How am I supposed to answer the question about making sure racial profiling isn't impacting my work? I work with computers all day.... I don't see a person. How is this a relevant question?

It feels like a weird unexpected question

Thanks for this question! It's a fair and valid one, and I'm sorry to see that you got a snarky reply (that seems to now have been deleted).

Since we're specifically building for traditionally under-served teachers/students, one example of what we're looking for with that question is an awareness of how technical decisions can impact equity. For example, in education technology, there's often a "Matthew effect" (https://www.allancho.com/2022/02/the-matthew-effect-and-digi...) where students who start with advantages tend to benefit more from new interventions. We want to ensure our product does't inadvertently widen this gap, and instead truly helps underserved students. Hope that's helpful!

I've been thinking about this for a bit, and I think the problem is how it's phrased: "What experience do you have ensuring that a commitment to racial equity and anti-racism is centered in your work?"

It seems to me that for the majority of developers the honest answer would be "none". If I look back at all my jobs over the last 20 years, then for none of them I can see how I could advance racial equity and anti-racism through them. It's mostly B2B software, or just doesn't really intersect with that in the way your K12-oriented software does.

I'm not looking for a job, but if I would be then I'd be somewhat hesitant to apply because all of this is kind of a lame reply (even though it's true). Answering all those questions is somewhat time-consuming to do well, and I'd sort-of expect to just be dismissed because of my somewhat lame reply – so why bother?

Sometimes I fear that these types of questions, no matter how well-intentioned, filter more on the ability to spin a yarn (if not outright bullshit) than anything else.

It's interesting that the thing to avoid is helping the wrong people. I might have naively thought that any nonnegative level of help provided to people other than the target demographic would be fine, and that outcomes could be compared primarily on the basis of the level of help provided to the target demographic.

Given the reply you got and my own experiences, dont bother. If you dont 'look' the part itll be a waste of time..

Teaching Lab | Software Developer | REMOTE | Full-Time | $82k - $153k

Teaching Lab, a growing education non-profit, is hiring a Software Developer to help scale our web platform, Podsie. Podsie makes it easy for teachers to utilize personalized spaced repetition in their classrooms to help their students retain what they've learned throughout the school year.

We're using Rails/React/TypeScript/GraphQL/Postgres to improve K-12 education nationally and looking for someone with 2+ years of experience to join our fully remote team. Join us on our mission to empower teachers and improve student learning outcomes! Apply here: https://jobs.lever.co/teachinglab/5a5dbaac-da5d-4490-801e-17...

As a former middle school teacher, I found that the evidence-based techniques that the author mentioned, such as "spacing" and "retrieval", were underutilized in classrooms due to teachers not knowing about them, as well as how tedious it can be to implement them. I founded a nonprofit called Podsie (https://www.podsie.org) to help with this problem, and we created a free tool that's essentially like "Anki for classrooms" so that teachers can help their students study more effectively in their classes.

this is really cool, especially as a nonprofit - makes it feel much more mission-oriented and teacher-first.

are there any ideological/learning methodology differences between podsie and anki?

Thanks, and good question!

Ideologically, I think Anki and Podsie are pretty aligned in our beliefs that personalized spaced retrieval (often referred to as spaced repetition) is a much more efficient and effective way to learn and retain information compared to other traditional review practices (eg. reading textbooks or going over notes).

Learning-wise, perhaps the key difference is that while Anki is very focused on the individual-learner, we're much more focused on empowering each teacher. This means that we've needed to build features like having different autogradable question types (eg. short answer and multiple choice), ensuring that teachers have easy-to-follow data reports on how students and classes are doing, and also providing teachers with tools to incentivize their students to regularly review on Podsie.