P.J. Karafiol, Chicago Public High School Principal

 

92-149. PJ Karafiol

SPEAKERS

PJ Karafiol, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with PJ Karafiol. PJ, welcome to the show.

 

PJ Karafiol  00:15

Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

 

Will Bachman  00:18

All right, so before I get to my normal question, just upfront, your given name is Paul, and we were talking beforehand, you said, no, no, it’s PJ. I’ve been PJ since birth. Tell us the story about that, and then we’ll get

 

PJ Karafiol  00:33

into your so it’s kind of funny. My father, my father’s father was a communist freedom fighter in Eastern Europe before and during World War Two, and so I was named Paul after him. And then my mother’s grandfather was Joseph. So I got their names. And then my father’s father had passed away before I was born. And then once my father was holding this baby, he couldn’t call this baby by the name of this much, much larger than life figure, not just in his life, but sort of in the world and and he didn’t want to call me Joseph because my name was Paul Joseph. And Paul Joseph seemed like a really, long name for a small baby, but they were stuck, and for about three weeks they didn’t call me anything, is my understanding. And then we live in Chicago, and so it being Chicago, and Alderman was indicted, and my understanding is the alderman’s name was something along the lines of PJ O’Flannigan. My parents were like, problem solved.

 

Will Bachman  01:39

It’s interesting how there’s certain combinations of letters that seem to go together. As you know, nobody would call me wh like that, that just doesn’t ring off the tongue. But PJ worked pretty well. So it

 

PJ Karafiol  01:54

does, all right, it does. And it’s funny because all growing up, I told people I would switch when I got to college, and then when I got to college, I had a few friends who are already at Harvard ahead of me and in our class, you know that I knew from various things, and so they already called me PJ, and I was like, why would I bother changing? So, all right,

 

Will Bachman  02:09

just roll with it. Okay. So PJ, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

PJ Karafiol  02:18

It’s a long and strange journey. I think probably that’s true of most of your guests. If you had told me 34 years ago or 33 years ago that I would be a high school principal, I would have told you you were crazy. That’s where I am now. When I graduate from college, I had managed to sucker the University of Chicago into letting me study simultaneously in the law school for a JD and in the philosophy department for a PhD. And my reasoning to them was that I wanted to do both, and maybe become an academic. And internally, there was a little bit of that, but mostly I just wanted to figure out which one of them I liked better. So so I studied the law and I had a great time in law school. Actually enjoyed the classes a lot. I did pretty well. I enjoyed philosophy graduate school. I did enjoy the classes so much. But I realized over the course of two years that the answer to the question of which one did I like better was neither one Okay, and so. So after two years, I just made a decision. I had to get out, and I spent a year cleaning up my requirements, and I only had one marketable skill at that point. I’d spent almost every summer since high school teaching at summer math programs, and so I went and through a series of crazy cosmic coincidences, landed a teaching job at Phillips Andover, teaching math. So I taught there for two years, and then after that, came back to Chicago. I taught on the west side. I was one of the teachers who helped start a new public school that’s become a little bit of a juggernaut. I used to say that it was Chicago’s equivalent of Stuyvesant, but better, and Walter Payton college prep, and then for the last 10 years, I’ve been principal here at Lakeview High School, which is in what we call a neighborhood High School in Chicago, which means it’s basically open admission, and it’s on Chicago’s north side. I’m a lifelong South sider, so for Chicagoans, that’s a big deal, and it’s been great. You know, outside of that, I mean, that’s sort of the job piece outside of that, it’s been super exciting. My very first class at Harvard was justice, which is where I met my eventually wife Alison Clark,

 

PJ Karafiol  04:43

she will tell you that we did not get along, which is accurate.

 

PJ Karafiol  04:51

Our first year, I had this unpleasant habit of acting like I knew everything. And some people would say, still. That habit, but any case, it was different from what she knew. So We butted heads a lot of times in just a section. And then it wasn’t until our really our junior and senior, that we became close friends. And then it wasn’t until after college that we started dating and got married. But we’re still married. We have three children, and, you know, I left math teaching, but along the way, I started a nonprofit math enrichment organization called math circles of Chicago, which has grown and which is, I describe it as my fourth child.

 

Will Bachman  05:36

Okay, okay, so a lot to a lot to explore. First, I’m always interested by crazy coincidences, so tell us about the crazy coincidences that led you to teach at Phillips and over.

 

PJ Karafiol  05:51

I’m glad you asked it is it is crazy? In fact, my entire teaching journey, it’s hard to look at it and not sort of see some weird cosmic planet work no matter what your belief system is. So I told you I’d made at the beginning of my what would have been my third year of this combined JD, PhD. I’d made this decision that I was going to go into math teaching because that was my marketable skill, and I knew I liked it. I didn’t know that I was going to do it long term, but I figured I would give it a try. I didn’t have a teaching certificate or anything like that, and that meant that I couldn’t get a job at any public school in Chicago. And in Chicago, there are very few private schools that aren’t Catholic schools and and, you know, for a variety of reasons, I wasn’t 100% sure I felt comfortable teaching in a Catholic school environment, but school environment. You know, it certainly wasn’t where I’d come from. And so I was really striking out, and I was getting no jobs in Chicago. And then, very sadly, one of my I found out that one of my former teachers from high school, who had been really very influential to me. He had passed away suddenly, and the same time that I had graduated and gone to Harvard, he had left my school to run a math and science program for minority students at Phillips Academy Andover. So they were having a memorial service for him on the campus in University of Chicago, and I’m like, Well, I have a suit, and he was my teacher, and I miss him, so I’ll go to memorial service, you know, sort of not quite out of obligation, but you know, so I went, and then I didn’t know anybody there, except for a couple of my other former teachers. And we were walking to the reception with some people who turned out to be faculty in Andover. And one of the Andover faculty said to one of my teachers and counselors from from my high school, which is a public high school on the South Side Kenwood, they said, you know, I’m looking for someone who can teach chaos theory this summer. And Ms Brown looked right at me and said, PJ, you could do that, can’t you? And in fact, I could. I had taught Chaos Theory several times. So I said, Yes, I could, but actually I’m looking for an academic year job. And so then at the reception, this again, older guy I’ve never met before pulls me to the side, and he’s asking me all these questions. It turns out he’s the dean of faculty, and he’s interviewing me for a job. Two weeks later, they fly me out, they give me this job as a math teacher, which is fantastic. I found out about six months later that 180 people had applied for that job. So for that job. It was incredible. So I think Mr. Cheryl must have been super excited that at his memorial this happened.

 

Will Bachman  08:30

So that that is, that is pretty wild. So you taught there for a couple years. And I mean, had you gone? No, you hadn’t. You went to school in Chicago. So I

 

PJ Karafiol  08:42

went to a public neighborhood High School in Chicago, just down the street from my house. You know, obviously I knew of PA from, from folks at at Harvard, and my roommate for several years, John Finley, was a, was a, was forgotten. So I I sort of I was adjacent to that world, but not in it. And when I got there, I discovered I really liked working with the young people, and I really especially the boys in my dorm. I found that that opportunity to develop relationships outside of class was super meaningful. And I love teaching math way more than I thought I would. And I mean, I thought I was going to like it, but I loved it, and I thought it was really great, and it was a really nice place to start, because the classes were small and the kids are relatively well behaved, and I had lots of people around me for support. I mean, I often tell people that your first year teaching in sort of a standard school system is really just, it’s just brutal. And I was fortunate. I didn’t have that, that sort of, I got to dip my toes. I didn’t have that full on, not even the deep end, throwing off the polar ice cap into the water and try to swim.

 

Will Bachman  09:50

Yeah. Now I was a public school kid. You were a public school kid. What surprised you about actually teaching at a private school? What was maybe different than your ex?

 

PJ Karafiol  10:00

Expectations. Um, you know, nothing’s not much surprised me at that time, I was kind of a weird kid, and I I was fortunate to go to public schools that accommodated many of my weirdnesses in a lot of ways.

 

Will Bachman  10:21

So I’m sorry. I can’t let that pass. I can’t What were, what were some of your weirdnesses?

 

PJ Karafiol  10:26

Oh, like, I mean, I mean, I was this funny kid. I got, I would get, like, C’s and regular classes. I would get B’s and honors classes, and I got straight A’s in my AP classes. Like, I just, like, if I was bored with something, I just could barely make myself do it. But if it was hard or challenging, that was great, right? So when I did buy my senior year, I sort of figured that out. So I was taking this economics class. It was my junior senior year, and like, so I actually read Marx in my economics class. I was the only high school kid in the class who read Marx. But like, that was what was interesting. What was interesting, right? So that was what what I did. And, you know, my high school, I had really terrific teachers who really pushed me to think for myself, which I think is what a good high school, public or private, does, but I don’t think it’s everybody’s picture of a public high school. So when I got to Andover, I saw a lot of that. I mean, the biggest difference was that the classes were really small and that the kids had this, were this sort of odd in between space, a lot of the day where they were at school, but they were not at school, if that makes sense, like they weren’t supposed to be in class or supposed to be someplace. They were just sort of hanging out, but they were at school, and so we had this weird supervisory kind of role, where, again, like, I was responsible for the kids in my dorm, but like, it wasn’t expected. I was monitoring all them because they were all in different rooms, and whatever, you know, so I don’t know, it didn’t feel as different. It didn’t feel as different as maybe I would have imagined it looking back on it now that I’ve been teaching in public schools for or administrator now for 25 years, I would say that they had pretty good systems and structures. I would say that at a large public high school, you have to have a lot of systems and structures, and I felt like there was a little bit more winging it at Andover at that time, but, but they knew what they were doing. I mean, that’s the biggest difference, honestly, was just this, I think, a very, very clear sense from the get go at Andover that we are creating an intentional community of human beings to try to develop not just certain academic qualities, but certain personal qualities as well. And I think every school should aspire to that, but I’m not sure that every school is as cognizant of that. And I think that at a boarding school you have to be, because you really are literally responsible for the kids 24 hours

 

Will Bachman  13:00

a day. Yeah, let’s talk about Chicago, and let’s talk about the school that was the I didn’t catch the name of it, but the sort of equivalent of the Stuyvesant of the world, better, better, better, according to some and so I’m in New York City, so I’m familiar with Stuyvesant and Bronx Science and those but tell me about the school that you were part of helping to start. I think you said so. Tell

 

PJ Karafiol  13:25

us so about 1998 then Mayor Daley realized that to keep affluent and frankly, to keep white families in the city, he needed to create really strong public high schools. And at that time, we didn’t know as much as we know now about how to take a school and make it better. And so his response was to say we needed these drawing public high schools. Was that we’re going to create these magnet schools. And so he created the first one was called Northside college prep. There had been a couple where you had to take a test to get in, but it wasn’t as much of a big deal. But he created Northside college prep, and then we were number two on his list, which was Walter Payton college prep. So we opened in August of 2000 and when we opened, we only had freshmen. So I was one of three math teachers. I taught algebra and geometry all day. Everybody was 14. There was this moment in the like late October, early November, where all the boys started growing little fuzzy mustaches across their faces. It was like a rash was spreading across the class. And, you know, I really found myself wishing for, like a 17 year old I could talk to. They were also young. They’re great, but they were so young and and so my partner in crime for many things, including my current venture, this Math Circle, Doug O’Rourke and I founded this math department, and we did a lot of things differently from what I had done at other schools. And so, you know, one thing that we started right off was that we used not just common tests. Quizzes, but common lessons. So you know, on Tuesday, if you walked into my class, you walked into Doug’s class, you’d see us to, you know, we’re both teaching algebra, you’d see us teaching basically the same lesson. Now, oddly enough, it isn’t the same lesson when two different people teach it, just like, you know, like the same piece of jazz isn’t the same piece. If you know, Charlie Parker plays it and you somebody else plays it, they’re totally different. Totally different. So it was sort of different that way, but, but, but we were operating off this idea that we were going to always be in step, always be in sync on our policies. And it really meant that in the time that I was working with Doug, I grew tremendously, just because we’re always thinking and talking about teaching and learning, right? So, you know, oh, this lesson didn’t really work. Well, why didn’t work? Well, well, what could we do better next time? Then we take notes, and then the next time we taught the lesson, we thought we looked back, really, it didn’t work so well. So we make it better, or, you know, conversely, wow, that lesson went way better than we thought it was going to go. And we’re going to do that again,

 

Will Bachman  16:02

and did that become sort of the standard practice in that math department?

 

PJ Karafiol  16:07

Okay, yeah, and they still share assessments, lesson plans and everything, and it’s still a site for a lot of professional development. So the school grew, and it was funny, because the first year we were open, we got all these kids, you know, we were an unknown quantity. The first time I visited the school, I had to wear a hard hat and climb a ladder. There weren’t even stairs. And our first events for families were off site because you couldn’t get in the building. We got our certificate of occupancy at five in the morning on the first day of school. So little bit a little bit of a nail biter. And then, you know, three years later, those freshmen were graduating, and through the year, their parents kept coming back and saying, Thank you, thank you, and talking to us about, you know, their child’s journey, and every single one of them said the same thing, which is, I told my child not to go to this school, and they said they wanted to go someplace new. And it was a really great group of kids. For that reason, they all had this sort of pioneer instinct. They’re all in an odd way, a little bit rebellious. I mean, not like, you know, in sort of like a punk rock kind of way, but more like, I’m going to do my thing kind of way, which I guess is punk rock, the essence of punk rock. So, so in any case, they were, but they weren’t like all amazing academic students, right? Because we had no reputation at that time. And then by about 10 years in, it essentially became the case that if you had a B in seventh grade, you could not get into the school. So the school now is the most selective school in in Chicago, and it remains true that there’s a complicated system in terms of there’s a complicated system for admissions in terms of what neighborhood you live in that tries to make it a little bit more equitable. But the long and short of it is that if you live in a reasonably affluent neighborhood and you have a B, you don’t get it.

 

Will Bachman  18:04

Now, what accounts for would you say is the secret sauce that accounts for the success of this school, is it? Is it like just selection effects, like you’re bringing in the A students, so of course, they’re going to be smart and study hard and do well, or is there something special about the teaching and the content of the school itself and the approach that is distinctive.

 

PJ Karafiol  18:30

I’m really glad you asked that. I think it varies a lot, and I could really primarily only speak to my department in math. We did teach very distinctively and very differently from the way that I’d ever been taught, and it was very much way I wanted to teach. And again, my practice grew and developed tremendously. I was teaching there for 15 years, and by the person I was 15, year 15 was very different from the person I was at year one. But I think a lot of it is selection effect, and I think it’s, it’s really hard when you have kids who are really good at doing school. And I think I really want to make that, that distinction. I think we look at the kids at the selected enrollment schools in Chicago or New York or wherever, and we’re like, well, they’re smarter, I don’t think necessarily smarter, but they are really good at school, right? So you give them eight classes a day, or seven classes a day, and they’ve got homework in every class, and they’ve got to move from period to period, and if they have a really frustrating quiz, they’re not going to take it out of the next teacher, and they’re going to get that work done, and all those things. They’re good at, all the pieces that make school doable. And if they’re not good at themselves, they have a family structure or structure outside of school that’s supporting them and doing those things effectively, right? So parents who every night, the routine is, you come home, you open up your plan, or you go through the planner with mom. This is what’s due Dad, it out or with dad and so forth, right? And so, so, you know, I’ve now been at this neighborhood, so. School for 10 years, and it really frustrates me that people often classify the kids at my former school and other schools as smart compared to my students. My students are really smart. They’re often disorganized, which I frankly sympathize with because I was pretty disorganized, because I could get away with it. I mean, I was like, I was good enough at keeping track of stuff in my head that I didn’t have to write anything down. Anything down for a very long time, and then when I got to a place where I had to write things down, it was like a near disaster. I didn’t know how to do it yet.

 

Will Bachman  20:29

Well, let’s talk about the neighborhood school where you are currently principal, and I’m going to ask the most ignorant question of the hour, which is like, what does a principal actually do?

 

PJ Karafiol  20:42

Well, that’s, you know, that’s nobody knows that. So that’s actually your your Socrates in your ignorance, so that you know that you don’t know this. So, so my school is 13 150 young people, grades nine through 12. I have about 150 staff members. All in all, we’re about, if dollars make sense in this context for about an $18 million organization, probably a little more, because some of the costs associated with the building and so forth are carried by the district directly, and I never see them. So my kids come a few come from my neighborhood, which is Lake Lake View, which is right next to the Cubs at Wrigley Field. There are, they’re great partners of ours, and I really appreciate them. And in the playoffs, Go Cubs, but, but, but 80% of our kids come from outside the neighborhood, and they come from all over the city, largely because they perceive Lake View to be better than their neighborhood school. So this is odd sort of hierarchy about it. So our population is about 85% low income. It’s about 90% black or Hispanic, mostly mostly Hispanic and lot a lot of first generation students. Almost all our students are first generation college going. And a lot of recently, a number of of refugee students, which has been a challenge for us, because, despite the fact that the overall demographics haven’t changed that much until recently, most of our Latino Latino students actually spoke pretty good English, so we didn’t have to really focus on dual language or bilingual instruction in the way that we now do. You know, I wanted to say a couple more things about the school, and then I’ll segue into what I do. So last September, you know, so September of 2024, 75% of our class of 2024 landed in college, like actually successfully enrolled and showed up on campus.

 

Will Bachman  23:00

What percent? 75 75% yes, that’s pretty high for a population that’s 85% low income, and we work really

 

PJ Karafiol  23:11

hard at it. Wow. Okay, now that includes city colleges. I want to be really clear, right? So two year colleges count, yeah, sure. And for a lot of kids, that’s a way to get a certificate to be in some kind of trade Chicago’s done a great job with the City Colleges of having them provide those trade credentials, both cheaper than traditional trade schools. And you know, then again, you’re in college credit. So it’s like a win win, but 75% landed in college. Over half of my seniors are taking an AP class, you know? So, so we’re doing a lot of things that I think people don’t, don’t expect from neighborhood schools, and I think that’s really exciting. And again, we’re relatively non selective, right? So it’s basically a lottery to get in if you don’t live in the neighborhood. And of course, if you do live in the neighborhood, then you automatically get in. So the only qualification is you have to be able to afford a house or an apartment in Lakeview, which is not trivial. What I do all day, I spend some time with students, which I love. It is in some ways the most meaningful and least effective part of my day. I often talk about, like the starfish story, where, you know, the guy’s walking down the beach, the kids walking on the beach, and they see the starfish, and they’re throwing the starfish back. And the old guy says, you know, why are you doing that? You can’t make a difference. The kid grabs the fish and says, you know, I made a difference to that one and throws it back in. Like, for me, I love that. I mean, I love making a difference in that one kid, but I have 1300 50. Of them, and I can’t do it myself, so I spend a lot of my time really working with teams within the building to try to make things go better. So a typical day, I might meet with the chairman of the art department, as I did today. And we’re talking about how they’re trying to make progress visible for every student every day. And our art department is phenomenal. We send kids to, you know, school, the Art Institute, on full ride scholarships every year. They really produce some incredible artists. So working with them, like, what? What would it take? What helping, helping these department chairs, or whatever, develop their vision of what would my department look like if I could make wave a magic wand, and then how could we get closer to that? I do a fair amount of classroom observation and teacher evaluation, so going and just watching classes and then giving teachers either informal or formal feedback on that. There are a lot of other teams in the building that I work with that aren’t academic teams. So, for example, I work with our counseling department. So every Thursday, I go to the counseling department meeting and we and we talk through all the issues that are going on with counseling. And you know, I’m really proud of that 75% it was not 75% 10 years ago, right? So we had to learn how to do things differently as a team to make that happen. And so that work happened in those meetings with it, with the counseling department, you know? But the other funny thing is, I’m I and my assistant principals, I’m fortunate to have three amazing ones. We’re the only people in the building who have no job descriptions, so we wind up doing a lot of the stuff that falls in the cracks, right? So that’s like, that might be, you know what? The deans are really busy dealing with this. That the other situation, there’s this kid has been wandering the halls today. Okay, bring him to my office. I’m going to talk to the kid. Or it might be, oh, for some reason, this thing went sideways. We don’t have a sub period seven. That’s very rare, but it happens. And then, okay, Mr. Craft Hill is teaching biology period seven, right? Or I wander into period seven and there is a sub, but I look at what the work the kids are doing, and I’m like, Guys, let’s, let’s talk about this a little bit more, right? So that’s, that’s fun, right? Or negotiating with downtown to get, you know, more money, more positions, you know, resources for the students. I do a lot of we have a lot of partnerships that really support the work that we do with the school. And so some of those I directly, you know, care for, and some of those are other people’s responsibility. It’s incredibly busy, and it’s incredibly busy, incredibly challenging and incredibly rewarding, right? Because, because, like, as a teacher, I would have this really awesome experience with 120 kids every day, or 140 kids, and I’d be like, yes, I’d make the difference. And I was right, absolutely, but, but, you know, down the hall they might be in some class that was like, I don’t know, like, really boring, and like wasn’t super wasn’t developing their ability to think like citizens, for example, or whatever. And so I couldn’t do much about that as a teacher. But you know, you know, beginning of last year I we switched around, so I took Social Studies Department beginning of last year, and I said, Your challenge is, challenge is we are in the most interesting time in US history in at least the last 100 years. That may not be a good thing. It may be a bad thing. We’re not going to discuss that, but nobody can argue that it is, from the point of view of someone teaching us history or civics or even World Studies, the most interesting time. And so your job is to bring that into your classroom every day, right? And so we’re doing some things differently in social studies, right? My biology teachers have gotten super empowered. They’re doing really cool stuff. They’re doing an entire unit on the biology of vaccination so the kids actually understand what immunization does. And they started off watching a movie of someone describing her two brothers dying in the same weekend of polio, right? So it’s being able to have that impact just outside of my classroom, and being able to develop teams to do that, right? So it’s not 140 kids having a great math experience, it’s 13 150 kids having a really good math experience, and that’s been super exciting.

 

Will Bachman  29:00

Talk to me about your you were a you were studying philosophy the graduate level. So you’re, you know, someone who’s, I’m sure, reflective. And talk to me about as a leader, how you have evolved over your time as principal, and what are some things that, maybe, that you did when you were early on in your tenders principle that you now maybe cringe about a little bit, or that you would have done differently today, I’m curious kind of how you’ve what you’ve learned over this period, as you know, from a leadership perspective.

 

PJ Karafiol  29:41

When I Yeah, that’s great. When I started out as principal, there’s always a lot of sort of, there’s always a lot of competing interests and a lot of competing priorities. And I think my vision at that time involved sort. Are balancing a lot of those, and also I would get, I would allow myself to get very caught up in things that ultimately I didn’t have a lot of influence over and and my mindset around those things has really shifted. So you know, I was thinking about this this morning, like if you asked me what my philosophy was, what I was going to what I was going to say, or something like that. And I think really, it’s come down to and I stole this phrasing from Sister Henrietta Poirier, who dead man walking. But you either believe that every human being is fundamentally wonderful and incapable of tremendous growth and development, or you don’t right, and if you believe that as your core belief, then even when that adult or young person is driving you absolutely bananas, you’re like, This is a moment with this person. But that doesn’t define who they are, and hopefully that doesn’t define who I am, right? I mean, I’m not always at my best in those moments.

 

PJ Karafiol  31:11

And sort of keeping coming back to that unshakable belief that everyone is capable of tremendous growth and development no matter who they are, no matter where they are, and then. So what that means is there are a lot of things I care less about, and I care less about balancing. And also I’ve gotten to a place where, like, there are certain things I’m just not going to fight about, and I’ll be sneaky and creative and try to, I mean, I’ll fight like, how heck for my kids in our school, in my school, but you know, Alison jokes that, you know, there’s a little hole I live under a rock, and there’s a little hole that she feeds me information through, like, I don’t have brain capacity to worry about much about what’s going outside my building. Inside my building, I have a lot of things to worry about, and I worry about them pretty effectively.

 

Will Bachman  32:08

I hope. What have you learned in particular about selecting talent? I imagine that you’re involved in the hiring process for new teachers. What do you do differently today than you did when you started as principal, yeah, well,

 

PJ Karafiol  32:28

yeah, it’s funny you asked that, because actually aligns a lot with this outside of school, work I’ve done with math circles, and I guess I would say, I don’t Try to select talent. I try to select people who love kids and show a real excitement about improving their practice. And sorry, you can tell we’re in a major street from all the sirens going by, right? We really are in the city. So I try some people who really love high school kids, because you have to really love being around them to be around them eight hours a day.

 

Will Bachman  33:08

That begs the question of, how do you tell like, someone can say, Oh, I love kids. I love kids. But like, what evidence do you look for? How do you Yeah, I

 

PJ Karafiol  33:17

asked them what they love, and you got a couple of different answers that are interesting, right? You got some people will say, Well, I like high school kids better than middle school kids, which is kind of like a tallest midget context, or those kids are more mature than middle school kids. Like, really, that’s like, rock bottom right? That’s like saying somebody’s smarter than a planaria. I have whole complications with the word smart, right? You know, so, so, so they’ll say that, or they’ll say, Well, I really want to make a difference. And I’m like, great, you could be a pediatrician and make a lot of difference. Why do you want to be a teacher? Why spend your time around kids? And what I want to hear them say is something like, young people are amazing, capable beings that can do these incredible things if we kind of support them and get out of their way at the same time, you know, a pivotal event for me, for me think in this sort of development thought process, was visiting the Bay of Pigs Museum in Cuba, which I did about like nine years ago When Cuba was open and they had this one little exhibit about how Castro made the island literate. When Castro took over in Cuba, only about 20% of adults could read, and five years later, 80% of adults could read. And here was his strategy. He knew that he couldn’t pull adults to go do that, because the adults who could read were all busy doing the many things that required adult readers, right? He didn’t have any extras, so he sent, literally, high school students, 1314, 15 year olds, off into villages by themselves for a year with a lantern and a book on how to teach reading. And they taught villages how to read. And. I was like, Wow, here in Chicago, we think volunteering at the pelt shop pet shelter counts as community service, right? Yeah, I cleaned out some cages. Well, I taught an entire village how to read living by myself in the mountain with no communication with my family, wow, right? So, like, like, young people could do those things. And so I want to hear a candidate say something like that, and then I want, I mean, I’m looking for a minimal level of competence, right? And a pretty high, minimal level of competence. I don’t want to, don’t want to short change it, right? I want somebody who’s actually good at making class work and can do all the things, because they’re about 200 things you have to do, teaching us an insanely hard job, but But fundamentally, like, I would rather pick somebody who has a little bit more to work on and who shows in the conversation with me and with our teams that they’re really reflective and that they really want to grow and develop, then pick someone who’s like, yeah, I’ve thought about this for 20 years, and I know exactly what I’m doing, because that person the exactly what they’re doing works well where they were before, but every school and every class is different. You know, I mean, what works in period two doesn’t even necessarily work in period five, right? Much less than a different school in a different community, in a different setting. So, so, so that’s really what I’m looking for, people who are that that commitment to their own learning and to their students

 

Will Bachman  36:23

learning. Let’s talk about your nonprofit.

 

PJ Karafiol  36:26

Okay, great. So, you know, so I came up in the math contest world. I was pretty good at math contest. Many of my friends were much better than I was, which was always a kind of humbling experience. You know, our classmate, Eric websick, was top 10 of the Putnam exam. I don’t know how many times he was my roommate, senior year. Great guy, but you hang out with those folks and you know, whatever, it’s your thing. That’s a different level. Okay? And I started so I came into Harvard really thinking I might want to major in math. And I did some math courses well, but I wasn’t enjoying them at all, and I switched to philosophy, and then, you know, so they wound up in this circuitous path back into math. And I was doing a lot of work in math contests, but I actually started to think that math contests were really only supporting and identifying kids with a certain set of skills. You know, I liken it like you can be really good at crossword puzzles. And actually, the funny thing is, most of the people who are really into crossword puzzles and really good at them are actually in math or math related fields. Kind of a strange thing. You’re not poets, but they’re poets are great, and poetry is really hard, but it’s, it’s a specific way of thinking about language, and so I think math contests are a specific way about thinking about math and and there’s a place for that, but I was getting sort of more disenchanted with them. And frankly, my my son was somebody who was never going to do a math contest, and he was really good at math, and so I heard about this new model called a Math Circle, which is really a group of people getting together regularly just to learn math. And I it really sounded like the best experiences I had had with math in high school and college. And so I got some friends together. I was fortunate. I had a very permissive principal, so we’d won. My math department had won an award which came with some cash, and she let me spend some of the cash to start this organization up. And so now we provide math enrichment for 5500 kids a year all across the city. We do one day festivals where you can show up and sort of go from booth to booth or table to table, and do different math related activities and puzzles. We have actual sort of classes. It’s less of a curriculum in terms of learning X, Y and Z than just getting kids to engage and think mathematically every week at a pretty high level and and then we have Chicago’s math research symposium, which I shamelessly ripped off of New York’s. When I heard that they had one, I said, we want one too. And and I guess the premise of math circles of Chicago is really that talent is abundant, right? You don’t need to you don’t need to search for talent, right? What you need to do is provide the conditions in which the talent that’s already abundant can thrive.

 

Will Bachman  39:25

In terms of the content. Is it mainly focused on stuff you’d have in your normal classes, or are you doing something kind of perpendicular to that, something that kids wouldn’t normally get in the algebra, trigonometry, calculus,

 

PJ Karafiol  39:39

100% perpendicular? Okay? I mean, for a couple of reasons, we have kids at a variety of different places in that standard trajectory. And so here I’m going to show you the next lesson in blah, blah, blah isn’t really helpful for some kids that already had it, and then it just makes them bored math class later. But there’s a tremendous amount of math you don’t need that standard curriculum to access. So we. Stuff in graph theory, in game theory, I wrote, I wrote a lesson in that uses very basic geometry on something called voronoi diagrams, which you typically don’t even hear about till college. But, you know, you imagine the problem that we were solving was, you got a bunch of different fire stations, and you want to draw a map in such a way that each reach, each point, is identified with a fire station that it is physically closest to, and so that if you draw that, it turns out that the map has some kind of interesting properties. And then, and then it turns out that if you draw that map on its grid of streets, it’s totally bananas, which is where I was going. But we never got there, because the first lesson was already, like, huge and wonderful and great. And, you know, too much for kids to do, which is fine, because what we want to have kids do is really question, develop their own questions, their own conjectures, have their own ideas and justify those. So they’re thinking hard for an hour. But it’s not about, oh, we’re going to master this one particular skill that will show up later on. It’s more like we’re getting really good at mathematical thinking.

 

Will Bachman  41:09

And so give me almost a visual, or what I would see if I was attending one of these as an observer. You know? How is it different than a normal classroom, what happens in that hour or so when they get together? Sure,

 

PJ Karafiol  41:26

so I’ll describe it one of our lessons, I think lines itself all this. It’s called hyper dog. Hyper dog is a dog, and he or she lives in one of a series of adjoining crates. But the funny thing about hyper dog is he can jump from any crate to the adjacent crate without actually going outside. He can make a little hyper jump. Okay, and you’re trying to catch hyper dog. And so the question, the whole question for the for the session, is, what’s the strategy that you could use to catch hyper dog? And so every turn you go, you open a crate. It’s either got hyper dog in it or not. If it’s got hyper dog, you caught him, and if not, you close the crate. Hyper dog jumps. And then you open another crate. And that’s how that’s how it goes. So you come to this class, we sort of present the problem within about three or four minutes, we have, well, we start the class, we have a community building activity, because the kids are coming from all over they don’t necessarily know each other. Then we get the kids up, and we’ll have like, seven kids stand in a row, and they’re the crates, and they’re all holding their hands behind them, and we have a little beanie baby dog, and so one of them has the dog, and then another kid is trying to catch the dog. That’s we act it out so they can really understand what’s going on with this problem. And then we come back, and then we’re like, okay, so what are we going to do? And we start, you know, the kids start working groups or pairs, and we have a whole class discussion, you know, what makes this problem so hard? And pretty quickly the kids get to the fact that there’s, like, a lot of crates, right? That makes it really hard. Like, okay, so is there a simpler case we could talk about? And eventually some kid will say, Look, if you have only one crate, it’s easy to catch hyper doc. We’re like, great. That’s a very mathematical way to think about a problem, right? It’s not right, it’s absurd. But it is. It is the the simplest case in which there are any crates. If you could argue that zero crates, it’s a simpler case, right? And they’ll say, What about two crates? And it turns out, in two crates, obviously you might open the wrong crate, but then if you close the crate and then open it again, hyper dog is guaranteed to be in that crate the second time, so hyper dog always has to jump. So now we’re starting to get a leg up, because we have a little bit of a strategy, and suddenly what seemed impossible is a bit less impossible. And so then the kids will work on coming up with a strategy for three or four and then they’ll try to see how they could generalize that so they could get to the original case, which is, you know, seven, nine or 11 crates, or whatever it is. But along the way, the kids will be asking lots of questions, like, you know, do your chances get better if there are two dogs, right or, like, and what is the strategy if you want to catch both dogs? And there’s this rule, like, they can’t both be in the same crate, or they could both be in the same crate, right? What happens if we let hyper dog go to any crate and not just the adjacent crate? Can we still catch up? Right? So a big part of this session is students actually generating their own generalizations and questions about the problem and maybe answering those questions. Maybe not, you know, maybe, you know, doing some work on them. You know, versus a typical math class, you’re asking a question. The question is, how did I How did you do that thing? Or, why is my answer wrong and right? This is not, we’re not asking either of those questions typically. We’re typically asking questions like, well, like, hey, what would happen if, when you did this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah happens? Like, how would, how would we handle that situation?

 

Will Bachman  44:41

That sounds like so much fun. And that’s fifth graders. By the way, I would be totally signing up for for math circles. I was, yeah, that sounds like so much fun. And the and so what was the what did it take? Like, tell me just a little bit about institutionally institution building. What was involved in scaling it up to where you’re serving 5500 kids? Yeah,

 

PJ Karafiol  45:10

I think the first thing was realizing that I was totally inadequate to that task. I mean, I was doing that sort of part, not even part time, really, just as an adjunct to my regular, you know, job. At that time. I was in a combination of teaching and administrative roles at still of Walter Payton, and so I’d get the mass circle stuff done, like just in time, but it was kind of helter skelter and whatever. And so, you know, we were fortunate. We had some friends, parents of former students, who were willing to help us incorporate, become a non profit. We had a board, and the first decision, major decision, the board made, was to hire a part time executive director. And then we were very fortunate, because this guy, Doug that I mentioned earlier, it’s my partner in crime at the math department of Peyton. He had left Peyton and gone and done some other things. Those things were winding up. So he came, and he became our part time Executive Director, and he’s really been the sine qua non of its growth ever since then. So one thing is, you know, and you mentioned, right, you know, you talked about identifying talent, and he definitely had the right skill set and a lot of tremendous talent. He’s one of the smartest people I know, and like he can organize like nobody else, but also, you know, working with him to develop a bigger vision of the organization. And you know, if you talk to him, I think he would say that his job has changed a lot, because now we have five full time employees. We have a whole institutionalized set of lesson plans we have, right? Whereas before, if you said you were teaching on Saturday, it was your job to come up with something to teach on Saturday. Now we have a plan, right? We run workshops for our teachers and and so he sort of orchestrates all of that, and that’s been what’s necessary to grow, because you can’t, just like you can’t have an organization that’s going to provide math enrichment that’s based on people randomly showing up with great math enrichment lessons, right? You have to have a system for that. And so the system of people in the organization, writing lessons, reflecting on lessons, revising lessons, the system of workshops to teach people this thing that’s very different from what they do in normal math teaching. And one of the things I’m super excited about with math circles is, like, over half of our teachers are CPS teachers, right? So they teach in Chicago public schools, and then they come to us, and then they say, You know what, my practice in my regular classroom changed, stop doing these things, and I started doing it more like math circles. Like that’s a win, because that’s more fun. That’s, that’s,

 

Will Bachman  47:45

that sounds like a lot of fun. Let’s turn back to Harvard. What are any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way?

 

PJ Karafiol  47:56

Yeah, well, you know, so of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say justice, because, not just because I met my wife in justice I did. But you know, you’re really thinking about what makes a society just, what makes an institution just, and those are questions I sort of have to grapple with, like the extent to which I’m going to make a rule that’s going to apply to everybody, and that, you know, the goal of education is to be individual, but I have 1352 individuals, so there’s that constant tension, and I live some of those spaces in that and in some of the other philosophy classes I took, and I had great classes. You know, Warren Goldfarb was such an incredible mentor to me, and has stayed a mentor and friend since then, and I was he had his retirement dinner last year, and I was really touched, and invited to go. And I just have to say that the experience of being with him and seeing like he has so much courage and, you know, and he is so smart and so thoughtful, and I know he’s just really great. He taught me. What course did he teach you? Or what’s the funny thing is, I so I took, I skipped his standard courses because he wasn’t around teaching them when I was taking them. But he took, I took a two semester sequence with him. The first semester was on fragra Russell and the early Wittgenstein, and the second semester was on, just on the later Wittgenstein. And honestly, like that those courses have shaped how I’ve thought about philosophy ever since. Really is be much more skeptical of big theories and of, yeah, a big theories and absolutes and much more like, well, what does it look like in this situation with these details, etc, which, which, I hope Warren would say is very much in the spirit of Wittgenstein. So those are those. Those are two that stayed up. But I was, I took great classes. I took this fashion. List course on 20th century classical music, like 40 people showed up the first day, the professor played a video of ballet mechanic, which is this crazy proto industrial piece from like 1910 the next day, only 50 people came back to class, and we had this fabulous class, right? He knew everybody, right. So we’d be talking about John Cage. He would be talking about times he hung out with John Cage, and you know what John Cage was telling him about the music that he was writing. So that was an incredibly important class. It developed my ear, and it just opened my mind to new ways of thinking about stuff. And I learned a lot from my roommates, right? I mean, I think, I think this is the thing I always tell folks, right? Like, I had a roommate who was into typeface design, and he formed in a Type, Type founder, and I learned so much from him. John Finley, right, has an esthetic, and he is such an amazing human being that, you know, again, I learned a credible amount from him over the time that I was there my freshman year, made Tom Gentile came from a background totally different from mine. I feel sorry that he was stuck with me as his demon roommate from Hal right? But I learned an incredible amount from him about just different ways of thinking about the world, right? So, so that stuff that you learned from your roommates and your classmates, that for me, was the biggest part

 

Will Bachman  51:17

of it, and it’s interesting that that you and John Finley both ended up founding schools. John, it was just on the show recently talked about the founding the epiphany school. Yeah,

 

PJ Karafiol  51:31

yeah. And I tell everybody, if you want, if your faith in humanity needs restoring, go visit. It’s incredible, amazing.

 

Will Bachman  51:39

PJ, where can listeners go and find out more about mass circles, about the school that you lead, or if they want to kind of keep track of what you’re up to?

 

PJ Karafiol  51:50

Oh, sure, I’m glad you asked. So I am pretty much entirely off social media, although you can find me on Facebook and send me a message and eventually it gets to me. My school is Lakeview High School. So www dot Lakeview hs.com because it turns out there’s a lot of Lake UHS is and in particular, Lakeview health services, that’s a nonprofit. So we’re like, uhs.com we’re the Chicago Lakeview High School. There’s a bunch of us. I guess there’s a lot of schools next to lakes, and then math circles is math circles of Chicago, all one word.org, and I’m incredibly proud of the work that we’ve been doing there and and super excited to tell folks about it, as you

 

Will Bachman  52:35

can tell PJ, thank you so much for joining. Thank

 

PJ Karafiol  52:40

you very much. It was great talking to you. Bye.