After-school activities
Friends,
The end of summer break means it’s time to fill in the fall after-school schedule.
Kid activities can be a frustrating chore. You put the pu pu platter in front of them hoping they develop an interest in something new. You hope they latch on to a sport or project that develops their sense of progression. Right-sizing challenges so they learn to fight through obstacles, build confidence that effort is rewarding, and discover what they like. If they develop an obsession, I’d consider that icing on the cake. There’s no higher octane fuel for learning than the focus that spouts from fixation. Obsessions can be unhealthy but not finding an obsession is an underappreciated form of suffering for many.
We present the kids with lots of choices for what to do. The sports commitments are covered. They both play soccer and basketball. Beyond that things are tougher. They naysay lots of stuff. Our house hosted chess for the neighborhood kids for the past 4 years but the boys have no interest in continuing. They take online Vietnamese classes with a tutor. They like the classes when they are doing them but they’d just as easily not do them. The younger one loves animals so for years we’ve been trying to convince him to try a nature program at a local ranch where they tend to animals, learn to garden, cook and basically larp as a Davy Crocket. He finally agreed this year. We also added Kumon to his schedule. There’s a bit of history with my objection to this in our household but his bestie is doing it plus he likes doing work like that so I’m compelled to comply with something that makes him happy that feels pretty uninspiring to me. That settles his schedule.
The 6th grader is more complicated. His opinions are stronger. He’d rather play Xbox than anything else. This is hard for me to stomach. It reminds me too much of myself when I was young. I too was unmotivated. But I had so little resources as a kid that I didn’t have much sense of possibility. At his age, I remember wanting to play drums but such a luxury was out of the question. We plead with him to show interest in something.
Boredom is important but there’s a balance. One discovers interests by sampling but inspiration can remain elusive. If the menu fails to inspire, we will suggest things strongly and whatever he doesn’t outright reject becomes a contender. Last school year he did the full Art of Problem Solving 6th grade pre-algebra course because he agreed without emotion. When saw how much work it was it turned into a battle for a few days but then he was diligent about doing the 5 hours a week on his own. It took the whole school year but he finished.
And was totally ambivalent about it.
No complaints but also no real spark. It was so bizarre. Either I would never have stopped rebelling or if I did it was because it finally captured my enthusiasm. In 10th grade, my high watermark of being an adolescent a-hole, I got a C in Basic programming. I was grounded for a semester. I begrudgingly put in extra work and then discovered I loved coding which led to making primitive games. I had nothing else to do anyway. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV or play with friends. (I tried to major in CS my freshman year of college and didn’t last a week. Just setting up the environment kept me in the public computer lab for 5 hours with little progress. I was a short-sighted, lazy wimp who expected things should be easy).
As a parent, it’s hard to watch your kid, in their infinite time, float in the wind. We don’t allow video games or TV during the week and you can’t read Spy School chapter books for 5 hours a day so our ultimatum: “Pick something to do or we will just pick something new for you again”.
He settled on coding because he wants to modify Rocket League bots which would require him to learn Python. We love the idea because it’s a project that requires learning and learning how to learn. He’s accustomed to using GPT and YouTube to learn stuff (he also wants to use Reddit, but daddy veto’d that) so it feels like this has potential.
We are also looking for a HS student who can act as a tutor/guide for the project. Someone who can enable him who isn’t me or his mom. It will give him a mix of mentorship from someone relatable and just ahead of him while preserving a healthy share of autonomy. The hope is that fostering traction in the early critical period will lead to renewable momentum.
I’ll let you know how kid activities go as the year progresses.
If you have any thoughts on kid activities please share. It may even make sense to re-share them in the letter. We can’t be the only people flailing around.
Worthwhile things I found in the vein of learning
There’s No Right Answer (6 min read)
Matt Bateman
You’ve heard the phrase “there’s no right answer” in educational settings. When we say this we are designing a safe space for disagreement with a well-intentioned lie. Matt’s post is about the cost of the lie and an alternative way to design the learning environment.
Excerpt:
“There’s no right answer” is meant to decrease the cost of speaking up by removing the risk of being wrong. Unfortunately, the “no right answer” mantra decreases the cost of speaking up by annihilating its main benefit. If there’s no right answer, if there’s no truth here, why bother? As commonly used, “no right answer” is an enormous dampener on motivation.
Cognitive motivation—the desire to know, to understand, to get at the truth—is often underappreciated in education. Educators debate whether grades and test scores are proper motivators or too “extrinsic”, and whether and how passion projects and independent interests can be used to motivate learning. But even this sort of passion project can be, in many learning contexts, one motivational step too many.
The pursuit of truth, the desire to be right—not in right in a debate, but right with the world—are powerful motives in themselves. The mind wants to know, and this desire to know should be pushed, protected, and cultivated. Cognitive motivation, the desire to know, is universal—especially in children of school age.
“There’s no right answer”, despite being well-intentioned, undermines this motivation. In the case of sharing experiences or opining, it can be straightforwardly replaced with the more precise, “I’m not looking for a particular answer.” In other cases, it’s far better to speak to students in a way that makes clear that there is a right answer—even if no one knows it, even it’s really hard, even if most people get it wrong and even if you get it wrong, we’re trying to figure it out.
The apparent fragility of students is more a product of how adults fail to help motivate them to understand risk, including cognitive risk. If anything, young children are naturally risk-takers, happy to stumble, to make mistakes, to put forth sustained effort for a while before they even ask for help. What adults do is not just fail to foster that motivation, but to undermine and block it.
Sheltering a person’s self-esteem just doesn’t work as a general tactic. Self-esteem is earned, and esteeming one’s capacity for thought and discussion is earned through practice, through argument, through finding oneself wrong and learning to love the process of self-correction, of changing one’s mind. It’s human nature to seek the truth, but it’s also human nature to be wrong a lot. One needs to earn over time a trust in oneself to be able to handle and even profit from being wrong.
[filling in some pedantic details]
To be a bit pedantic: there are some circumstances where there is no right answer. Sometimes an idea is so arbitrary that it’s “not even wrong”. Sometimes you’re using a mode of expression more in the vein of a non-declarative speech act, so right and wrong isn’t directly at issue. But this is nowhere near justification for the notion that there are substantive, important questions, the types of questions that we routinely discuss in classroom seminars across many disciplines, on which there are neither right nor wrong answers.
Older students will, of course, naturally grapple with the notion that there is no truth or that truth dissolves into weaker notions. Whether it’s pragmatism or standpoint epistemology or coherence theories, these ideas are in the air and even part of frameworks that should be offered for consideration in education. The point is not to propagandize students into believing in an objective, correspondence theory of truth—or even to push them to care about this issue.
But at the level of pedagogical methodology, aimed at cultivating implicit habits of mind, we indeed ought to be guided by this view. This is one of many examples where a commitment to a substantive philosophical view at the level of educational methodology manifests as a commitment to empowering students to disagree with that view. (The First Amendment, premised on the inviolate power of the individual mind, enables people to disagree with the First Amendment and whether or not the individual mind’s power really is inviolate.)
In class discussions, we may very well disagree with one another. We might, as a class, a society, or even as a species, be mistaken. We might, for these or for other good reasons, refrain from correcting a student in any particular case. But let there be no ambiguity in our pedagogy that we are on a quest for the right answers.]
Fostering a good-faith, truth-finding culture
This is a topic we’ve talked about before in this letter. Safe-to-disagree spaces need to be well-designed if you want to find truth. This a complex goal.
it requires defining what outcomes are actually desired and why
aligning interests effectively since there are always competing values en route to a shared goal
enabling unsuppressed conversation & feedback subject to a group’s consensus standards (ie yelling is never ok, pulling rank is off-limits)
In the Alpha Player Problem, gaming contexts offer helpful angles into the general organizational behavior puzzle. This issue is especially relevant in organizations where short-term efficiency is often prioritized over long-term growth and learning.
In Trading is a Team Sport, we extend the discussion to the trading desk.
Childhoods of Exceptional People (8 min read)
Henrik Karlsson
It’s a bad idea to extrapolate from outliers but this post strikes a keen balance between overfitting while extracting patterns that, while not sufficient nor mandatory for thriving, certainly seem additive.
The post’s references to Bloom 2-Sigma insights are strongly reinforced in real-time by watching Dwarkesh’s podcasting career unfold. I read his update today, and while it’s a story about his young professional journey, it’s a revealing glimpse into how much more effective and accessible self-directed learning is in the modern era.
The internet and AI will keep lowering the age at which mastery can be achieved. But reading this as an old geezer I get a different but equally uplifting message — reinventing yourself is more possible than ever before. The bottleneck is nerve and energy not opportunity.
Fun learning
A couple weeks ago I pointed you to Quant Questions. The site collects math puzzles to help candidates prep for trading interviews.
Most of the content is free including the Discord with over 950 users.
If you want to dive into the paywalled parts use the code MOONTOWER to get 25% off.
Another site loaded with math puzzles sorted by type and difficulty:
I looked at the Monty Hall solution on the site and noticed there was a simulation to test the solution yourself built with Google Colab, a cloud-based Jupyter notebook!
https://colab.research.google.com/gist/varun-seth/e828928baefdfd503548bef522c15a7b/14_monty_hall.ipynb
Warning: If you are under age 40 look away.
I just started using Jupyter notebooks this year (also I hear The Raiders play in Las Vegas). They are so much more modular and friendly for using Python to explore data than writing .py scripts. I was actually mad when I realized this existed. If you are code-curious this is a much better gateway to start playing with Python or R. Colab makes onboarding even faster since it doesn’t require setting up a code environment.
If I knew about this a few weeks ago I could have shown the kiddos at cousin camp a simulation in Python instead of the Excel version. But I guess there’s something to be said for little goat icons.
Stay Groovy
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The best courses I took in college were based around the idea that the class was working towards a difficult to find correct answer, but that any statement or question that got you closer to that answer was a worthy contribution. I found that most of my classmates were willing to go out on a limb and propose solutions (even if they weren't sure) because the response was usually "let's explore if that answer is true, and if not, that exploration could lead us somewhere anyway." A thought that was not immediately a correct answer is still worth contributing because it is a step towards truth as long as your group is willing to commit to working through and incrementing on everyone's ideas.
try an arduino starter kit for the kids, good hands on intro to programming / engineering.
if you want something more polished check out mark rober's: https://www.crunchlabs.com/