His teaching methods are weird and crazy, but highly enjoyable for those who attend them. Usually, teaching methods described as “cool” and “hip” make me cringe and feel sorry for everybody unlucky enough to attend that lecture.

But to understand how Tom Henderson teaches, he makes three points:

1. Punk rock is founded upon not knowing how to play your instrument
2. He has no idea what the problem with math education in the US is.
3. Math knowledge also exists as a performative concept

First things first. In an argument with his high school girlfriend – who was very much into punk music – he made the claim that punk is founded upon people not knowing how to play their instrument.

Which is true, but not the point. Being in a punk band, and being terrible at playing your instrument, is all about performing on a stage. Instead of pointing fingers at those who can’t play, one should focus on acknowledging the courage they have for getting up there and living the dream.

This changed his worldview completely, and what his teaching style is now founded upon.

When asked what the problem with math education in the US is, he has no idea. But what he knows is that many students’ approach to math is wrong. It’s all about showing the steps, getting an A for answering correctly and knowing the books inside out.

Essentially, it’s about not knowing anything, but still being able to answer the questions posed in the tests. What if math was more about the path towards the solution, and not just handing in an answering sheet? What if math was more like punk?

Math must also be about the performance – just as punk music is. If he has to climb the chair and desk to show the progression of a graph – he climbs and climbs and climbs. The visual element of math becomes real and the ridiculous bunch of letters and graphs becomes an interesting problem that should be solved.

Why do we blog this?

Besides talking about teaching, Tom Henderson actually touches upon a point that’s essential in the fundamentals of 23. It’s always been about building tools for people who want to express themselves, without the need to learn to operate the instruments usually needed to do so.

It shouldn’t be a hassle to set up a website that you can upload pictures to – it should be accessible to everyone looking for a way to show off what they stumble upon every day. That’s where 23 Photo Sharing comes in.

If we take it even further, we find the purpose behind making 23 video. Five years ago, a couple of guys started something called YouTube (you might have heard of it) that kicked off a video revolution. Every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Every single minute. It’s an unbelievable resource of education material, music, humor and cultural artifacts.

Yet, if you were an organisation looking for a possibility to have your own site, own domain and own relation to users you’d pay a premium price. It’s not unheard of that you pay €30,000 just to get started, and you never really knew the end price if you want extra modules and features.

We figured that if you take the best of both worlds – the ease of publishing a video to YouTube with the options of customisation from the premium retailers – interesting stuff could happen.

Now we’re seeing all kinds of creative uses for video; campaign sites, intranets built around video, video archives in municipalities being activated, kids talking about their schools etc.

It doesn’t take you months and months of preparation to start a video site, and it certainly won’t cost you tens of thousands of Euros.

To us, it’s all about taking the punk approach to video – it doesn’t matter if all you have is a Flip or Kodak Zi8 or whatever. What matters is that you have something to say and start performing!