That Mr. Beast Video - I Have Thoughts

YouTube celebrity Mr. Beast dropped a video this week that has EduTwitter all . . . well atwitter. He isn't the first one to do this. I remember being required to watch and respond to a video posted by a punk in a hoodie telling us that knowledge didn't matter in the age of Google about 15 years ago.  That one fizzled quickly, but this one is different for a number of reasons. I have thoughts - lots of them, so get some tea and settle in.

First, let's address who Mr. Beast is. When I called him a YouTube celebrity, I was understating it.  At 468 million, he has the most subscribers of any channel on the site, and he has the third most followed TikTok account. He is especially popular with high school boys because much of his content consists of the stunts and challenges they enjoy; many of his challenges are philanthropic, so their parents don't mind that they watch him. He's been posting for over 20 years, which is longevity in any field, but is insanely long for the internet world. All of that only matters in this discussion because his reach is wide, and his influence is high. When he speaks, his followers listen. 

So last week, he decided to use his immense platform to criticize educators. I'm not saying there is nothing to criticize - far from it. Ask any teacher what could be better in education, and they could give you a TED talk without preparation. 

But Mr. Beast is an outsider. He graduated from a small Christian school in NC and then dropped out of college in 2018 to study virality - what makes a video spread like wildfire - on his own.  He is public about his lack of desire to have children. So, when he speaks about education, he speaks as someone who has not been inside of a classroom in almost a decade. Someone pointed out that he has built ten schools, and, to his credit that is true. But it's not the same as knowing something about education. A person who builds a church doesn't know how to be its pastor.

His basic premise is that teaching hasn't changed in over a hundred years.  "Why," he asks, "are we still being taught the way our parents were taught when everything else has moved on?" He claims that when he was in school, a teacher just read out of a textbook. He then goes on to suggest that kid would be better taught by videos because a lot of complex information can be delivered in a short period of time. 

I want to be as kind as I can to Mr. Beast because I think he was probably well intentioned, but he was wrong about so many things in such a short video. Let me unpack a few things here:

1. Your kids are not being taught the same way your parents were. They just aren't. I taught for 25 years (including ALL of the ones when Mr. Beast was in school) in three different schools, both public and private, and education changed dramatically during that time - some changes were for good and some were not. As Tom Bennett said, "Any parent who has helped their kids with their math homework recently knows that kids are not being taught the same way they were." 

Tech access alone has changed things; when I began my career, I made an appointment to take my kids to the computer lab to use Google for research. By the end of my career, AI was making its push. And, I promise you Mr. Beast's parents weren't using either of those things when they were in school. There were also multiple swings in education philosophy during the 25 years I taught. The pendulum swung from STEM focused to arts integration in every class, from explicit rubrics to free form exploration, from phonics to whole language and back to phonics again.  

Mr. Beast MAY have a had a teacher who read aloud from a textbook. He was in a tiny school in NC, which currently has an enrollment of 287 in K-12; so ten years ago, they may not have had the resources to do any more than that. Since he is using a sample size of ONE, it would be hard to say that applies to the whole field. 

2. Tech has changed. Brains have not. One of my favorite responses to the Mr. Beast video addressed a basic fact he clearly doesn't know (maybe he would if he hadn't dropped out of college). The way brains learn doesn't change with the technology of the world. 

"There is no neurological reason we should be taught differently. Our brains work exactly the same way our grandparents' brains did." While neuroplasticity is real, it creates only minor differences in our brains - strengthening some connections while weakening others. It does not change the basic architecture of our brains. We all learn basically the same way - encoding through our senses, spaced retrieval coupled with feedback, rinse and repeat as needed. The encoding may come from a variety of sources, from live teacher to video to book to podcast, none of it sticks without the retrieval and feedback process (more on that in the next point). 

Change is often good, but not ALL change is good. A change that makes the picture on your TV better is good; but it is still basically TV - we aren't going to say we need television reform and dramatically change the way we film just to say we have changed with the times. 

The truth is that we would likely be better off if we were learning more like our parents learned. The push for discovery learning turned out to work against the brain rather than with it. Some were successful, but the most disadvantaged kids just became more disadvantaged because we overwhelmed their working memories. Projects and labs are great, but they are reinforcements for explicit teaching, not replacements.  

3. No, you cannot absorb and retain the information from a video in 20 minutes.  One of the points made by Mr. Beast is that there are a lot of high quality videos that we can use for learning. He's not wrong about that part. He references Mark Rober, but there are many good sources - Kahn Academy, Veritasium, Crash Course. I have used and loved them all.

But here's where Mr. Beast got it wrong.  He said, "You can learn complex topics in 20 minutes in a way that's engaging, fun, and you retain it." Complex information can be PRESENTED in 20 minutes, and you can CONSUME information in 20 minutes, but you cannot LEARN it in 20 minutes. As I said earlier, there is a cycle of retrieval and feedback that are needed to retain information.  I consume a great deal of content.  I listen to podcasts, read books, read blog posts, and, yes, I watch videos. If I retained all of the information in the things I consume, I could rule the world. But the truth is that most of it passes through my consciousness and then back out. I might remember one very interesting point, especially if I found it interesting enough to tell someone about it the next day (retrieval) and have them find it interesting enough to engage with me in conversation about it (feedback), but I will have a temporary and superficial understanding at best if all I do is watch the video. The idea that videos are engaging is ludicrous; there is nothing more passive than watching a video. It's even more passive than a live lecture, which we have all been encouraged to eliminate. Entertainment is not the same thing as engagement. Engagement requires interaction, which videos do not provide. Engagement is a means to an end, but it is not the end. Learning requires engagement, but engagement alone is not learning.

Videos are great as supplemental tools, and I used them frequently. They were super helpful in science teaching because they animated processes. They were good review tools because students could hear an explanation that was similar to but slightly different from mine. But they are not a replacement for quality instruction from a human. Education has been, at its core, a social experience since the Garden of Eden, where God came and walked with and talked with Adam. This is why I don't believe technology is going to replace teachers (even AI).

4. Mr. Beast is the beneficiary of the very thing he is criticizing.  This is where I want to be as charitable as I can with Mr. Beast because I don't think he knows. It's so easy, once you have learned enough for learning to be easy for you, to forget what it is like to be a novice. He may well be able to watch a video on a topic that interests him and that he knows reasonably well and retain something new. A 7th grade math student who is learning a concept for the first time does not have that base. 

Mr. Beast benefits from a strong knowledge base already being in place from his years of schooling (even if he had a teacher or two who only read from a book) that allows his working memory to not be overloaded when taking in information from a video. He has a schema of knowledge from decades of school as well as professional learning to connect new learning with. A freshman year biology student who is encountering Latin roots for anatomical terms for the first time is building that schema, but she doesn't have it yet. Butterflies tend to forget that they used to be caterpillars and think that, since they can now fly, those younger than them should be able to as well. (I'm not sure if that metaphor worked, but hopefully you know what I'm saying.)

At 27, Mr. Beast is old enough to have lived in a childhood where screen time was still considered something we should limit. He would have had some video time but not the constant stream we have now. Because he wasn't engaged by video non-stop in his childhood, he had moments of boredom that trained his imagination, and it was that training that allows him the success he has today. But he doesn't know how to look back and see what got him here. 

Teachers, you are not beholden to a 27 years old YouTube influencer. Do what you know is right. Do what you know works. If you don't know what works, we live in a golden age of books on the science of learning. Start with Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham or Learning Begins by Andrew Watson. If you want to dive really deep, take a look at How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene. Form a relationship with a teacher in your building who has been at it long enough to see the fads come and go and return to the basics of quality instruction. Don't give in to the idea that "newer is always better" as our culture seems to have. You are there to teach, not to do the latest thing.

Teaching Videos - a Weird Coping Mechanism

Note:  This is a very "teacher-y" post.  If you aren't a teacher, feel free to keep reading, but don't expect to get much out of it.

The first time I heard about "flipping the classroom," I thought it seemed like something I might like to do every now and then, particularly if the practice problems for a concept were difficult enough that they needed more guided practice than independent practice.  I made a list of 5-6 topics I thought I might like to do it with, but I never did anything with that list.  That summer, I just could not summon the motivation to make those videos.  Perhaps I was daunted by the idea of recording my voice; perhaps I couldn't envision students watching the videos at home and figured I would have to reteach it anyway.  The bottom line, though, was that I didn't really believe in the concept enough to follow through with it.  That was 2015, and the videos never got made.

Enter the pandemic.  Teachers were challenged in ways we never had been before.  First, was the remote spring.  As a science teacher, the challenge was even more daunting because hands-on experiences were not possible.  I could demonstrate some things from my house, but there were a few that weren't feasible to show across a computer screen (black light demonstrations, lasers bouncing off of mirrors, color mixing, static electricity).  We made it work as well as we could, and I did end up making one video - not for the purpose of flipping the class but because I couldn't get my computer close enough to "the board" when I was live streaming, so I premade a video of the calculations I needed to show in a place where I could put the camera closer to the writing.

Then, came the hybrid year, a time I still don't know how to talk about with anyone who didn't do it.  As we split focus between the students who joined us from home and those in front of us, we exhausted our brain capacity each and every day.  We worked as hard as we could possibly work and made it (sort of) work while praying for the day we wouldn't have to do it anymore.  Then, we found that it was possible that virtual teaching might be part of our post-pandemic future.  Ideas were tossed around about asynchronous learning (which means pre-prepared videos).  I didn't want to even think about the possibility, but I had to adapt to the idea just in case; so I did what I do - I made a list.  I made a list of every topic I teach and what kind of video (document camera over my hand while I worked through a problem, voice-over images, etc.) might be best suited to teach each topic.  When I was done, my list had 118 items.

Thankfully, by the end of that school year, our administration had listened to our feedback and decided not to pursue this virtual plan.  But my list was already made, and I reasoned that it wasn't going to hurt to have a video pool in case I was absent one day or a student had an extended absence.  That summer, I made 63 videos, some of which do double duty because I teach some of the same topics in both 8th grade and physics, making it effectively 78 videos.  I didn't do a lot with them that year, except occasionally send one to someone who was out or asked for extra help.  The following summer, I made 15 or so more.  Last year, I gave everyone access to them on our LMS, and they were used pretty well (more on that in another paragraph), but because I didn't have one for everything, there were still some limitations on how I could use them.  This summer, I set out to finish the rest of the list.  When I left for camp, there were still two left to make, and I finished those the week we got back!  I now how have 118 videos of me teaching concepts (with images) or working example problems. 

So, you may be wondering how they will be used if we don't have a virtual program.  Here are a few ways these videos can be / have been helpful.

1. Mitigating Student Absences - Ask any teacher in America and they will tell you that attendance has become a real problem since the return from the pandemic.  It's not quite as bad at GRACE as other places, but we have certainly seen an upward trend in absences.  Families go on trips more frequently, and more students are on traveling teams that pull them out of class frequently.  When students send me emails informing me that they will be out Thursday and Friday of next week, I am now able to respond with, "Read pages 46-48 and watch the video on Free Fall."  Is it the same as being in class?  Absolutely not; nothing replaces real live teaching with peer interaction and retrieval opportunities with checks for understanding.  But it mitigates the absence.  They aren't coming back with no idea what we did while they were gone, and when they meet with me, it takes less time.
2. Study Help - Some students have used these videos to help them review things as they study.  In particular, the videos with math problems worked out have proved helpful.  They can pause, do step 1, then continue the video to see if they did it correctly.  Instant feedback!  They didn't all use them for this, but I know some of them did because I got an email telling me about an error and a student who thanked me for them in a teacher appreciation week card.
3. Squeezing in Content - At the end of the semester, we are often running out of time to cover everything.  Or sometimes, we are pushing up against a break, and I cut something out in order to end the chapter just before it.  These videos will give me a chance to include some of the less complex things that don't need as much explicit instruction from me by assigning the video as homework.

So, now that I have told you that I'm glad to have these videos at my disposal, let me set your teacher mind at ease.  I am not going to recommend that you do this, and I would actively resist any effort by administrators to push teachers into doing this.  

For one thing, it was something I chose to do with my own time out of fear and chronic stress.  I still don't know if it was a healthy coping mechanism.  I mean, it is certainly healthier than drinking or overeating or compulsive shopping, but anything can be unhealthy.  (I learned that many years ago when I coped with grief by crocheting 28 scarves and giving myself carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist until I was in the craft store and said out loud, "Beth, step away from the yarn. You have a problem.").   Second, to do this right takes many, many hours.  I'm not sure people recognize how long it takes to edit video. It can take an hour to get just ten minutes of completed video.  The quickest ones were the math ones because it was just my hand under a document camera while I talked my way through solving the problem, so they required no editing afterward.  If you want to dip your toe in the water, maybe start with videos like that.  Lastly, video teaching is not the future.  I'm going write that again and use something I hate using, all caps.  VIDEO TEACHING IS NOT THE FUTURE.  We should have learned that from the pandemic, but I'm not sure we did.  As I said earlier, these videos mitigate people's absences, but they are not the same as engaging a class of students in real teaching.  Research shows this, and it IS a hill on which I am willing to die.  Do this if it is something you want to do, and enjoy the benefits I described earlier, but do not pressure yourself to do it because you think you should.