s answer lined up beautifully with the mission of Chicago Public Schools: “To provide a high-quality public education for every child, in every neighborhood, that prepares each for success in college, career, and civic life.”

“It was exactly what I was looking for,” says Ms. Woods. “Positions in life that you can attain using this lesson. That gave us a little teachable moment.” 

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