Transcriber: Miloš Milosavljević Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Hi! How are you today?
(Audience) Good.
How are you today?
(Audience) Good!
Good? I already knew you would say 'Good'.
That's what everybody says.
The problem is some of you are lying.
In fact, most people when they're asked
'How are you today', they say 'Good',
and it turns out that most of them are lying.
I know because I've got the data to prove it.
But it's this little lie where we tell each other
we're good when we're not,
it's taken me on an interesting journey into the human mind,
and it's taught me something incredibly important.
It's taught me compassion.
You might be thinking,
how can a lie teach anyone about compassion?
Well, I'm a high school science teacher,
so I watch people interact with each other all day, every day.
And I constantly hear the greeting 'How are you today?'
I don't know that anybody really listens to the answer,
but I began to and I noticed
that everybody always says 'Good,'
just like most of you did.
I figured there is no way
that all of us are good all of the time,
especially my students
because high school can be tough.
So I came up with a plan.
It seems that everybody is so willing to broadcast
their emotions on social media these days.
I wondered if my students would tell the truth
if the computer asked them that question?
So I got a hold of my cousin Justin,
a computer programmer here in Bozeman,
and asked him if he'd be willing
to write an iPad app that will allow me
to ask my students this question,
and hopefully they would tell the truth.
This is obviously a fictitious class,
but when students enter my room,
they walk up to the iPad
and -- let's see, it will be Albert today --
they click on their name,
and then they show me, hopefully, what their mood is.
So they can move this back and forth,
and I think Albert would be thrilled to be here today,
so he'll be at a hundred.
They go and sit down, and the next student comes up
as they enter class.
This actually takes very little time.
And as they're coming into the class,
on my computer, in real time,
this is what I see.
I see the students who have checked in,
I see the mood that they chose for the day,
and then I can see
the average mood of the class,
and then historical over time.
This gives me a really, really interesting picture
into how the class is feeling that day.
So, I envision they should be able to take this data
when I first came up with this plan.
I should be able to take the data
and then compare that data
with things like the temperature, the humidity,
or maybe Moon phases.
And then I'd be able to trick my students
because I'd be able to manipulate my classroom.
So when they come walking in, they'd just stop and say,
"I don't know what it is about this room,
but I could just sit here and learn chemistry all day."
(Laughter)
What I failed to realize was how the app and the journey
that would take me on into the teenage brain,
would forever change my life.
And it would teach me what it means to be human.
I knew I was in trouble the first day I turned on the app.
I was excited, students were coming in,
I was having them sign in,
they were figuring it out.
One young girl, she passed by,
I grabbed her and said, "Hey, how you doing today?",
and she said, "I'm a three,"
(Laughter)
and they said, "A three? That seems awfully low!"
and she started to cry.
There were tears coming down her face,
and she started to tell me about some things
that were going on in her life,
and she stood there like pouring her heart out to me
and all I could think was, "What have I done?"
(Laughter)
I am not trained for this.
(Laughter)
And the very next class period,
four guys come into the class, four football players.
They run up to the iPad,
they are like, "Whoa, we can put in a number."
First one says, "I am a 97,"
next one says, "I'm a 100,"
next one, "I'm a 100."
Forth one didn't say anything, he went and sat down,
but after what happened in first period,
I figured I could use something positive.
I grabbed the first three guys and I'm like, "Guys,
sounds like you're in a good mood. What's going on?"
They said, "Big game tonight.
You're going to be there, aren't you?",
and I'm like, "Yeah",
And I made my way over to the fourth one.
And I said, "Hey, big game tonight. How you doing?"
He said, "I'm a 47."
I suck at football, I'm not going to get to play anyway.
I just wish the season would be over."
I am thinking, "In only two class periods
(Laughter)
I have just experienced every known human emotion
with my students", and remember,
this isn't what was supposed to happen.
I was supposed to make sense of the world,
not clouding my own understanding of it.
So after I got a pretty good stream of data here,
I figured, well, what does anybody do
when they get a whole bunch of data?
They make a graph.
(Laughter)
So I made a graph. The math teachers were proud.
Then I figured maybe I can make sense
of what's going on by the temperature.
You know, we've dealt with a lot of that this year.
It's been cold this year. This was a couple of years ago
and I ran some statistics, I didn't find anything I really thought
was going to change the world and I said what about humidity
because I could put some humidifiers in my room,
or I can just dry... I don't know.
And... nothing.
Nothing that's going to change the world.
And then I just started reaching for anything I could think of
to help understand my students, and help me understand
why their moods were fluctuating so much.
I grabbed anything I could think of,
and the more statistics I ran, the more I began to realize
that it wasn't the correlations in the data that really mattered.
It was the students putting the data into the machine
that really mattered.
See, I had a young person
who put 0 for several weeks, and then stopped showing up to my class.
And when he came back to school
I pulled him aside and said,
"Hey, we missed you, where've you been?"
And he went on to tell me how he tried to take his own life,
and he was out getting counseling for a couple of weeks
trying to get help and put things right.
And my heart just sank. I was sick to my stomach.
I had seen his zeros on the screen
and I didn't do anything about it
because I didn't know what to do.
And I didn't sleep that night,
and the next day when he came into class,
I brought him up to my computer
and I said, "You know, if I see your mood go down to zero again,
would it be alright if I just checked in with you
to see how you're doing?"
And he seemed like that was a pretty good idea.
And I didn't know it, but that day
transformed that young man's life.
And I wouldn't know it till the end of the year.
But he never put a mood number below 80 again.
He became one of the most energetic
science students I had all year,
and at the end of the year he told me something
that forever changed my life.
He said, "Mr Beals, it's nice to know that someone cares."
And he's not the only student that's told me that
since I turned this thing on.
I could tell you a story of the young person
whose graph was slowly going down over time,
and when I approached them and asked them what was going on,
they explained to me that an eating disorder
was basically eating them alive,
and they couldn't get it under control.
Or the student who pulled me aside one day
to explain why their mood number was so low.
They wanted to reassure me
that it wasn't my class that was causing it,
(Laughter)
but it was some really horrific things
that were going on outside of class.
You see there's a million things
that seems that can affect our mood:
Happiness, anger,
hunger, tiredness,
or maybe you suck at football and it's game day,
and game day can ruin your whole day.
So, I think it's important for all of us
to remember that each of us does have a number,
and that number lives inside of us.
And I found that that number can
and it does change throughout the day.
So if you want to change people's lives,
start by changing people's numbers.
And what can you do to change people's numbers?
Well, I've found that a little bit of compassion,
and a little bit of kindness goes a long way.
But some people struggle with those two things.
I found something I think that all of us are capable of:
start with something simple like a compliment.
And if this real data from one of my students
doesn't show you the power of a compliment,
I don't know what would.
So, as we part ways today, remember
that it does no good to say,
"Hi! How are you today?"
Odds are the other person is just going to lie to you.
Instead, try something like
"Hi! What's your number today?"
But if you do, be prepared for the consequences,
because their number might just change your life.
Thank you.
(Applause)