I would pay ungodly sums of money to be able to send this essay backwards in time to 15-year-old me. Still finding many of these points useful today (eg around setting up your body)!
This was very enlightening to read as somebody who is entering their second half of high school soon.
Besides computer science, one of my main interests is in mathematics, and it seems that it is especially in pure mathematics. Lately I have been working through a calculus textbook, reading and working through exercises each day. However, this definitely doesn't seem to be a "real thing" as you describe, and I've been struggling to come up with ideas for a real thing to do that ends up with the same, or better, outcome; namely, a deep understanding and knowledge of the topic. So I am wondering if you had any suggestions for such a real thing?
You do suggest the idea of proving theorems in another comment, but I am not sure this would apply well to learning these earlier, often calculation based, subjects like calculus and introductory linear algebra (I think, but I don't know much about linear algebra.) Or maybe my perspective on this is wrong, and I don't need to gain the same knowledge a textbook would give? Either way, I would love to hear your thoughts!
Really great read, especially for someone who's struggling with the pressure of grades and high school, thank you for posting this!
Here, the only thing school achieves is stifling the time, energy, and resources to do anything but study the narrow curriculum you're given. I really hope there's a complete rehaul of the system because anything shorter than that wouldn't do it justice
I was a teacher of burnt out 15-17 year olds and managed to help a few by pointing out that they were in the middle of a golden age where they had close to adult levels of willpower, and close to childhood levels of malleability. Formal schooling in its current form feels like the biggest waste of human potential possible. Wonderful essay. I will save it to share with people around this age in my life.
> When you’re a young child, you actually do get to achieve real accomplishments. You learn to walk and talk, then to throw a ball, to write, to draw, to build a sandcastle or a fort in the woods. Once the tasks of basic interaction with the world become too easy, though, you get assigned years of fake work in a sequestered environment: instead of getting progressively harder real tasks, you get switched over to made-up ones until you’re eighteen.
I really like this. Except learning math, chemistry, history etc is a real task, it just seems like high schoolers are expected to learn far more of these subjects through rote memorization than will serve them.
have you tried asserting this onto any 14 year olds yet and what were the results? I read Paul Graham's essays in high school and I'm not sure it did much, beyond temporary agitation and maybe fostering a counterproductive sense of superiority. I wish my education focused less of total quantity of material and more on motivating the process of discovery, but the teachers who can do that are really rare.
I actually disagree with the idea that you shouldn't try to form or participate in groups, because being a founder or someone who has to organise it does build skills above just participating - and best of all, you'll often get a budget!
I would say that joining a football team probably teaches very few things other than playing football and teamwork, as the coach usually handles all the real world interfaces. However, becoming the president or treasurer of a club (assuming that an adult doesn't just do that job, but try to convince adults to let you) can often be really educational. I picked these two roles because they tend to have "real jobs" compared to most other roles - president does the work management (or just the work, depending on club dysfunction), treasurer handles money. Secretary is a maybe - some clubs use their secretaries well, some badly, so it's a bit of a crapshoot.
President gets you a headstart on things like contacting real-world people and groups, whether to collaborate, or to buy stuff. You get comfortable with speaking to strangers on the phone (an unbelievable number of young people struggle with this). You learn what it takes to organise an event (estimate how many people are coming to things, book a venue, organise stuff and people to happen).
Treasurer learns about how most organisations do finance. Most of these kinds of things which are funded by a school are audited - you learn how to record things to pass an audit. You have a very unique, low-stakes opportunity to learn how to manage funds for a non-profit organisation - to understand your income sources, sometimes to get creative about income sources within rules and real world regulations, and to understand the expenditure. (You'll learn more if the club members are ambitious, try new things types, because a lot of ventures cost money, and it'll be your job to figure out if you can afford it and if you can't, how much you have to raise).
It also looks good on resumes because people will figure if you haven't embezzled club funds as a teenager with low impulse control, you probably won't do something similar as an adult. Note: do not embezzle club funds. A lot of these kinds of organisations are registered non-profits (or parts of anothet registered non-profit) and that's one of the few ways you can actually get into real world trouble by embezzling funds from a non-profit.
That being said, I know adults end up doing a lot of these things for high school clubs. But if you happen to have clubs you can join where adults let you do the job, you should.
I also think a lot about KC, because his story is a terrible and tragic argument against precisely what he argues in the book he wrote.
I keep thinking "someone should have told that kid he CAN'T". His death was entirely preventable. He couldn't swim, wasn't wearing a life jacket, wasn't supervised, and was roughhousing with his brother in a kayak, when it capsized and he drowned.
I helped supervise about 15 5-8 year olds in canoes yesterday. Of them, about half are already competent swimmers, and 100% of them (including the adults) were wearing life jackets. There is absolutely no good reason not to teach your children swim. There is absolutely no good reason for anyone to be in a canoe without life jacket. Full stop.
And neither of those things prevent you from writing a book! Think about how many more books we'd have from him if the adults in his life had told him, just once, he couldn't, and how many more people would have taken his book seriously if he hadn't demonstrated the frailty of its thesis. No parent wants to lose a child like that.
I would pay ungodly sums of money to be able to send this essay backwards in time to 15-year-old me. Still finding many of these points useful today (eg around setting up your body)!
Been binging your posts the last few days. Absolutely loving them keep it up
This was very enlightening to read as somebody who is entering their second half of high school soon.
Besides computer science, one of my main interests is in mathematics, and it seems that it is especially in pure mathematics. Lately I have been working through a calculus textbook, reading and working through exercises each day. However, this definitely doesn't seem to be a "real thing" as you describe, and I've been struggling to come up with ideas for a real thing to do that ends up with the same, or better, outcome; namely, a deep understanding and knowledge of the topic. So I am wondering if you had any suggestions for such a real thing?
You do suggest the idea of proving theorems in another comment, but I am not sure this would apply well to learning these earlier, often calculation based, subjects like calculus and introductory linear algebra (I think, but I don't know much about linear algebra.) Or maybe my perspective on this is wrong, and I don't need to gain the same knowledge a textbook would give? Either way, I would love to hear your thoughts!
This is sick - I run a program (lol) very philosophically similar to what you write about. Sharing with the team + some of my students.
Really great read, especially for someone who's struggling with the pressure of grades and high school, thank you for posting this!
Here, the only thing school achieves is stifling the time, energy, and resources to do anything but study the narrow curriculum you're given. I really hope there's a complete rehaul of the system because anything shorter than that wouldn't do it justice
I was a teacher of burnt out 15-17 year olds and managed to help a few by pointing out that they were in the middle of a golden age where they had close to adult levels of willpower, and close to childhood levels of malleability. Formal schooling in its current form feels like the biggest waste of human potential possible. Wonderful essay. I will save it to share with people around this age in my life.
> When you’re a young child, you actually do get to achieve real accomplishments. You learn to walk and talk, then to throw a ball, to write, to draw, to build a sandcastle or a fort in the woods. Once the tasks of basic interaction with the world become too easy, though, you get assigned years of fake work in a sequestered environment: instead of getting progressively harder real tasks, you get switched over to made-up ones until you’re eighteen.
I really like this. Except learning math, chemistry, history etc is a real task, it just seems like high schoolers are expected to learn far more of these subjects through rote memorization than will serve them.
have you tried asserting this onto any 14 year olds yet and what were the results? I read Paul Graham's essays in high school and I'm not sure it did much, beyond temporary agitation and maybe fostering a counterproductive sense of superiority. I wish my education focused less of total quantity of material and more on motivating the process of discovery, but the teachers who can do that are really rare.
I actually disagree with the idea that you shouldn't try to form or participate in groups, because being a founder or someone who has to organise it does build skills above just participating - and best of all, you'll often get a budget!
I would say that joining a football team probably teaches very few things other than playing football and teamwork, as the coach usually handles all the real world interfaces. However, becoming the president or treasurer of a club (assuming that an adult doesn't just do that job, but try to convince adults to let you) can often be really educational. I picked these two roles because they tend to have "real jobs" compared to most other roles - president does the work management (or just the work, depending on club dysfunction), treasurer handles money. Secretary is a maybe - some clubs use their secretaries well, some badly, so it's a bit of a crapshoot.
President gets you a headstart on things like contacting real-world people and groups, whether to collaborate, or to buy stuff. You get comfortable with speaking to strangers on the phone (an unbelievable number of young people struggle with this). You learn what it takes to organise an event (estimate how many people are coming to things, book a venue, organise stuff and people to happen).
Treasurer learns about how most organisations do finance. Most of these kinds of things which are funded by a school are audited - you learn how to record things to pass an audit. You have a very unique, low-stakes opportunity to learn how to manage funds for a non-profit organisation - to understand your income sources, sometimes to get creative about income sources within rules and real world regulations, and to understand the expenditure. (You'll learn more if the club members are ambitious, try new things types, because a lot of ventures cost money, and it'll be your job to figure out if you can afford it and if you can't, how much you have to raise).
It also looks good on resumes because people will figure if you haven't embezzled club funds as a teenager with low impulse control, you probably won't do something similar as an adult. Note: do not embezzle club funds. A lot of these kinds of organisations are registered non-profits (or parts of anothet registered non-profit) and that's one of the few ways you can actually get into real world trouble by embezzling funds from a non-profit.
That being said, I know adults end up doing a lot of these things for high school clubs. But if you happen to have clubs you can join where adults let you do the job, you should.
I also think a lot about KC, because his story is a terrible and tragic argument against precisely what he argues in the book he wrote.
I keep thinking "someone should have told that kid he CAN'T". His death was entirely preventable. He couldn't swim, wasn't wearing a life jacket, wasn't supervised, and was roughhousing with his brother in a kayak, when it capsized and he drowned.
I helped supervise about 15 5-8 year olds in canoes yesterday. Of them, about half are already competent swimmers, and 100% of them (including the adults) were wearing life jackets. There is absolutely no good reason not to teach your children swim. There is absolutely no good reason for anyone to be in a canoe without life jacket. Full stop.
And neither of those things prevent you from writing a book! Think about how many more books we'd have from him if the adults in his life had told him, just once, he couldn't, and how many more people would have taken his book seriously if he hadn't demonstrated the frailty of its thesis. No parent wants to lose a child like that.
💚