ON 7 GENERATION CONCEPT

I had the idea for a long time and it took a long time for the software, hardware and graphics capabilities to catch up. Because it’s only been within the last decade or less that it’s been feasible to do something like this on a computer and have it not cost that much money.

María put it very brilliantly — there comes a point when kids have this attitude: “I’m not doing my homework and you can’t make me.” And the truth is: you can’t make them. You can take away their Nintendo, you can tell them they can’t leave their room, whatever — but you can’t make them do it.

There’s a number of reasons that kids just absolutely refuse to study: sometimes it’s they think they can’t do it. You hear people say, “Oh, I don’t have a math brain” or whatever. Which drives me crazy, because it’s just not true. But some people are convinced that they can’t do it.

Or they think there’s never going to be any use for it. Or they think it’s boring and they don’t have the discipline to do things that are boring and difficult because they’ve never learned that.

But none of those reasons are good enough, because not learning those things is going to be a barrier your whole life.

That’s where the 7 Generation name came from. We spun off of a company founded on an American Indian reservation. And a lot of the tribes have this idea that you should think about the consequences of your decision — not just today, but for seven generations hence.

Dr. Carol Davis, who’s one of our head cultural consultants up at the Turtle Mountain Reservation. She’s also a big advocate against fracking — taking oil out of the ground that way. She says because three generations from now, they’re not going to be able to drink oil. And if it’s damaging the water… So that’s one way of looking at it.

With us, with education: if you can change somebody’s life by getting them a better education, it doesn’t just change their life, but it changes their kid’s life and their kids’ life.

Because what happens often is you have somebody who maybe they’re thinking they’re ok in school. Then they run into some concept they have trouble with, whether it’s fractions or decimals or perimeter or whatever it is.

And then they start thinking, “Well, I’m just not very good at this.”

And math is cumulative. If you don’t quite get the causes of the Civil War, that doesn’t mean that you can’t understand the Vietnam War. In math, if you didn’t get decimals, you’re never going to understand probability. You’re never going to do that well in statistics.

So often when people say, “I don’t have that math brain” — what it really is: you don’t have the bases that would make it possible for you to understand whatever it is you’re learning today, because you missed it somewhere along the line.

What happens is people start thinking, “I’m not good at math” — there isn’t any level of schooling where you don’t need math. I see people who don’t get into a good college because they did poorly on the math-part of the SAT, or they did poorly in their math courses. Or they drop out of community college because they couldn’t pass their math course.

And that has a negative impact on the trajectory of your whole life. Because then they can’t get as good of a job; then they can’t live in as good of a neighborhood; then their kids can’t live in as good of a neighborhood.

But what if we could change that?

What if we could change it so you kind of figure out: “Maybe math isn’t so bad. Maybe I’ll stay in school and I’ll graduate. My mom really wants me to; my teachers really want me to. And yeah, it would be better for me if I did.” Then you stick it out and you go to college and get a decent job.

So intervening at those points where people are having problems can change their whole life. And like I said, it will change their kids’ lives.