Revolutionizing Math Education with Dr. Craig Hane

Tim: 0:38

Welcome to Speaking with Confidence, the podcast dedicated to helping you unlock the power of effective public speaking. I’m Tim Newman, a recovering college professor turned communication coach, and I’m thrilled to guide you on your journey to becoming a powerful communicator. I want to thank each and every one of you for your support. It truly means the world to me. Please visit timnewmanspeakscom to sign up for the Speaking with Confidence newsletter and other free resources.

Tim: 1:03

Today’s guest, dr Craig Hayne, also known as Dr Dell, is a math educator and innovator dedicated to transforming how math is taught and learned. With a PhD in algebraic number theory and decades of teaching and business experience, dr Dell is on a mission to revolutionize math education and empower individuals with practical tools to unlock their potential. His mission is to break down math barriers and inspire listeners to invest in yourself for a brighter future. Dr Dell offers a compelling mix of expertise, innovation and storytelling that resonates with listeners of all backgrounds. Dr Dell, welcome to the show. I mean, you’ve got a long, long history in both academia and business, but there’s one area that I’m really, really fascinated with and that’s your relationship with NASCAR. Can you just give us a little bit of background on what that history is and how it started and who you were dealing with.

Craig (Dr. Del): 2:01

Yeah, sure, tim, I’ll be glad to. I’m an old guy, as you can tell. I got my PhD back in 1967. And the truth is, as I tell in the book I wrote, how and why Public School Maths are Destroying the USA. I almost flunked out of math when I was in high school and then I was saved by actually a total of three teachers saved me and I learned, in addition to my PhD in theoretical math, I had learned practical math and today I teach students practical math in about three months that you need for practical math.

Craig (Dr. Del): 2:32

Now let me tell you what practical math did for me, starting in the early 1970s. The first I’m from Indiana and I lived in Terre Haute where Tony Hallman was and he had the 500-mile speedway and I knew Tony and I knew other people I won’t mention their names now and I sponsored AJ Floyd in a racer in a racing in Terre Haute at the action truck. And if it hadn’t been for practical math, that wouldn’t have happened, because then what happened was I built a drag strip, an eight-mile drag strip in Terre Haute called Action Dragway and then I got to deal with drag racers Big Daddy, don Garlitz, grumpy Jenkins, bob Glynn and all those. Then later I developed a racing gasoline we sold for years called H&H Racing Gasoline and then I developed something called the DynaBrain. Now, all of this was practical math, not theoretical math. And once I developed the DynaBrain to test racing engines on water break dynamometers, my customers there became people down in NASCAR, mostly Charlotte, north Carolina, and one of my customers was Australian Racing and they were one of my early customers. They had a dynabrain, tested their racing engines on a water break dynamometer and it made it much more efficient than the old way.

Craig (Dr. Del): 3:57

And Roland Walotka, who was the general manager of Austin Racing, one day I’m out back talking to him because I go to Charlotte all the time and I said I hear you got rid of your racer, dave Marcus. He said yeah, we got a new racer. I said, well, who would that be? And he says well, he’s. He’s that guy right now motorcycle backers. I’ll introduce you to him. So he waved him up.

Craig (Dr. Del): 4:19

Guy comes up on a little motorcycle and he says I want you to meet Craig Hain, who is the guy that developed the DynaBrain. And that’s why we have the best racing engines in NASCAR today, because we can test them better on the on our water break dynamometer and he said Craig, I want you to meet our new race driver. He said he’s. A lot of people say he’s a wild man and no one else would hire him, but we’re going to take a chance with him. Craig wants to meet Dale Earnhardt. I’m at Dale Earnhardt and that was before he ran his first NASCAR race and then he went ahead that year and ran five races, but the next year he won rookie of the year. The year after that he won grand national champion and, of course, when I would be down there I would meet to race. I met. I knew, um, virtually all the racers I knew at that at that, at that point in time this would have been in the late seventies and, um, I knew Richard Petty. I used to go up there and go to his place and his brother was ran their dynamometer and knew Junior Johnson and Cale Yarborough and Darrell Walter of them. They knew all those guys, buddy Baker, and all this is because of practical math.

Craig (Dr. Del): 5:28

Now today I have a program online. Back then I love teaching high school math. That was my favorite thing. I did it for years and years. I loved to teach it. It was very difficult to do in the old days. Now, today, thanks to the scientific calculator TI-30XA, the first thing I do is I teach a student how to use this calculator, the things they need to know on it, which is just a small part of what they need, and then I teach them practical math, and I have a website today where they can go to and they can learn all about this. I have four videos that are educational, and those educational videos will teach a student or a parent what they need to know to be successful with math. No schools are doing it today. You can’t get it in any school I’ve heard of. There’s no textbooks that do it, but it’s online and it’s easy to do, and so they go there, and those four educational videos will teach them how to dramatically improve their life for $9.

Tim: 6:29

So you bring up something, and I just want to make sure that everybody understands what we’re talking about here. Explain the difference between theoretical math and practical math.

Craig (Dr. Del): 6:41

Oh, it’s a huge difference. Theoretical math in both subjects you study concepts and you understand what’s a triangle, what’s a circle, things of that nature. But then you’ve got to learn processes to apply those things to all sorts of different things, whatever it might be. I’ve applied it to building a drag strip, the dynabrain, all sorts of things, any technical subject. Then I had a company called Hain Training where we trained over two and a half decades we trained thousands of technicians in the military and in big companies, all practical math.

Craig (Dr. Del): 7:19

Now, first of all you learn arithmetic and you learn. There’s all these manual techniques to do things. But if you learn, take this calculator which today costs about $16, you do all your arithmetic with a calculator. But you got to learn to do it. That’s the first thing. I teach the student how to use a scientific calculator. I’m talking about post-elementary now starting, say, the eighth grade teenagers how to use this calculator. They learn it in about two or three weeks. It’s like playing a game, it’s fun. A lot of students today in high school and middle school have a struggling mind. They don’t like it, they’re afraid of it. In fact I’d say 80% of them are afraid of it and don’t like it. None of them are being taught properly, so I teach them to use this calculator. Then, once I’ve done that, I teach them practical algebra, practical geometry and practical trigonometry. That sounds terrible, but there’s only seven lessons. No-transcript, now they’re ready for the military.

Craig (Dr. Del): 8:18

They’re ready for a technical career. It also will help them in their high school math, which is still horrible High school math today and it varies from school to school and teacher to teacher. There’s no uniformity to it. Believe me, if you say well, I studied Algebra 1. What does that mean? Depends on which school you went to, what teacher you had. It could be all sorts of different things. And had it could be all sorts of different things and I flunked algebra. Well, I didn’t do well in algebra one when I was in high school and I was told by my principal Craig, you’ll never go to college. No one in my family had ever gone to college. Craig, you’ll never go to college because you didn’t do well in algebra.

Craig (Dr. Del): 8:54

I lived in Greencastle, indiana. We had a school there called DePaul University. My senior year, by the way, I did go to geometry. I had a good teacher for geometry. My senior year she recommended I go to DePaul and take college algebra. My principal didn’t want me to. He said I embarrassed the school. But I had a good teacher, dr Clint Gass, and I got an A in it. Whether you learn math or not depends Number one what is you’re being taught and whether you learn math or not depends number one, what is you’re being taught, and number two, how it’s being taught. Pardon me, when I talk I get a little phlegm on my throat that’s what you’re good.

Craig (Dr. Del): 9:29

so now I explain all that in a book called how and why public school math is destroying the usa.

Craig (Dr. Del): 9:35

if you go to my website, craighanecom c-r-a-A-I-G-H-A-N-Ecom, you get a free PDF copy of that book and you’ll learn about my story, things I’ve just now told you, and you’ll also learn how, today, any student can learn math. There’s only one grade that counts, by the way, in math, and that’s A. You either know it or you don’t know it. Anything other than an A. There’s something you didn’t know it, anything other than an A you didn’t understand. There’s something you didn’t understand. And so when they take my program, it’s pretty amazing and I explain all that in the book, and then those four videos I told you about that they can go to, and I’ll give you the URL for that.

Tim: 10:14

But again you bring up some really good points and I think a lot of it comes down to you know what you’re being taught and who’s teaching it. So how did your early experiences, in math education in particular, really kind of guide you to where you are today? Because, like you said, you had somebody who was really bad and then you had somebody who was really good and helped you. How did that really kind of define who you are and get you to this point?

Craig (Dr. Del): 10:44

Well, as you know, I’m 86 years old. I was born in 1938. And during World War II my parents both worked. My dad worked on a water plant, my mother worked in town and I lived next door to my uncle, jack Davis, who was a barber and a builder. He was 60 years old and he taught me to count with Cheerios. I went to a little public school in Putnamville, indiana, and I was the youngest kid in my class. I was five years old when my dad enrolled me there and I couldn’t skip. I couldn’t sing. I was the dumbest kid in the class on just about everything they did, except Miss Bernice Lewis. My teacher decided to teach all of my classmates to count. None of them had been taught to count because the parents were all working. They were a war too. Believe me, it was a different world.

Craig (Dr. Del): 11:46

So she gets us up, sit us down and she’s going to teach us to count. And some of them had learned to count, maybe to 10, but they didn’t really understand counting. My Uncle Jack had taught me how to count, taught me the decimal system 10, 11, 12, all that. So she came to me and I counted. I just started counting and when I got up into my 50s or 60s she says Craig, how far can you count? I said, well, I don’t know. When you get to 99, you go to 100 and then you’re 101. It amazed her. I was the only kid in first grade to learn how to count. Because of my uncle Jack Davis, not because I’m not. I was no smarter than my classmates. So then she said Craig. The next day she said Craig, would you come up and help me teach your classmates to count? So I had my first teaching experience when I was five years old and it was wonderful. My self-esteem went up, my self-confidence, and all of a sudden everybody thought I was the smartest kid in the class. Oh, he’s a genius. No, no, no, no, no. I was lucky, I had my Uncle Jack Davis as a teacher. Then, all through the eighth grade he taught me practical math. I’ve got some Uncle Jack videos that I give people and any parent can do this. He wasn’t a math teacher, he was a barber and a builder.

Craig (Dr. Del): 13:02

Well then, in the ninth grade in green castle, indiana, when we moved into town as a freshman in high school I took algebra one and I didn’t understand it, I didn’t like it and I didn’t get a very good grade. And and my principal said, craig, you’re never going to go to college, you’re not college material, you’re going to be a working man, just like your family. No one in my family had ever gone to college. My dad had an eighth grade education, which was common back then. Okay, well, my sophomore year I had geometry and Ms O’Hare taught us how to prove theorems, which I like doing. That. It’s just reasoning, reasoning, reasoning. By the way, that’s not how I teach geometry today, but that’s how she taught me. My junior year, I had algebra, again with that same algebra teacher. It didn’t do well again, but now I was a troublemaker. I kept asking questions how do you do this? How does this work? Where did this quadratic formula come from? Where did it come from? He just said shut up and learn it and apply it. He didn’t know where it came from.

Craig (Dr. Del): 14:08

Well then, my senior year, as I told you earlier, I went to DePaul and took college hours with Dr Clint Gass. So my Jack Davis, then Miss Madonna O’Hara, was my geometry teacher. Then DePaul was Dr Clint Gass and he taught me. I took college out, he was a good teacher and I got an A. He then got me into the number one liberal arts college in the United States, oberlin College. It’s no longer number one, but back then it was, and it had a better math department than DePauw did, because it was a more advanced college.

Craig (Dr. Del): 14:45

I majored in math and English and then, after I graduated in 1960, I taught high school for a year at Western Reserve High School in Wakeman, ohio. I taught all four grades. And then I realized, up until then I’ve been tutoring students and I never had a failure as a tutor, but as a teacher, and I taught all four grades of math and chemistry. So some of the kids couldn’t keep up and I couldn’t do anything about it. And so I, my, my, I wanted to know if there was any way I could revise high school math. But I there was no way to do it at that time, no technology to let me do it. And so then I went back home that summer and Dr Gass asked me he was my mentor now and I always meet with him. He said what are you going to do? I said I don’t know, and he said well, I’m going on sabbatical second semester next year. Would you teach at DePaul? I said, oh, what do you want me to teach? He said the advanced theory. Now, I know a lot of advanced theory too. I don’t teach it to my students. I only would teach that to students that really want to become a theoretical mathematician. And so, anyway, he then said well, why don’t you go to graduate school? I never thought of it.

Craig (Dr. Del): 15:56

Went down to Bloomington, indiana, 40 miles away to Indiana University, and I enrolled as a grad student and I loved it. It was easy for me. I loved it and I hate math tests. There’s no such thing as a good math test, in my opinion. So I didn’t take the math test to get a master’s degree, but to get a PhD. All you could do is write a thesis, and I did that.

Craig (Dr. Del): 16:12

And in 1966, they gave me a PhD and made me go to work. And then I went to a teacher’s college in Indiana called Indiana State University where they taught math teachers, and they hired me to teach theoretical math to their math majors and I stuck my nose into what they’re teaching the high school teachers and I tried to get them to improve it and they got so mad at me they fired me. So then I went and taught for that was three years there. I taught at an engineering school there for four years and then I went into business. That was three years there. I taught engineering school then for four years and then I went into business and I started doing the business I’m telling you about right, starting with AJ Foy and then Don Garlitz and then Dale Earnhardt, and all that and and all that required was practical math, not theoretical math so you know, jim, when we talk about math, you know my eyes start to glaze over and you know you lose me.

Tim: 17:02

But you have a knack, and just in our conversation you’ve got a real knack of making it easy to understand. How did the problem with teaching math start and how can we communicate it so that it’s clear and easy to understand, so that, you know, young people today can get into math and learn it and not feel so much anxiety about it?

Craig (Dr. Del): 17:25

Well, I explain that in my book how and why Public School Math is Destroying the USA. You’ll learn all about it there. What’s wrong with public school math? And, by the way, it’s not the math teacher’s fault, it’s really the math educators. There is no such thing today as a good high school math textbook, Because what will happen is they’ll take the things that you would find a value to use and they’ll mix them in with all kinds of stuff you’ll never use. And it’s difficult stuff and most kids get discouraged. They can’t keep up in class and they just give up. And now they grade on a curve.

Craig (Dr. Del): 18:01

I talk about the horrible curve and anybody that doesn’t get an A at a math course didn’t learn the subject. Get a B or a C or a D or an F. You didn’t learn it. I don’t care if you got a B. There’s things you didn’t learn you should have learned. There’s only one grade in math. You either learn it or you don’t learn it.

Craig (Dr. Del): 18:19

But the point is what I do in my program, my online program, which is all automated online, self-paced. They study it at home. I use tutorial videos, me tutoring them. It comes off Amazon Web Services. I use notes and exercises. There will be a book they’ll have. They can print out a PDF of it or they can buy it on Amazon a little cheap book, and then they go at their own pace and they learn it. And then they go. It’s like climbing a ladder, one step at a time, and you don’t try to go from step three to step eight. You got to do all the steps at a time to get up there.

Craig (Dr. Del): 18:56

And in high school math they can’t do this in high school. I couldn’t do it when I was a. If a high school hired me today to be a math teacher, what I would do today and I’m trying to get some skills to do this I got two private skills to do it already. What I’m trying to do is, if I was hired today to be a math teacher at a high school, I would put all the students into my online program and then I would be a coach, Because you cannot do it. They all learn at different paces, Different paces. Right Depends on their background and their ability and how hard they work. And sometimes they got to, you know, get sick for a week or go on a vacation, whatever, and so with my program it doesn’t matter, it’s all self-paced. I have students who go through my entire practical math program and and assuming they didn’t already know it if they already knew a lot of it, they’d go through it in a week.

Craig (Dr. Del): 19:48

But let’s say they didn’t know it, they’d go through it in about a month. Most students take about three months, but if it takes them six months it’s okay, it doesn’t matter. But you’re going to learn practical math and I teach that in my. When you go to the web page, if you go to my personal website, I have a button on it that says how to improve your life. You go there and it’ll show you right, and I have four educational videos that fully explain this.

Craig (Dr. Del): 20:18

The first thing, by the way, I do with post elementary and I do this pretty as I teach them how to use what they need to know about this scientific calculator. Now, this scientific calculator used to cost $10. It’s up to about $16 today at Amazon. It has about 50 things it’ll do. There’s less than 20 of them you need to learn, so I don’t teach the stuff you don’t need. There’s all kinds of stuff on this calculator that you’ll never use. I teach the stuff you’ll use and it’s easy and it’s kinesthetic and they learn by doing. You don’t learn by just listening to someone talk about it. You’ve got to do it Once you’ve learned this calculator, I then teach you practical algebra.

Craig (Dr. Del): 20:55

How many lessons does it take to learn all the practical algebra that I ever needed to do, all the things I told you I did and all the things you’ll need? How many lessons do you think practical algebra is Ten you’ll need? How many lessons? Do you think practical algebra is 10 10?

Craig (Dr. Del): 21:13

Hey, then I teach practical geometry and we apply algebra to geometry. How long is something? What is the area? What is the volume? Now, 19 lessons, because we got triangles and circles and three-dimensional stuff. But it’s all practical, and what makes it easy to do is we use the calculator to do all arithmetic calculations. You’ll never, ever again do it manually, and that makes it so much easier. Now, before the calculators came out, you couldn’t do that. In fact, when I taught an engineering school to do the math, you had to do it manually. Or they use what they call log table, logarithm tables, and they put them on a slide reel called a slip stick. In 1972, when the first scientific calculator came out, the HP-35, those became obsolete. By the way, do you know how much that first calculator cost, the HP-35, in 1972?

Tim: 22:04

I’d say probably $300.

Craig (Dr. Del): 22:07

In today’s dollars, $2,500. In today’s dollars 2,500 bucks. In today’s dollars At that time it was $395. Now Hewlett Packard thought they’d sell 10,000 of them to engineers. Students started buying them.

Craig (Dr. Del): 22:21

I was teaching at an engineering school at that time, rose Holman Institute of Technology in Indiana. I’ll never forget. This calculator came out and some of the students there had money. They could afford $395. The professors weren’t going to spend it and I asked one of the students. I said show me this calculator. And he showed it to me.

Craig (Dr. Del): 22:42

Now I was teaching advanced theory, but I could see what it did. So I went. I saw immediately slide rules are obsolete. What would take you 10 minutes on a slide rule you do in one minute with a calculator. Okay, I go to my math department meeting. I said hey guys, guess what Slide rules are obsolete? Log tables and trig tables are obsolete.

Craig (Dr. Del): 23:03

Oh, that’s what they taught, blew their minds. Well, that’s what happened. Taught blew their minds Well, that’s what happened. And they quit making. They quit making slide rule about 1980. And, um, I don’t know if you buy one today or not, that’s what you buy an old one, but uh. But then Hewlett Packard, instead of selling 10,000 of them that year to engineers they sold a hundred thousand. So about a year later they lowered the price to one 95. The Texas service came along and they said you know, the Hewlett Packard calculator is kind of hard to use. So they came up with one that was easier to use and they sold it for under $100. And then years later they came up with the TI-30XA and up until we had recent inflation it was $10.

Craig (Dr. Del): 23:45

And this calculator is extremely useful easy to use if it’s taught properly, which is what I do. If you’d had one of these during the Manhattan Project, this would have been worth a million dollars, because I had to do all the arithmetic manually they hired a bunch of women to do it, by the way, and this calculator does it and this would have been worth a million dollars. People don’t realize. I mean, it’s $10, but it’s kind of like a smartphone. Yes, look at all you can do with a smartphone today, right? You?

Craig (Dr. Del): 24:18

can do stuff with a smartphone that you used to couldn’t do. And then, when’s the last time you bought a camera?

Tim: 24:25

Yeah, if you’re not into photography and videography, your camera is your phone. Yeah right.

Craig (Dr. Del): 24:33

So anyway, that’s what it is, and so if you go to my personal website, craighanecom, you’ll learn all about this. I’ve got a lot of free videos there, just of interest. One of my recent ones is Math Proves God Exists.

Tim: 24:47

I was going to ask you about that. What do you mean by math? Is God’s language.

Craig (Dr. Del): 24:54

Well, the math the Chinese use is exactly the same math that we use. Yes, Let me give you an example. When I was a graduate student, I had to pass French and German back in those days in the 60s. I can’t read a French newspaper or a German newspaper or a French book. I learned a little bit of French, a little bit of German, but I couldn’t read a book. But they would give me to test me. They would give me a paper in mathematics written in French. Well, because of the math, I could do it. Math is universal. Whether you’re Chinese or Russian or whatever you are, math is math, Same thing. The number system and geometry, Now they have different, maybe names for it. Now they have different, maybe names for it. But if I see a triangle and then I see a word that describes it, in whatever language I know, it’s a triangle, Right. So that’s how I passed the. If they had given me a German test or a French test without a math paper, I couldn’t have passed it. I deflected it.

Tim: 26:06

That’s a really good point, and now, I never thought god exists.

Craig (Dr. Del): 26:10

It’s not just math, it’s math and science combined. But I uh, I explained to it had nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with the bible. It’s math and science. It depends how you define god, and I explain all that. What, how I define it. But there’s a scientist that you may never have heard of, named William Tiller. You ever hear of William Tiller? No, okay, I will tell everybody now. If you really want to understand what I consider to be the latest, most important science, go study Dr William Tiller’s work. He wrote three books and he’s got a website. He’s dead now. He died recently. He’s older than he was in his 90s when he died. Fantastic guy. But he explains it and I won’t get into it now. We haven’t got time on this on this particular part.

Tim: 26:57

If you want me, if you want to have another podcast sometime, I will give you more details on that I would, we, I think we definitely will, because we got’ve got more to talk about than what we can fit into here, that’s for sure. There’s another interesting concept that you talk about a lot. It’s the idea of what you believe is what will happen. How did that change your life, that whole idea?

Craig (Dr. Del): 27:24

When I was 10 years old, my parents were not religious, they weren’t atheists, they just didn’t. They worked so hard. They never went to church and we didn’t. But my grandparents did and they took me to the Nazarene Church in Greencastle, indiana, and I had a Sunday school teacher named Theron York and he taught me things out of the New Testament, the golden rule and things like that. But he also taught me that what you believe will come to pass, like if you had enough belief, you can move them out and remember that it’s in the Bible. Yep, and I believed him, and so all my life I have now stopped on what you desire.

Craig (Dr. Del): 28:05

By the way, it’s what you believe. There’s a big difference in what you want and what you believe. All my life I have believed, I’ve learned how to believe things, and I teach that in other places. But and what I believe then came to pass, and it’s happened many, many, many times. I believed I would go to college, and when I was told in the ninth grade, when I didn’t do well in algebra, that you’re not going to go to college, it really depressed me because I well, how can that be? I believe I’m going. Well then, miss O’Hare, my sophomore year in geometry saved me, had it been for her. But it happened. And I could go through story after story after story where I believe something and then it happened Right and I don’t know.

Craig (Dr. Del): 28:58

And it’s part of understanding God and the non-physical world. God exists in what’s called the non-physical world. By the way which it exists, your body is both physical and non-physical, and when your physical body dies, your non-physical body exists in another. It’s really not a time space, it’s a frequency domain. Tiller explains all that. By the way, that’s science. That’s not. That’s not nothing to do with the Bible or the Quran or any any literature. Now they understood it. But Tiller explained it from a scientific. He’s actually done experiments to prove it. I call him the modern Galileo.

Tim: 29:43

That’s again all very interesting things and, like I said, we could spend hours or I could spend hours talking about a lot of these things, but really do appreciate you taking some time with us today. Where can people find you, Craig, Craig hangcom.

Craig (Dr. Del): 29:59

C R a, I, g, h, a, n, ecom, just go there and and I I have a tab that tells you how to improve your life and that’ll take you to what I told you about the four videos that are educational and basically what they’ll do is they will tell you how to dramatically improve your life for $9.

Tim: 30:22

And, like I said, I’ll put that in the show notes and for everybody to go, and they can also download your book there and lots of other things. And, like I said, I’ll put that in the show notes for everybody to go and they can also download your book there and lots of other things. Dr Dell, thank you so much for taking some time with us. I really do appreciate it.

Craig (Dr. Del): 30:37

Tim, you’re more than welcome and God bless you and God bless your listeners. Now, everybody listen to this okay, thank you so much.

Tim: 30:44

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