Speaker 1: Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on
Speaker 1: how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's
Speaker 1: call it a great transformation, a change in the way
Speaker 1: workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever,
Speaker 1: putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll
Speaker 1: be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves
Speaker 1: as they find their life's work. On the last season
Speaker 1: of On the Job, we spoke with Benny Boas, who
Speaker 1: founded a coding company that provided coding boot camps for
Speaker 1: anyone who wanted to become a software engineer. Well, today
Speaker 1: we're going to talk to Magabo, an educator and a
Speaker 1: graduate of that boot camp who's had a love for
Speaker 1: math and numbers for as long as he can remember.
Speaker 1: His goal is to build tools that spread education because
Speaker 1: from personal experience, he knows how dangerous it is when
Speaker 1: people don't have access to it. Well, good morning, Mr mcgabo.
Speaker 1: How much sleep did you get last night? And you know,
Speaker 1: much a lot more than than I I've gotten in
Speaker 1: the last few months. My six and a half month
Speaker 1: old sun is still learning how to sleep through the night,
Speaker 1: and so it's been and up and down in the
Speaker 1: last few months. Terry mcgabo or Lingamana goes by Mugabo.
Speaker 1: He lives in Burlington, Vermont, and since Mugabo has a
Speaker 1: six month old son, he knows a job to suit
Speaker 1: his lifestyle and mess of to engineer for this moss.
Speaker 1: As of just over a month ago, Desmos is a
Speaker 1: software company that builds tools for students and teachers to
Speaker 1: use in their curriculums. They're big thing is making their
Speaker 1: online graphing calculators and geometry tools fun to interact with
Speaker 1: because an arching philosophy at this moos, which I feel like.
Speaker 1: He's a company founded by people who love math and
Speaker 1: who are trying to create the tools and the learning
Speaker 1: opportunities to help help students not only learn math, but
Speaker 1: love learning math. Magabo is one of those people who
Speaker 1: loves math. He sees it as a way to understand
Speaker 1: how things in everyday life interact, the rules to how
Speaker 1: things work. And he believes that once you understand math,
Speaker 1: you can use it to create new ways that things
Speaker 1: interact with each other, and then from that can emerge
Speaker 1: new fields of mathematics, you know, and so it can
Speaker 1: be a game, it can be like legos, you know,
Speaker 1: where there's some ways that they can connect and the
Speaker 1: ways that they can't connect. And once you understand how
Speaker 1: they connect or don't connect, you can build amazing things
Speaker 1: and and take them apart and build different amazing things,
Speaker 1: you know, and so there is a magic to it.
Speaker 1: So does most and the software that Mugabo is helping
Speaker 1: to develop is trying to answer that problem, how do
Speaker 1: we make math enjoyable, which is a big one to
Speaker 1: take on in our society that has, for many reasons,
Speaker 1: become very math phobic. Math phobic math generally gets a
Speaker 1: bad rap for being too boring or too difficult, we're
Speaker 1: not actually useful. At DESMOS, they make super accessible tools
Speaker 1: online and also have a resource database for teachers anywhere
Speaker 1: to use that has math activities on it that allows
Speaker 1: not only teachers to adapt activities, but students to interact
Speaker 1: with activities and then for teachers to facilitate those activities
Speaker 1: in a classroom. And so all of that is running
Speaker 1: on on on on software on Intennetic technologies, and as
Speaker 1: a software engineer, Mugaba works from home behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: taking in feedback from teachers and students, working with the
Speaker 1: team on how they can improve the coding on the
Speaker 1: tools they have and building new ones that make math
Speaker 1: more enjoyable and understandable. One of the things that has
Speaker 1: made me feel really good about joining this organization has
Speaker 1: been the outpouring of love from math teachers and from
Speaker 1: students talking about how learning math this way has been transformational,
Speaker 1: has been more joyful. You know, and you don't hear
Speaker 1: people is those where it's for learning mathematics often. So
Speaker 1: your job is to make the magic happen. Yeah, more
Speaker 1: or less, more or less, you know, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: So you love math? I do? I yes, I have,
Speaker 1: I've have um. I grew up in the household that
Speaker 1: loved math. My dad was an engineering My mommy is
Speaker 1: in finance and accounting, and so numbers was something that
Speaker 1: we were at least told that we had to get,
Speaker 1: you know, that it wasn't an option to not get it.
Speaker 1: Mugaba was born in Kegali, the capital of Rwanda, little
Speaker 1: country in Central Africa. We left one day in one
Speaker 1: oh seven because of the because of the genocide in nineteen.
Speaker 1: Between April and July of the truly horrific Rwandan genocide
Speaker 1: took place. Tensions between the two main ethnic groups, the
Speaker 1: majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi had been raging four decades,
Speaker 1: and on April six, plane carrying rwanda as president was
Speaker 1: shot down and two t extremists were blamed. That night,
Speaker 1: the country erupted and a mass organized killing of the
Speaker 1: minority Tutsi began. Magabo's mother was Tutsi. How how how
Speaker 1: did I understand that as a seven year old? I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know. And we knew that it wasn't
Speaker 1: it wasn't safe, you know, you know, and I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess that's that's all that we needed to know.
Speaker 1: It's it's not safe out there, and and we need
Speaker 1: to leave. Magabo and his family got out of the
Speaker 1: country and fled to Congo. They were among two million
Speaker 1: others that fled Rwanda, and in a few months after
Speaker 1: Magabo left, over eight hundred thousand Tutsi were killed there.
Speaker 1: He says that his parents got him out early enough
Speaker 1: so that he didn't witness the atrocities. That's a lot
Speaker 1: of young people younger than I, um, we're exupposed to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I'm thankful for that. His family spent three
Speaker 1: years in Congo. They had interrupted schooling because of conflicts
Speaker 1: and moving around then they went to Tanzania and spent
Speaker 1: three years there before coming to the US. So you
Speaker 1: came to the US so when you were thirteen. I
Speaker 1: was thirteen. Yeah, the first thirteen years of my life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They landed in Buffalo, where he and his five siblings
Speaker 1: started to get into a regular schooling rhythm. Gobbo's trajectory
Speaker 1: toward math and science really started to take hold right
Speaker 1: around high school. I think I always I always wanted
Speaker 1: to be like my dad. I I wanted to my
Speaker 1: dads civil engineer. I wanted to do civil engineering. He
Speaker 1: took some software engineering classes in high school and loved it,
Speaker 1: so by the time he got into college at Stanford,
Speaker 1: he knew he was going to major in some kind
Speaker 1: of engineering. He ended up doing electrical and had a
Speaker 1: few more classes in software engineering that really hooked him.
Speaker 1: So that that was that That was the piece that
Speaker 1: took me towards software engineering, and I got exposure there.
Speaker 1: I liked it, and there were a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot more jobs, a lot more Soto engineering jobs and
Speaker 1: electrical engineering jobs, and after graduating he got a job.
Speaker 1: I was coming home every night to burn the midnight
Speaker 1: oil with this AI class that Stanford made available online
Speaker 1: for anyone to take. And I was blown away by
Speaker 1: like how well technology could deliver learning experience. And I
Speaker 1: think that was kind of the first late pop moment
Speaker 1: of realizing that this two can come to get any
Speaker 1: very powerful ways. So he got a glimpse at how
Speaker 1: his skills could help teach people in the future, and
Speaker 1: a lot of his motivations came from everything he had
Speaker 1: experienced in his past, this belief that if one of
Speaker 1: the things that made the wander very turbulent and very
Speaker 1: susceptible to what happened was that you had a massive
Speaker 1: kind of youth demographic that did not have prospects, and
Speaker 1: that makes them very susceptible to some Yeah, it leads
Speaker 1: to a lot of political instability, you know. And you
Speaker 1: and I always thought that if more people had had opportunities,
Speaker 1: if we had the good the system of education where
Speaker 1: people graduated with with with opportunities to take on you know,
Speaker 1: to pursue their their lives, you know. And um, so
Speaker 1: a lot of your motivation for getting into teaching was
Speaker 1: to it's it's too to think about how I can
Speaker 1: be part of, you know, contribute to creating a world
Speaker 1: where what happened in the rue that doesn't happen, And
Speaker 1: I thought I was gonna be through through through education.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well yes, and anyone know when you're young, it's okay
Speaker 1: to kind of dream big and think. I mean, I uh,
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought of I hadn't thought of it as
Speaker 1: the pressure. But you know, I mean, I think the
Speaker 1: language that i've that that that I picked up at
Speaker 1: some point is survivors remorse. You know, the people if
Speaker 1: you make it out of a tragedy like it aside,
Speaker 1: you walk away feeling like, Okay, I survived where many
Speaker 1: many didn't. Um what how does that then ship my
Speaker 1: my purpose? How does that then ship how I live
Speaker 1: my life? And and to try and also answer the
Speaker 1: very real questions of of of why, like why me.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with Mugabo story after the break.
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Speaker 1: to Mogabo, he'd become a software engineer, and now he
Speaker 1: saw the huge potential his skills had to be a
Speaker 1: tool for education, because again he believed that if there
Speaker 1: were better education in Rwanda, the country maybe wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been so vulnerable to dangerous rhetoric, and maybe the genocide
Speaker 1: wouldn't have happened. It's nice to have a powerful drive,
Speaker 1: a powerful motivating sense of purpose, you know. So he
Speaker 1: had been exposed to this online class from Stanford and
Speaker 1: he was blown away by how well built the software
Speaker 1: for the class was. So this Jove is actually getting
Speaker 1: into teaching. It put education on the map for me
Speaker 1: as something that I wanted to do. I wasn't sure
Speaker 1: in what, how, in what capacity because I was headed
Speaker 1: towards engineering, and I think that was kind of the
Speaker 1: first late pop moment of realizing that this two can
Speaker 1: come to get any very powerful ways. It was two
Speaker 1: thousand nine by the time Mugabo graduated college. The recession
Speaker 1: had just so it was hard to find a job
Speaker 1: in teaching or find a job at all at the time.
Speaker 1: He stuck with engineering and worked as a software consultant
Speaker 1: for the I R S. He was taking more online courses,
Speaker 1: you got his n b A. He even started working
Speaker 1: at an education technology company. I think it was the
Speaker 1: years in social engineering that kind of made me appreciate
Speaker 1: the human element that yes, technology can facilitate great learning experiences.
Speaker 1: And it worked for me. But when we're talking about
Speaker 1: where kids are in the company classrooms, having a piste
Speaker 1: of technology is not It's nowhere near enough. So when
Speaker 1: I had the opportunity to go into the classroom, I
Speaker 1: did because I wanted to spend some time on the
Speaker 1: other side of not creating the tools, by using the
Speaker 1: tools in the classroom, and that was a whole learning experience. Um,
Speaker 1: that was a whole learning experience. Mugabo got a job
Speaker 1: in the w new Ski School district of Vermont. He
Speaker 1: was teaching middle and high school kids ages eleven to
Speaker 1: nineteen Utah engineering and science, and by all accounts and
Speaker 1: students loved them. I leaned on exploring. I leaned on
Speaker 1: following the interests and the kind of the whims of
Speaker 1: the students, like world where the questions coming from, and
Speaker 1: kind of you know, And I always leaned on fun.
Speaker 1: I mean, all learners learned differently, you know, and and
Speaker 1: and there was a whole lot there that I needed
Speaker 1: to learn and then I needed to figure out. He
Speaker 1: was a very interactive, experience teacher, always experimenting using technology
Speaker 1: and legos, and he tried to run a classrooms very democratically,
Speaker 1: like an open forum where people expressed themselves freely, and
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes with disagreements. Kids felt very free and
Speaker 1: very free too to check me and and and to
Speaker 1: to freely express themselves in ways that you know, like
Speaker 1: if I'm angry and I'm raising my voice, I'm not
Speaker 1: being rude, you know, I'm just angry and I'm raising
Speaker 1: my voice and you know, and it's like it's okay.
Speaker 1: Mugabo played a very important role at his school. For context,
Speaker 1: Vermont is like white, very white, but a lot of
Speaker 1: the immigrants and refugees who have come to Vermont has
Speaker 1: settled up in Winowski and nearby Burlington. And you know,
Speaker 1: my my class, my school was like a majority black
Speaker 1: and brown kids. That is very exceptional for Vermont, very right. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: the teaching staff and the administration was still like almost
Speaker 1: entirely white. He was actually the only black teacher in
Speaker 1: the middle school in high school, and he felt a
Speaker 1: responsibility to advocate for more diverse multicultural space because while
Speaker 1: they had students from all over the world, they were
Speaker 1: still learning in a structurally white American environment. And I
Speaker 1: found that the impact that that had on my young
Speaker 1: kids was the message that the ways of being were
Speaker 1: not okay, that they were the ways of being were
Speaker 1: not This was not the place to express yourself as
Speaker 1: you are. You need to learn a new way of
Speaker 1: being um And that for for young malleable minds, that
Speaker 1: has a way of kind of teaching them to reject
Speaker 1: who they are and then to try and figure out
Speaker 1: what who they're supposed to be. But he says it
Speaker 1: was always an uphill battle. The school preached its messages
Speaker 1: of being a multicultural space, but wasn't really ever acting
Speaker 1: on it. Mogabo spent a lot of time advocating for
Speaker 1: his students to make those changes for a better system,
Speaker 1: for more diverse faculty, but he says time and time
Speaker 1: again he wasn't really supported by the school. UM. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: I I left. You know, it was kind of burning
Speaker 1: out that I didn't on community organizing was just not
Speaker 1: visible and I was becoming a dad and so so
Speaker 1: I I left. I left so you know, to to
Speaker 1: be able to be able to also fulfill my responsibility
Speaker 1: as a husband as and as a dad. Mugabo left
Speaker 1: the school last year in he had a baby on
Speaker 1: the way and he says being an educator and an
Speaker 1: activist within the school he worked in was taking so
Speaker 1: much of himself. I realized that UM, a lot of
Speaker 1: the change it needs to happen. Can you know the
Speaker 1: community needs to spearhead that the parents need to be
Speaker 1: organized enough to realize what's happening to their kids. You
Speaker 1: know what they are and aren't getting um and then
Speaker 1: demanded he wrote an open letter to the school giving
Speaker 1: specific examples of how the faculty and community can actually
Speaker 1: be more diverse. In it, he said, I have done
Speaker 1: my part to make good trouble at w Newski. I've
Speaker 1: spoken the truth even when it was hard. These are
Speaker 1: very actionable steps. Which of these will you take lead
Speaker 1: on to make sure it is implemented. I think that's
Speaker 1: absolutely more sustainable that we have more engaged, more parents
Speaker 1: who understand what's happening, to understand the system, understand how
Speaker 1: to advocate for themselves, and working in collaboration with whoever
Speaker 1: is willing to work with them to make sure that
Speaker 1: their kids care what they need. Did you feel bad
Speaker 1: leaving at all? Yeah? Yeah, it remains hard. I mean
Speaker 1: every time I see my students, um um, I feel
Speaker 1: like I part of the reason why I made my
Speaker 1: resignation leaders public was too you know, was understanding that
Speaker 1: I had and responsibility to the community to kind of
Speaker 1: explain what happened and and and why I felt that
Speaker 1: I um, I couldn't stay. In the letter, he also
Speaker 1: says that he plans to get back to community organizing
Speaker 1: when he can. He told me he probably won't feel
Speaker 1: totally better about the situation until he finds the time
Speaker 1: to do that. But it's nice that I'm able to
Speaker 1: be there for my for my son and my wife.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would not have been able to do
Speaker 1: that and so so there is that and um and
Speaker 1: that counts for that counts for a lot. So he's
Speaker 1: still working through a lot, but now he has the
Speaker 1: autonomy and the time to do it. Teaching and trying
Speaker 1: to change the way people learned in the school was
Speaker 1: draining him. Now that he's building educational software with DESMOS,
Speaker 1: he can be there for his family and still be
Speaker 1: a part of spreading knowledge as he always intended. Seeing
Speaker 1: what they've done here gives me a lot of hope.
Speaker 1: We're not trying to do everything. We don't have to.
Speaker 1: We understand that I'll play is to create this powerful
Speaker 1: kind of a little tool that's gonna be one of
Speaker 1: many tools that eight people educating all over the world
Speaker 1: I'm going to use. And if we make it easy
Speaker 1: enough and intuitive enough and fun enough and enjoyable enough,
Speaker 1: you know, then this teachers are going to do magic
Speaker 1: with it. Um And they do. Mugabo saw a lack
Speaker 1: of cultural understanding in his school, and he fought tooth
Speaker 1: and nail to change it because he knows firsthand how
Speaker 1: dangerous that lack of understanding can be. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people who are driven by some kind of
Speaker 1: higher purpose, like that can forget to take care of
Speaker 1: themselves in the process, to think that we need to
Speaker 1: be the solution instead of being a part of it.
Speaker 1: To me, it's really inspiring what mcgabo has done all
Speaker 1: of it. But one of the most admirable things I
Speaker 1: think is that he knew when to step away, and
Speaker 1: he knew he couldn't do it alone. Yeah, he had
Speaker 1: real purpose to fight for, but he also had a family,
Speaker 1: and he also had his well being, and he realized
Speaker 1: that he couldn't adequately take care of anyone if he
Speaker 1: didn't take care of himself first. Today he found a
Speaker 1: job that lets him do that and still allows him
Speaker 1: to be a part of making that magic happen. He
Speaker 1: knows he can't do everything and understands that he is
Speaker 1: just a powerful little force, one of many that are
Speaker 1: all needed to help people learn. As the world changes
Speaker 1: and all of our lives become more complicated, I think
Speaker 1: we can all take some pointers from Ogabo, because there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot more jobs like that, jobs where
Speaker 1: we can take better care of ourselves and still do
Speaker 1: the work that matters to us. I don't know this
Speaker 1: compulsion that you have to be an educator I'm sure
Speaker 1: you got to really scratch that itch by seeing people
Speaker 1: face to face every day, is what you're doing right now?
Speaker 1: Is it still fulfilling that specific need for you? Yes,
Speaker 1: it still feels like I'm part of a team that's
Speaker 1: contributing to something that I very deeply care about and
Speaker 1: that I I think is very important. And I can
Speaker 1: do that with the autonomy of being a software engineer
Speaker 1: and God willing with the autonomy that's going to allow
Speaker 1: me to do more things once, you know, we find
Speaker 1: a rhythm with a family life. Yeah, so it's a
Speaker 1: good place. It's a good place to be now. For
Speaker 1: on the job, I'm Modiscray