Gone are the days when the biggest classroom distraction used to be a paper airplane. Now you’re up against algorithms designed by Stanford PhDs to hack the human dopamine system.
But contrary to popular belief, our Our CEO Michael Vilardo says the crux of the problem is broken engagement, not attention spans:
“Students are playing video games 24 hours a day, watching TikTok 24 hours a day. It’s not a biology issue… It’s an engagement issue.”
Michael learned this during UCLA’s $70,000-a-year “Zoom University” disaster. While stuck in lockdown attending virtual lectures that felt like watching paint dry, he and other students were simultaneously obsessing over Tiger King. The same humans who couldn’t focus on graduate business courses were having passionate debates about Joe Exotic’s mullet.
That disconnect sparked the founding of Subject, which is currently achieving 80-90% student preference rates over traditional providers. Michael found the answer to keeping students engaged: stop fighting the attention economy and start winning it.
Bringing a Typewriter to a TikTok Fight
When you’re competing with TikTok, Instagram, and that YouTuber making millions teaching calculus while dressed as historical figures, you need a new strategy.
The standard response has been denial wrapped as academic standards:
- Ban phones.
- Double down on content that feels like reading iTunes Terms of Service
- Assigning massively long (and boring) Faulkner readings with no guidance or engagement along the way
Students have always gravitated towards what interests them. The best method for engagement is to bring all of that into the classroom.
The CTRL + ALT + Teach Method
The solution isn’t becoming TikTok with textbooks. It’s putting technology to work so teachers can focus on what makes them irreplaceable: developing humans, not delivering dry lectures. Michael’s key pillars of education are bound to make a difference.
Pillar 1: Accept Your New Competition
Students expect personalized content. “Everything’s moving so fast right now that these parents and teachers have so much technology they’re missing out on,” Michael says. Rather than having the goal to eliminate digital engagement, redirect it toward meaningful learning.
When our platform lets students explore geometry through basketball or study history through locally (and culturally) relevant examples, engagement increases because learning feels like choosing your own adventure rather than being assigned homework by bureaucracy.
Pillar 2: Deploy Your AI Helper
Your EdTech should handle what Michael calls “the personalized, repeatable admin pieces” while teachers focus on “the inspiring and the coaching.” The current model is like hiring Gordon Ramsay to microwave frozen dinners—tragic waste of human potential.
“Teaching should be a profession about connecting human to human, and they shouldn’t be having to do the same lecture 3 times a day, year over year,” Michael argues. Let AI handle lesson planning, grading, and administrative paperwork—all the stuff making teachers question their life choices at 2 AM.
This frees teachers to become educational life coaches: Tony Robbins meets Mr. Rogers, helping students navigate emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and career exploration.
Pillar 3: Track What Actually Matters
Traditional education measures success like judging restaurants by attendance, regardless of whether people enjoyed the meal. (…and let’s be real, we’ve all been let down from a TikTok-hyped restaurant.) Test scores tell you what already happened, not what’s working.
The difference isn’t whether you measure—it’s what you measure. Standards-based education obsesses over whether students can reproduce the ‘right’ answer on demand. Engagement-based education tracks whether students voluntarily choose to keep learning when no one’s forcing them to.
All educators should focus on the voluntary learning displayed through student engagement, instead of testing outcomes. “Engagement leads to efficacy,” as Michael explains. It shows students are willing to think more actively and tackle tough problems.
Pillar 4: Career Discovery
“School should be more about getting you monetizable skills,” our CEO suggests, ”and also understanding yourself well enough that you know what you would like to do all day, every day.”
If most students graduate knowing more about the War of 1812 than career possibilities for their future, that’s a failure. For example, Michael didn’t even know investment banking or software engineering existed until college.
Leveraging technology can expose students to career paths their environment never would. Whether pursuing “top 200 university or trade school” tracks—both legitimate—they need earlier exploration to make informed decisions.
Pillar 5: Equity Through Accessibility
True educational equity means meeting students where they actually are, not where our overlords—whether they’re helicopter parents or stuffy bureaucrats—think they should be.
This means making sure lessons are accessible to non-native English-speaking students. That’s why translated content is so crucial. It enables genuine parent engagement regardless of English skills while allowing students to learn at their natural pace in their preferred language.
“If you don’t see it, you can’t dream it,” Michael, the son of a Colombian immigrant, reflects on his own personal journey from small-town limitations to graduating from an Ivy League school. Technology can expand horizons for students whose geography might otherwise constrain their aspirations.
The Future Is Connected
Teachers leveling up their classrooms keeps them ahead of the changing technology tide. “AI is not going away, like the internet [didn’t go away],” Michael warns. Educational institutions can thoughtfully work with AI tools or watch students use them anyway without guidance.
Subject encourages 10-30% AI usage in student work. Collaborating with AI and critically questioning its output are crucial 21st-century skills. While AI dependence creates intellectual weakness, banning it completely in student assignments ignores our reality.
For students to be future-ready, they need to build dual abilities:
“The biggest hurdle education needs to overcome in the age of AI is emotional intelligence, above all else, making sure that they’re really good from an emotional capacity to connect with other human beings”
Or if not, Michael emphasizes, teach students lessons that prepare them for careers resistant to automation, like in the trades.
A Quick Survival Guide For Your Technological Classroom
Embracing technology in the classroom creates the dream team. You’ve got teachers doing what they were born to do (inspiring, connecting, changing lives), while technology handles the grunt work (grading, attendance, explaining fractions).
Michael’s core tenets for Subject present his vision for successful classrooms.
- Champion engagement over compliance.
- Augment humans, don’t replace them.
- Design for cultural relevance.
No one has ever said a standardized test changed their life. A disengaged student may test well, but the goal is to light them up with intellectual excitement. They’ll remember the teacher who saw their potential, believed in their dreams, and helped them discover who they were meant to become.