🇺🇸 [lalilo] Benjamin
Lalilo shines light on the extraordinary work its team members do. Meet Benjamin, co-founder of Lalilo.
What are you doing at Lalilo’s? Since when?
I joined Laurent and Amine at the very beginning of the adventure, in March 2016. Initially, I was a summer intern just as Laurent and Amine were originally. We were our own supervisors from the school perspective!
As a founder, my role has evolved a lot. During the first year, we were all developing the program, and I grew expertise in how reading is taught, in the US and in France. As the team got bigger, I’ve evolved to coordinating the Pedagogy, AI & Speech Recognition.
What kind of student were you?
The kind with the awful handwriting. From 1st grade to my Bachelor’s degree I was told that my handwriting would cause me problems. In the end, computers gained momentum, and now everybody types. Except for the New Year’s cards I’m sending… which are desperately awful.
What do you like most about Lalilo?
The people I work with — users and coworkers. Teachers are an extremely benevolent population — they usually don’t count hours, and they do everything possible to have students achieve their best. Our team is full of determined and benevolent people as well.
Teaching in a classroom is extremely demanding. Building a company in the EdTech industry is also super demanding. I feel we’re all doing our best every day to achieve our mission — whether to teach kids or help teachers :-)
Why did you want to work in Edtech?
There are a lot of different problems in the world. Global warming, wars, terrorism, indoctrination, pollution, energy production, food production, access to water… Some of them are technical challenges, others are about changing our mindset as a society or as individuals. Anyway, all of our long-term challenges should be addressed through education. We need to emphasize the fact that we need to take into account our environment, as we’re too many now not to care. We need to develop our social and collaborative skills as a human race. We need to develop strong critical thinking skills to be better able to sort and evaluate growing incoming flows of information.
What do you think needs to change in education? Why/How?
Education is not reshuffling the social deck as it stands today.
We need to achieve a higher outcome in terms of linguistic, analytical, and interpersonal skills. For that to happen, we need to heavily invest in Education, reduce class sizes, and allow for more innovation coming from the ground. Teachers, researchers, and publishers should work together to find better ways of achieving learning outcomes, developing passion, and growing as an individual. Today, very few publishers talk to teachers or researchers. Researchers don’t spend much time in the classroom. Teachers need more time without a class to manage to deepen their expertise and try out new things on a frequent basis.
Would you have liked to be a teacher? If so, what subject would you have liked to teach?
I’ll probably either turn into a 1st-grade teacher or a physics or math high school teacher, at some point in my life!
