INTERVIEW SERIES: Lensyl

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT [edited for clarity]

Lensyl: “My teachers influenced me a lot, growing up. And my friends. We would—so, since I lived fairly far away from school, we had to get there early to beat the traffic and all that, so we’d get there about an hour before school started. We spent that time playing cricket and soccer, something like that. But, you know, when you’re playing soccer in Trinidad, you’re ten degrees north of the equator, so it gets pretty hot, and so you’d have to have this cool-down time after you played but before classes started so you could make sure your uniform was dry and everything. That was always a good time to talk. You’d sit at the top of the hill, and get the breeze coming through. It was a good place to talk and philosophize.”

Do you remember what kinds of things you liked to philosophize about?

L: “Pretty broad array. I remember there were things like race that came up…in Trinidad, I think forty percent of the population is from East India…another forty percent, Africa…and then twenty percent mixed. So, you know, race relations in Trinidad still are significant. The political parties are sort of race-based and all that—well, at least, they were when I was growing up. And, you know, like everywhere else, color is how people interact, so that’s one of the things that came up that we’d talk about a fair amount. Because, again, the kids who would be there doing stuff in the morning were a fairly mixed group and it was very interesting to talk about those things.

[Nowadays,] philosophically speaking, we’re in a very interesting time. There’s lot’s of change going on, particularly with technology, and as a teacher, I think there’s a lot of change that should be going on with the way we teach and how students use things like the internet. Students use these scientific calculators a lot, and I’m beginning to wonder, why? Because we do have scientific calculators and stopwatches and all sorts of interesting sensors on our phones. We could be using that. I’m sure you guys use Google translate in your language classes. I think one of the big challenges in teaching, but really in general, is how do we adapt and use the resources that have become available in the last twenty years? A lot of people grew up with certain things, and they adapt to certain technology, but the way they use it is very much influenced by the way they grew up and what they’re used to. Now that we have this new technology, how many things could we be doing that we’re not doing yet? A lot. And so when I’m teaching, I want students to have devices. But then, you know, it becomes important for them to be trained to use it responsibly. It’s important for them to have that trust so that they can have access to all this information at our fingertips. Memorization becomes a little bit less important, and using the tools that we have [becomes more important]. This ties directly into the increased automation, in terms of robotics, AI, other computer programs, and so on, that can start doing a lot of human jobs. We should be taking that and seeing how we can build on it rather than worrying about how it’s preventing us from doing stuff. It’s giving us more opportunity. The question is if we’re actually taking it, and what do we need to do to be prepared to take it?

So, we’re living in a wonderful, fascinating time as far as technology, and it will be interesting to see how things continue to change.”

Where do you see yourself in all that? How do you think your role will change?

L: “I’ll be keeping up to date with all the technology. Using it. And, again, a lot of [my role] is trying to train students on how to use technology responsibly. Cause, you know, we have to teach things like how to safely navigate things like giving Facebook or something permissions to share my data. That can become an issue because how do we judge what a reliable source on the internet? What I have to teach is a higher level than what we had to teach ten years ago, which requires keeping up. One of my pastimes is creating websites and interactive things like that which helps me keep abreast of where a lot of technology is. So I want to share that with students.

Another technology development is the ‘Internet of Things’—have you heard of that?”

No…?

L: “Well, [an example is] a refrigerator that has a device capable of connecting to the internet on it. Also I recently got a thermostat that detects when I’m close enough to home to turn on the heat, which is really nice. But I have to worry about security for that. But, can we build our own Internet of Things? The raspberry pi Door-Inator downstairs in the basementnasium—that is an Internet of Things thing. Oh—did I show you the crock pot? It’s out in the dining room. I’ve converted it into a sous vide cooker, using a raspberry pi, and you control it from the website! See, this is a very crude version of what people are doing with smart homes and such. But I think part of what I’m trying to do is having all the microelectronics and teaching students how to use them to make their own things so they better understand how things work.

Another key thing I philosophize about is, are we using technology, or are we capable of creating technology? How much do we use versus how much do we create? Are you a consumer or a creator? Could you use it to create something if you needed to? These are things I think everyone should have a little bit of familiarity with. Everyone should learn how to program a little bit, just because it’s everywhere, and if you understand the logic of it, it opens up a lot of spaces for other things, and it does help you think about the challenges that we face like with privacy and so on. And when you hear those arguments, it helps you understand them a little bit better, I think.”

Lastly—and this is unrelated—but I have to ask, how did tea become your drink of choice? 

L: “Well, growing up, [my drink of choice] was hot chocolate. I drank a lot of it in the morning before we’d go to school. Sometimes that was the only breakfast I had. You know how it is, when you get to high school. You don’t have time for anything else. And you’re not really hungry in the morning, either. So I’d usually just go for a cup of hot chocolate. And, you know, in Trinidad, we had cocoa trees in the back of the house, basically. Sometimes my parents would actually make cocoa, themselves, or just buy stuff that was [inevitably] close to the source. But the other big thing was tea. A lot of tea bags, which were okay…but I guess in graduate school, there was this place in Minnesota called The Tea Source, where you can get this very nice, loose-leaf tea. So I’ve always been drinking tea, but once you can find a good source of tea, it makes a huge difference. Right now, [my drink of choice] is a cup of tea with milk and sugar, instead of coffee.”