the game of school

Moontower Munchies #100

Friends,

Last Wednesday, I talked about the cognitive bias where our minds substitute an easy question for a hard one. It’s in the category of “attribution” error which encompasses many biases you’ve heard of such as overconfidence, availability, peak-end, and more.

I remember Tetlock saying in his book that superforecasters suppressed this natural urge to switcheroo the question. Instead, they read the question like a lawyer. With precision.

A recent story at home made me think of this again.

My 6th grader told me that he's been dominating the trivia competitions in history class. It’s jeopardy-style trivia where you lose points for being wrong.

Last night he told me his 18-game winning streak, in a class of 25 kids, was just broken. (He argues it was on a technicality and nobody actually beat him, so I think he’s well on his way to a JD. I am in seclusion in the north wing mourning).

While he's good at school crap I was still surprised by this streak. Zak, how are you doing this? Turns out he basically lays in the weeds, answers fast when he's confident, and otherwise lets the other kids "cook themselves". They answer too many questions.

I have a couple thoughts about this.

First the superficially obvious one…Zak’s strategy is precise. The goal isn't to know the most about the subject. It's to get the most points. He understood the objective quite literally. No substituting. I appreciate that he recognizes this.

But it brings me to my next thought — about school’s limitations.

This game is a microcosm of school training.

Don't take risk.

There's a right answer.

Failure is heavily penalized.

Some of this dosed correctly is good and necessary. We need our bridges to stand.

But you can overlearn these lessons. I did. I never saw school as a place to learn but as a game. I even took that mentality to college. What major is the easiest to satisfy requirements while being tolerable? (Answer: econ)

The rules of life from what I was told:

getting an A = a pleasant future

I took this quite literally and missed the forest through the trees.

(I have a post about misapplying my trader mindset which shows how this particular folly of overlearning lessons was not limited to my academic years).

I’m not gonna go on some crusade about playing Jeopardy in school because it injects insidious game-thinking into one’s entire educational journey. It’s just a story that reminds me that formal schooling is incomplete. Risk-taking is a form of learning. School’s not really built to encourage that type of learning.

You can just try to round out the lessons at home. We definitely do the cliche stuff. At dinner, we might talk about a risk we took or something we failed at today. It's not all the time because, heck, sometimes mom and I aren't taking enough chances. But being annoyingly repetitive about it does seem to have an impact. The kids will just parrot me “why would you expect to be good at something the first time you try it”. I like when they mock me. It means they’re listening.

With the older kid now getting report cards, the kids are figuring out that mom is the letter grade enforcer. And you don’t even need to wait until report card day. She is addicted to Canvas notifications. I’m not the most detail-oriented about “did you do your homework” which is a flippancy towards school I am trying to suppress so they don’t pick up on it. That said, I’m pretty matter-of-fact about an A just being table stakes. School’s designed for everyone, the least you can do is get an A (look, I wouldn’t say this universally but parents know their kids — whether it’s school or sports you figure out the curve to grade them on).

More critically, an A is NOT an endpoint. The 6th grader gets As easily but I'll spot check his work. I looked at an essay of his last week and threw up in my mouth. I went through it line by line with him. Not to make him feel bad (I do so in a joking way so he’s usually laughing when I make fun what I deem lazy work), but to teach him basic writing hygiene. The truth is he's gonna get an A for what I consider trash. I don’t expect him to write like a lit major but the first step in closing the gap between what he's capable of and where he is is pointing it out. That gap is unmeasured by the stupid grade. The grade is not on a curve to who he is. It’s my job to calibrate.

I think a lot about that interview I summarized with Kathleen Mercury. She teaches boardgame design to gifted kids in middle school. She says the lesson most of those kids need is that an A is not a ceiling.

Teaching game design is teaching to orient towards an internal scorecard not an external one:

That quantitative checkmark feeds into a lot of the programming that we’ve already done with kids as far as you know letter grades and standardized tests and success is 100% and success is, you know, an A plus is, you know, and I think for a lot of my students especially having to sort of break that mentality. A lot of what I do in teaching game design is here is this problem that cannot be solved, or notions like that. Here is this problem that you will have to you have to define the problem. You have to figure out how you’re going to solve this problem, you’re going to design your tests with these resources in terms of you know how close are you to solving this problem and you’re gonna do this again and again and again, you’re going to make a prototype you’re going to put it in front of other people, they’re going to play it, you’re going to get their feedback, and then you’re going to take those ideas, and that, you know, good, bad, the ugly. Incorporate that into your next design so that when that hits the table hopefully it’s better. Thinking of it as an unfinished unending hopefully upwardly ascending sort of cascade. See that process as a real process reflective of what life will be, I think is really important, because for a lot of my kids, you know they’ve learned what successes is and it’s an A+. I’m trying to show them that if you want to do anything cool, there will never be A+. You will never be finished. You will always just have to try to do your best to put out your best possible effort, listen to other people, and hopefully make that idea better and so that’s why I teach game design.

The reason why I teach game design is a teaches them this process of thinking design, thinking hands-on, trying to create solutions and learning how to see successes incremental progress, not as I finished I’m done.

We do talk about how it can be finished and not perfect and that’s really important for a lot of them. That you can have something that is unfinished. And you can see it as successful because you did try to make it better, even if you don’t think it’s better. And that’s really really hard for them to accept because it goes against everything they’ve always done

Real work has a tension in that you must ship even though it can always be better, especially in creative work. Balancing the quest for excellence without making perfection the enemy of the good will be a struggle for kids that are used to not struggling.

The struggle for school achievers can be a reluctance to try things they won't be good at right away. Chipping away at the reluctance is part of the education that's rarely captured in grades. It's often actively selected against (like picking a major based on the easiest route to As).

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The whole interview with Kathleen is great. Here’s a few more bullets:

On kids having different abilities

✔️Everyone deserves to learn at their level every single day that’s just one of those tenets that I just hold. If you’re doing something where their disabilities or inabilities become apparent to others. I think you have to be really careful about how you handle that. As far as you know what you’re willing to do to, you know, protect them to take care of them because if they’re stressed out and embarrassed.

✔️Approach to gifted kids:

1. If you don’t give gifted kids problems to solve, they will create their own.

2. They need to learn how to struggle and work through it.

✔️Heterogeneous groupings can protect kids by partnering up but homogenous groupings have advantages too.

For my gifted kids, a lot of times when that happens, they’re always like the ones that are like spread out amongst the other groups, and then they put all the spread out all the middle kids and then they spread out all this sort of low kids and pardon me for speaking in broad brushstrokes but I am. And so a lot of times they never get chances to work with each other. And one thing that research shows is that when you let kids have similar abilities work with each other. Everyone gains, because the kids on the middle step it up, and the kids on the lower end also step it up, even if it’s like one notch higher, you know, that’s okay for them, you know they’re using their abilities and what they know and trying to push themselves up to be more competitive as well

✔️Why the emphasis on points in winning is redundant.

Points are used to ultimately communicate your position in the game to other people. And if we’re playing a game that is just to be, you know, a review or something like that I don’t care about the points at all. And so, what I will often do is even if they get points, or if one team starts to get a blow out. I will, you know, do something like say “this is a 20 point question”, and then somehow I manage to make it so that kids on the other team get those points, or I start awarding ridiculous points my cool you just got a puppy. So drop puppy up there on the scoreboard.

✔️An antidote to results-based thinking

I honestly try to minimize any type of objective points in any kind of game situation as much as possible, because no one should ever be blamed for losing for their team, and I honestly don’t want anybody to be, you know, the fourth batter to just hit the Grand Slam home run and they get all the credit, not the people who also got on first, second and third.

✔️Be thoughtful about when points matter

It does make sense to have kids have scoring that matters, but I think you have to really ask yourself, is this that time?

✔️Not having grades at all doesn’t really work either

And if I had my choice I wouldn’t do grades at all, but this is the world we live in and I have to actually try tried one year to not give out grades and our gifted class. There’s some unintended consequences there but there you go. We tried it once. As much as we wanted it to work it didn’t really work.

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More personal exhaust

Monday was my 3rd grader’s chance to have dad be a hard-ass:

https://x.com/KrisAbdelmessih/status/1894107936613699618

Just as an fyi on the tweet context…there’s a test called the OLSAT that all 3rd graders get in CA. It’s basically an IQ test that measures verbal and non-verbal reasoning. It determines whether your kid gets into “gifted and talented”. The mean score on the test in our town is re-centered to 1 standard deviation higher than the CA mean. You need to be 2 standard devs above the town mean to make the program.

If you are one of these tiger parents who says “kindergarten is the first step towards college” you should definitely not live in a town with good public schools. This would be substituting the easy question for the hard one. You are playing the game wrong. I’m pretty sure there’s niche little industry for getting your address to be somewhere in the Dakotas if this is the type of game you gets you off.

That reminds me I need to have my friend Brent guest-post again. Retired options trader turned college consultant. Dude’s forgotten more about trading the VIX complex than I know plus knows exactly how to understand the admissions game for what it is — a horrible game. It’s an area where the conventional wisdom reeks of substituting the easy question for the hard one. Which is understandable since looking at the game for what it is, is certainly not pleasant.

Every article like this and company’s reactions (see what Google did) is going to pile up to real change one day as the system has overplayed its hand. Industry, like Billy Beane did 25 years ago, will add liquidity to an inefficient market. The spirit of “show your work in public” will become increasingly common amongst ambitious high schoolers and I expect more routes around the ossified college-industrial complex.

It’s funny — when I was in Vegas last week with my good friend we were talking about NILs. His son is an elite HS athlete (if you know me IRL there’s a good chance you know which kid I’m talking about). They are meeting famous sports agents. The scouts are circling. If the boy stays healthy and stays on the curve he’s been on since he was 2-years-old (Yinh and I flew to Anaheim when he was 4 to watch him throw out the first pitch at an Angels game), he’ll make more money in college than most people make in their fancy jobs. I’m so proud and hopeful for him. But I’m also reminded that colleges are branded hedge funds with multi-billion dollar logos. Education is part of the bundle but I suspect it’s a large part for only a tiny number of students whose futures depend on the things they actually learn in school.

Nothing would make me happier than seeing them lose their grip on our youth’s singular dreams. I’m going to root for anything that encourages more paths to thriving without paying some artificial-scarcity tax.

As I’m getting older and watching friends with high school-age kids it seems like everyone agrees that the situation is gross but they feel hostage to it. I don’t know how much of it is cartel economics versus paradox of skill. If people internalize that college is so valuable it becomes more competitive — and if a game is competitive enough, the outcomes look random. Which tracks. What word do parents use in describing admissions?

Crapshoot.

Stay Groovy

☮️

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