What happens when you take public high school students with zero computer science background — 87% of whom are below the federal poverty line — and put them in one of only two quantum computing programs for high schoolers in the entire nation?
That's exactly what A.M. Bhatt (https://www.linkedin.com/in/albhatt/) and his nonprofit DAE (https://mydae.org/) are doing in Connecticut, and the results are challenging everything we think we know about education reform, student potential, and what it really means to prepare young people for the future.
In this episode of My EdTech Life, host Dr. Alfonso Mendoza sits down with A.M. Bhatt to unpack why traditional education is stuck in an industrial-era mindset, why the push for "job readiness" might actually be more dangerous than the problem it's trying to solve, and why real education reform starts with identity formation — not content coverage.
Bhatt shares how his students complete 24 college credits worth of computer science in just 10 months, why he left a successful career advising Fortune 500 executives to work with underserved youth, and what a simple bowl of soup has to do with building a real learning community.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
01:37 A.M. Bhatt's Journey in Education
09:36 The State of Education: Challenges and Opportunities
15:37 Identity Formation in Education
22:01 Preparing Students for the Future: Players vs. Audience
26:31 The Importance of Non-Technical Skills
28:09 Real-World Hiring Insights
32:13 Remedial Humaning in Education
34:32 Infrastructure vs. Human Development
39:10 Dropping Seeds of Knowledge
43:46 Kryptonite in Education
45:50 Messages for the Future
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