1+1 = No One Cares
Friends,
In Learning To Appreciate Learning, I offered a personal perspective:
Let learning be a source of joy. Insight is its own reward and to train someone to appreciate that when they are young is a life-long gift because they can find stimulation in the pleasures of the mind and the mundane.
Sure, math proficiency has plenty of instrumental value in life, but appreciation and beauty is the bigger gift here (I also suspect this is an antidote to the doping that broader media does to people — if you find beauty in the evergreen you don’t need to constantly be taking drags from the current times and you’re perspective and emotional state will be better off for it. No science behind that — just my hunch).
You are already doing the single largest muscle movement –> literally giving a shit about your kids’ curiosity flourishing. Like seriously that’s 90%. The specific instances of expression — coding, writing, drawing, cooking, composing — or any other forms of creation are secondary. Creating not just consuming is the key because by being able to manipulate the world (I don’t mean manipulate in some evil sense) around you, you reinforce your agency.
For today’s Munchies, you get a few related follow-ups:
1)The Math Evangelist Who Preaches Problem-Solving (9 min read)
This is a short interview with…Richard Ruscyk founder of Art of Problem Solving, has a vision for bringing “joyous, beautiful math” — and problem-solving — to classrooms everywhere.
AoPS and their elementary school curriculum Beast Academy are highly regarded supplementary math programs. I’m putting my 4th-grade son into one of their online programs (the diagnostic tests were fun, I did them too!)
I actually know of AoPS because it was co-designed by Sandor Lehoczky one of Jane Street’s founders and a pioneer on SIG’s index desk before I joined the firm in 2000.
A few excerpts (bold is mine):
You can’t lecture a third-grader. You need to have a back-and-forth. The comic book structure we use has little kid monsters in conversation with each other, parents, teachers, the different characters in the universe….We spent months trying to figure out: What is our delivery mechanism? We had 150 pages of worksheets, and we’re like, “No, this doesn’t work.” And then in one five-minute stretch, someone said comic books, and someone else said monsters. And we got a fantastic artist and started building out the books.
When I started experiencing high school math Olympiads, it was two years of getting zero right on every single test. That was really frustrating. But it was safe, because it was a math contest, and who really cares? It wasn’t the first-year math class in college, staring at four problems and thinking, “I am not going to be able to do this, I am not going to be a scientist, I’m not going to be an engineer.” That’s the experience our educational system gives to a lot of students. They think they’re not good enough, because the first time they’ve had this experience is when they get to college. They’re good enough, they just haven’t been prepared…So we show the problems first. If a student discovers math for themselves, it becomes their math, instead of just something that was told to them. They’re not always going to get there, and that’s fine. Or sometimes they’re going to do it very differently than we did. That’s great too.
Whether this is revealing that the material teaches the kids or the material unlocks the kids, I’m not sure it matters, right? You have to give them material that’s going to make them want to do it. Getting the student to a place where they are interested in struggling with whatever you’re showing them, for a lot of kids is the whole game.
2) Magic Power
In the spirit of my own belief that you should trick your children into believing that reading gives them magical powers, here’s a note by the legendary Jane Goodall:
Dear Children,
I want to share something with you — and that is how much I loved books when I was your age. Of course, back then there was no Internet, no television — we learned everything from printed books. We didn’t have much money when I was a child and I couldn’t afford new books, so most of what I read came from our library. But I also used to spend hours in a very small second-hand book shop. The owner was an old man who never had time to arrange his books properly. They were piled everywhere and I would sit there, surrounded by all that information about everything imaginable. I would save up any money I got for my birthday or doing odd jobs so that I could buy one of those books. Of course, you can look up everything on the Internet now. But there is something very special about a book — the feel of it in your hands and the way it looks on the table by your bed, or nestled in with others in the bookcase.
I loved to read in bed, and after I had to put the lights out I would read under the bedclothes with a torch, always hoping my mother would not come in and find out! I used to read curled up in front of the fire on a cold winter evening. And in the summer I would take my special books up my favorite tree in the garden. My Beech Tree. Up there I read stories of faraway places and I imagined I was there. I especially loved reading about Doctor Doolittle and how he learned to talk to animals. And I read about Tarzan of the Apes. And the more I read, the more I wanted to read.
I was ten years old when I decided I would go to Africa when I grew up to live with animals and write books about them. And that is what I did, eventually. I lived with chimpanzees in Africa and I am still writing books about them and other animals. In fact, I love writing books as much as reading them — I hope you will enjoy reading some of the ones that I have written for you.
Jane Goodall
My sister, a veterinarian, gave me a copy of Goodall’s 2021 release The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times this past winter. Seeing the Goodall quote reminds me that this woman probably has couple lifetimes of wisdom to share on the topic. Here’s the Amazon blurb:
In this urgent audiobook, Jane Goodall, the world's most famous living naturalist, and Douglas Abrams, the internationally best-selling coauthor of The Book of Joy, explore through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue one of the most sought-after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her "Four Reasons for Hope": The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.
Drawing on decades of work that has helped expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we all need to do to help build a better world, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? What is the relationship between hope and action? Filled with moving and inspirational stories and photographs from Jane’s remarkable career, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in the world today.
While discussing the experiences that shaped her discoveries and beliefs, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope, from living through World War II to her years in Gombe to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world in her role as an advocate for environmental justice. And for the first time, she shares her profound revelations about her next, and perhaps final, adventure.
3) Online coding courses
I asked Twitter:
What are the latest recommendations for online courses for learning to code (adults or kids)?
This thread has the answers. Based on the results and my own experience my top 4 recs (not in order) are:
And if your impulse is “why bother something something GPT” then you’ve missed the point of today’s Munchies. But you should definitely be using GPT to bootstrap learning to code. Learning to code was already an exercise in prompt engineering — GPT lets you skip StackOverflow the way Google shows you featured snippets.
Yesterday, my younger guy turned 7 and we did a photo shoot at one of those selfie shops.
His older brother is giving a preview of the punky years ahead:
1+1 = No One Cares
Just what the world needs — another shitposter.
Stay groovy
☮️
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