When a PD doesn’t work, because teachers are all on different pages.

• The practice should be closely aligned to the goal.

What follows is more of a brief intro to my pedagogical philosophy, an educational Weltanschauung of sorts:

• In today’s information age, learning is no longer about memorization of facts, but rather the ability to link those facts to new ideas and apply problem-solving skills. Through increased awareness and practice of “meta-skills”, learners acquire a foundation that engenders intellectual growth through the rest of their lives.

• Too often, basic principles are obfuscated by advanced notation or technical jargon; I believe the two can and should be decoupled. Everyone can learn and appreciate big-picture models & apply their understanding to better decision-making.

• Teaching is much more than simply transmitting correct information to learners. It’s a dynamic profession where learners’ needs and the best ways to meet them are constantly in flux. Many pedagogical methods are currently being developed to improve our current education system, and it’s time to research what actually works and re-imagine the space of educational possibilities. As an educator, I must constantly question my assumptions and re-examine my practice.

• Learners are diverse in their needs and goals. I believe in creating equitable learning environments with low floors (scaffolding accessible entry points), high ceilings (high expectations and not stopping at “good enough”), and wide walls (many paths to success).

Imagine walking into a classroom to observe a lesson, and finding a discussion that’s just really point. Questions are answered correctly, nobody’s being disruptive, discussions are extended with thought-provoking questions. Teaching that kind of class feels great – everything goes according to plan, and you got to deliver all the material while being “interactive”.

Unfortunately, the third-party observer also catches plenty of stuff the teacher didn’t. In particular, they notice all the people who were out of the spotlight and not answering the questions. (This includes: people who are a little slower to formulate thoughts verbally, or have a higher standard for what they choose to share; people who don’t understand the meaning of a key term and are just confused; people who are too shy; people who are on their phones; or even those who think their peers/the discussion is not worthwhile/dumb, but are too polite to speak up.)

Too often, teachers rely on verbal questioning as a proxy for whether the whole group gets it. It’s about as bad as the scenario where a group leader asks, “do y’all want A or B?”, one person says A (because the others were still thinking, or wondering how on Earth am I supposed to speak for the whole group), and the leader says, “great, let’s do A!” – ridiculous, right? Yet teachers use their S1-impression of flow as a proxy for the quality of the lesson all the time. I’m not trying to point fingers here; I was shocked to find myself guilty of this. (The magnitude of this effect was probably the most shocking experience I had while full-time teaching.) And it’s a hard problem: it’s really nontrivial to gauge how students are doing just by looking at them. The sea of faces looks tired or bored or disengaged; they just have a bunch of neutral expressions on. That doesn’t mean they’re not learning, but it might feel like it.

This tunnel-vision problem isn’t just restricted to discussions and extroverted students. On the flip side, those who are loud and disruptive suck up a lot of attention. In louder classrooms, I notice how the students asking for help or being “disruptive” get 90% of my attention. I was surprised: how is it so difficult to connect to the quieter students, when those are the very people whose situations I most empathize with? Those students often look bored, may not show work, and are generally hard to notice in the crowd. I was only able to identify the students who were in a similar situation to my high school self by circulating during a multiple choice test. How do I best give them a fair share of my attention and care, especially when they’ve been conditioned to disbelieve in the possibility of such a relationship? And on the topic of “disruptive” students: when I was teaching at Chelsea or Tech Boston, students were often out of their seats and talking – learning, just loudly. This doesn’t match my top-down prediction for what a “good classroom where learning is happening” looks like, but it’s what was most comfortable for them. But ultimately, my experiences, S1-impressions, and top-down models of good learning aren’t either accurate or reliable.

So I know these are problems. Currently, I’m working on the following solutions:

To avoid tunnel vision in general, I should videotape my teaching, or invite an observer into the classroom (or some kind of “open door policy”). This would help me see the class more objectively and notice the things I failed to while teaching. It’d also help catch weird(/annoying) tics and monitor the clarity & speed of my presentations. Unfortunately, many schools prohibit videotaping students, even for internal/personal use, and inviting someone in has a ton of prerequisites too including: feeling comfortable in their presences; being on the same page with respect to values, assumptions, beliefs, communication, honesty, trust; etc… To help with class discussions in particular: Explicitly state intent of discussions (hearing from the gestalt, even Increasing wait time after asking a question greatly increases the quality of student responses – something much easier said than done. So let students think/write to themselves before sharing with a partner.Use a variety of formats for eliciting participation, not all verbal Take real anonymous data from students about what’s working and what isn’t Make sure to actually check in with people who look like they’re quietly on task

07:05, 7F, air

There’s some repeating theme here of how the experience of teaching from the educator’s perspective is fairly different from the experience of a student. (This is the same problem that surfaces when writers experience a piece a million times while editing it, vs. the one-time impression a piece makes on readers. Writers just can’t remember what it’s like to experience it fresh.)

This manifests in many forms:

Pentagoning & unclear expectations – when I say or intend X, students actually hear or assume some modified version Y that matches with their expectations and models of the world Overchunking – it’s easy to forget that things are hard and how much practice it took to get where I was/how many facts I presuppose & generally, other weird relativity effects – e.g. when I wait for a long time, the silence is uncomfortable and deafening, though it seems short to the students; if I say something once, it feels “covered” to me, but repetition helps students To give the students the impression/experience I want them to get (call this E), I have to act in some different way (E’). As a teacher, I must also consider myself an actor.

I first noticed this when repeating the same schtick 5 times to each class last January. Yes, it was almost a scripted exchange each class between my mentor teacher, an unspoken agreement that we were going to respond to each other in the same ways. I was going to write about this back then, too. But now I’ve begun to understand this as something much larger than simply repeating lines.

There’s some sense of caricature. As the de facto leader of the classroom, I make ripples; my effect is exaggerated tenfold exaggerated. I am the first example & last word. If something feels cheesy to me, and even to my students, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Timescales of learning are weird, and sometimes weird steps are taken to achieve desired results. One SPARC instructor spoke of good teaching as metis, not epistemic (section III) – basically, not a first-principles set of rules, but weird cultural learning. And I’d have to agree more and more. “Classroom culture” is a really hard problem, and an interesting one to work at.

This past week, I parachute-taught 7th graders at Chelsea Public Schools. Unlike traditional substitute teaching, parachute teachers are given the freedom to teach anything they like (ideally, something within their expertise, or that they’re passionate about). For instance, a chef might come in and talk abut various cooking techniques or cuisines, while a programmer could show off some 3D-printed artifacts and guide students in making their own things.

In theory, it’s a great idea. I remember all the times I had a substitute and did some worksheet that was obviously just busywork thrown together at the last minute. As a high schooler, I also would’ve benefitted from exposure to subjects outside the school curriculum; high-school me thought the space of “academically legitimate” possibilities was limited to what was offered in school, and would never have considered actually pursuing a field like astronomy or linguistics without outside inspiration.

In practice, though, the parachute teacher program requires nothing of the parachuter beyond a background check. I was given a packet with some logistics: how to get there, how to log in, the bell schedule – and then we were off!

As someone who has already taught full-time in Boston, worked with students from diverse backgrounds, and explored a wide variety of learning spaces in general, I thought I would be fairly well-prepared.

Needless to say, I was not.

When I recount the experience to others, they all point fingers at the district. “Chelsea… it’s something else,” they say to me. I’m not really sure that’s true. It seems unlikely that I would just happen to be placed in some outlier district, and that there aren’t tons of other places like this. (Surprising side note: S1 did not even register that the student population was 95% minority students! Apparently, my brain just bins ‘white’ and ‘hispanic’ together, and doesn’t even think twice about it.) I am still chalking it up to “high-energy 7th graders”.

Without further ado, my experience:

As I entered the colorful math classroom, a student comes up to me and asks if I’m new here. I say yes, and he says, “Good luck – it’s going to be hard teaching here.” Hm. Well, I had a slide deck prepared for facilitating a discussion introducing linguistics; I had already simplified it significantly from my normal approach, and had explicitly prepared for a fairly interactive, high-level lesson that wouldn’t consist of me just be blathering on for 45 minutes straight.

Turns out, I wouldn’t even get the chance to start.

First period began… except it didn’t. Students didn’t ever settle down or sit in their seats, electing instead to continue talking (and quite loudly at that). I tried to get their attention with some textbook “attention grabbing signals” (e.g. two fingers in the air, simply waiting it out), but nothing happened. I asked individuals to please speak a little more quietly, so that I could at least explain what was happening without having to literally yell over them. No such luck. I forged on with my presentation, and perhaps that was a mistake – it became a constant battle of “who could be louder” between the middle schoolers laughing with their friends and me trying to explain who I was, why I was there, and what language was. When I asked for any interaction, I was met with blank stares from the quieter half of the audience.

Halfway through, I gave up. Okay, you win. Go get your Chromebooks. From then, they got quieter as everyone immersed themselves in a flash game. I tried circulating through the room and talking with individual cliques (while making sure no fights escalated past throwing pencils). I tried asking, is there anything you want to learn? – like, about anything? languages, biology, space? But everyone responded in the negative: nah, not really.

Next class, I tried to reason with them: let’s make a deal. I’ll try to convince you language is exciting in the first half, and then I’ll let you choose whether to keep listening or to go get a Chromebook . But I’m not convinced saying that made any difference: though some quarter of the class preferred computers and bought in, the people who were very loud didn’t care and kept talking anyway. I forged on for a bit but ultimately gave up even sooner this time.

Come third period, I wondered whether I was just giving up too early, giving in because it was easier. I also tried streamlining startup by telling people ahead of time we would be learning about languages, and trying to get people’s names at the door. As class started, I just determinedly talked at them, competing for volume all the while. This time, a group of 4 students gathered close to me to hear better. But when I tried using proximity on groups that weren’t paying attention, all I got was losing everyone else, so attempting to get the whole class at once probably wasn’t worth it. Halfway through the class (which felt like an eternity), I allowed students to get Chromebooks out again, and lost my small audience. At that, I wondered if I hadn’t given up too soon yet again. The final classes went similarly.

So, how did it go?

Well, none of my students actively hated me. In fact, many actually liked me (“are you coming back?” & “don’t go!” & saying hi to me on the sidewalks afterschool), but of course, that’s just because I let them play computer games. That said, when I didn’t allow computers, they weren’t really learning anything either [citation needed]. But ultimately, student feedback is not a great proxy for learning/I don’t think it’s correct to optimize for fun. But I believed so strongly in not making any student’s day worse that I ended up caring too much about how students felt at every given moment. If I had more time with them, this kind of behavior would build trust and good relationships, but it definitely doesn’t work for a one-off.

I had come in with the goal of getting a small fraction of people excited about linguistics. I probably achieved this with at most 3 people per class. I also had a goal of “not making anyone’s day worse” – this means not getting mad at or otherwise punishing individuals. I think people had a good time in that class. So in some senses, it was okay. But it still felt pretty existentially eyebrowraising to live through. If my career teaching felt like this more than a third of the time, I would probably do something else with my life. (Sidenote: I believe with fairly high confidence it won’t; my experiences in high school are uniformly more pleasant, regardless of the learners’ level.)

Another thought: what looks good isn’t always what is good. The whole time, a paraeducator was coming in with “motivational comments”, reminding me my job was just to keep the volume down, make sure nobody stabbed anyone else, and not to keep wasting energy & setting myself up for disappointment by trying to teach. Compare the following two scenarios: (A) you walk into a classroom and see a teacher lecturing, but the students are yelling over her and running around. Here, it looks like the teacher is trying, but the students are just “too unruly”. Perhaps the teacher should learn about classroom management. (B) you walk into a very noisy classroom. Students are all over the room, talking amongst themselves or playing computer games, while the teacher is conversing on the side with 2-3 students. Here, it looks like the teacher isn’t doing her job.

Throughout the day, I experienced a constant fear of administration coming in and getting mad at me – even though I stand by my actions. The “classroom management” route is inherently inequitable, relying on striking fear into the hearts of students via threats of punishments, forcing theme to appear attentive, and generally turning curious and lively humans into automatons. What does this teach them long-term? That this subject sucked so much that they had to be forced to care? That teachers have power they don’t?

Instead of feeling disheartened about the whole endeavor, I left eager to reflect and go try again. My graduate school has a motto, “try learn try” – it is a call to the iterative nature of design thinking, and learning by doing – something I finally feel like I got to live through this parachute-teaching disaster. I surprised myself with how resilient I felt to (in??) the setbacks, and was ready to tackle the problem it different ways over the course of the day. By the end of the day, I was teaching more linguistics, not less. I guess one way to think about WW’s principles is, it’s the derivative that counts.

A pretty cute video (despite the somewhat clickbait-y title) that showcases some principles of Just Doing It During studio debrief time, my peers and I ideated some concrete experiments to try next time to avoid the fiasco. Next time:

I will make my expectations for the day more explicit, writing the plan + a clear directive (e.g. sit in your seats) on the board. This means I won’t have to rely on getting everyone’s attention verbally. I will bring in some novel attention-grabber that isn’t just my voice, e.g. a bell. Hopefully this lets me talk to the class for a minute, but if this fails, I’ll just go to individual groups and let them know what’s going on. I will ask students to get into groups of 1 to 6. By default, students will be “doing work on computers” (i.e. enjoying themselves), but for 5-10 minutes they’ll be learning something in a small pod with me. What they learn will be chosen from a list of at least 2 options I create ahead of time. This allows me to cater to individuals, and I am much happier about how I manage the small-group dynamic with people I don’t know. I’ll make [some of] my lessons more clickbait-y. I know, not great, but the attention span of generic middle schoolers is probably a lot lower than I think – I recently heard the number 5 seconds. (Evidence that this is a good update: Students were willing to answer quick questions like “what color is this” or give a quick yes/no. Students groaned at having to listen for “a whole 20 minutes”. Students stopped paying attention when I wasn’t near them.) I’ll take attendance at the end of class, so there isn’t an awkward period for students of shuffling around and not knowing what’s happening. I also feel prepared to talk to admin about what’s happening in the classroom. My planned experiments look a lot more like the above-described scenario B to someone walking in. I believe more learning is happening in B than A, even though it’s not traditional and may look like a mess. After all, I was told most full-time teachers just let students talk all class; in this case, I think something is better than nothing, and it’s certainly worth trying.

Note I’ve liberally repurposed some quotes from the book in my notes to self, which I then repurposed here. No plagiarism is intended. Raising an eyebrow at the description, I approached this book cautiously, unconvinced by the “algorithmic thinking” craze in education and fully unenthused by the prospect of teaching small children to program a “turtle” to draw shapes on a screen. (For some context, I was underwhelmed with my own experiences in LOGO, and was generally wary of another nonfiction book wherein the author hits the reader repeatedly with his sledgehammer of a thesis without regard to objectivity or good epistemic practice.) TL;DR, Papert argues for an educational paradigm shift that can be catalyzed [only] by computers. His thesis is actually twofold: (1) learning happens through the improvement of our mental models and (2) computers are the best/a very good way to mediate this kind of learning. Everything Papert went on to say about (1) resonated with me; what he said about (2) had either already come true, or I was (initially) quite skeptical about. Yet though Mindstorms was published in 1980, the accuracy of some of its predictions lent the rest of his reasoning much credibility. [For instance, he spends much time defending ideas like: programming need not be a recondite discipline; computers would catalyze the emergence of new ideas; computers would carry these ideas into a world larger than a research lab (e.g. via the ubiquitousness of today’s Internet).] So I read on.

I. He talks about learning in general. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. Usually, the term describes the study of the conditions of validity of knowledge. Here though, Papert talks of Piaget’s epistemology, concerned not with the validity of knowledge but rather with its origin and growth – what he terms “genetic epistemology.” Basically, the claim is that people have a collection of models in their heads. These models/heuristics constitute what they know about the world. Accordingly, learning anything is easy if one can assimilate it to their collection of models. It further follows that what an individual can learn (and how he learns it) depends on what models and real-world data they have available. Papert argues for more “Piagetian learning” in schools, optimizing for conditions under which new models can take root. Educators should understand the nature of this “natural” learning. It notably does not mean regurgitating information, or any kind of tabula rasa/teacher-filling-empty-minds-of-students model. These natural learning paths include “false” theories. New and old knowledge sometimes contradict, and effective learning requires strategies to deal with this conflict. That is, sometimes we encounter data inconsistent with our expectations, or when our intuition fails us. In these situations we need to improve our intuition. Education is about learning to improve this intuition/mental model collection. Sometimes the conflicting pieces of knowledge can be reconciled, sometimes one or the other must be abandoned, and sometimes the two can both be safely kept around in separate mental compartments – and all this is normal. For instance, in intuitive geometry, a straight line is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points, and walking slowly between two points does not necessarily take more time than walking fast. It is not merely an “item” of knowledge that is missing, but rather an epistemological presupposition underlying the idea of “shortest” as a property of the path rather than of the action of traversing it. In traditional schools, though, children are being force-fed “correct” theories well before they are ready to invent them, before their intuition says anything at all, and well before they care about the question the facts are addressing. After all, it’s easy to take truth for granted (in a “well, that obvious” way) without having had to derive it in the first place. For instance, natural selection seems “obvious” when it’s taught in an introductory biology class, but many very smart people didn’t believe it back in the 1800s, and nobody verbalized before Darwin either. Or how about when Descartes invented his grid? I don’t think about coordinates non-Cartesianly anymore, but even this was apparently once unintuitive enough that it had to be invented. (I’ll come back to this point in a bit.) It’s also worth noting that timescales of this learning are very hard to measure. In particular, there are experiences we have that have disproportionately large or far-reaching consequences, but only many years later. At the end of the day, an educator ought to remember that what they see is not the learning itself; they can never access the full picture. What’s going on in students’ minds is often hard to access. Students need practice becoming aware of and communicating their thought process. After all, the root of “education” is Latin’s ēdūcere – to draw out the existing knowledge (and models) in children’s heads (as opposed to “teaching how to think” per se – students already do this naturally!). Yet in a system centered around test results and measurable outcomes, Piagetian learning is all but ignored.

II. He speaks of the social environments/contexts of learning. How we think about knowledge affects how we think about ourselves. Students are exposed to a range of (potentially arbitrary) labels: STEM/humanities; smart/dumb; freshman/senior. People who believe they are “good at X” and [therefore] “bad at Y” may then view Y as foreign and “other”. These students self-report “making their head go blank” to memorize Y. In doing so, they encode a factoid in isolation, missing out on potential connections. Yet to learn something, one must 1) relate new thing to something they already know and then 2) make the new thing their own. Imagine learning a foreign language by only memorizing a random list of vocabulary without building sentences or conversing! How pointless that seems, and how transient the knowledge. And to draw links between things, they must seem meaningful instead of arbitrary. There’s an overall lack of genuineness in traditional schooling. Why learn the parts of speech in elementary school? The distinction is pretty pointless, unless, for instance, you’re going to try to make a program produce reasonable sentences. The reasons must be real. When a teacher tells a student that the reason for those many hours of arithmetic is to check change or calculate tip, or that “math is used in all jobs”, that’s ridiculous. It’s just another instance of that unnecessary dishonesty in the educational relationship (along the lines of “let’s do that together” when the teacher already knows the answer). Discovery cannot be a setup; invention cannot be scheduled. The flow of ideas should not be one way street. How long I waited for “growing up”, only to find that real-world adults (or researchers!) didn’t really know better, and were nearly as confused as the rest of us. It’s worth noting that “genuine” doesn’t have to mean “real-world”. For some, the game is scoring grades; for others it is outsmarting the system. For many, school math is enjoyable in its repetitiveness, precisely because it is so mindless and dissociated. But just because people can find meaning in intrinsic dullness is not a reason to avoid improving. Papert claims a good learning environment is where real, socially cohesive, and where experts and novices are all learning together. Learning should not feel compartmentalized or arbitrarily partitioned, and “in-school” time should be as enjoyable as “out of school” time (e.g. clubs, the things people choose to work on on their own). As a final story, imagine that children were forced to spend an hour a day drawing dance steps on squared paper and had to pass tests in these “dance facts” before they were allowed to dance physically. Would we not expect the world to be full of “dance-phobes”? Would we say that those who made it to the dance floor and music had the greatest “aptitude for dance”? It is no more appropriate to draw conclusions about mathematical aptitude from children’s unwillingness to spend hundreds of hours doing sums.

III. Given (I) and (II), the traditional school system/education is in a bad spot. Papert forewarns that the human-computer interface needs to be implemented with care and intent, lest historical accidents lead to strange side effects. That is, in developing a new system/technology, it’s worth putting some time into making sure it’s actually doing what’s intended before wider implementation. For instance, BASIC is a lot less readable than Python, and if it became the standard (as it was for some years), programming might look very different today. He also talks about how QWERTY sucks (though maybe this is an urban legend), and how humanity was a bit hasty during the Industrial Revolution. Education is no different. School is a set of historical accidents. A committee of 10 people decided the standard curriculum; it’s said that we often learn science in the order “biology, chemistry, physics” only because these were listed in alphabetical order. Likewise, a major factor that determined what math went into the standards was what could be done in a classroom with pencil and paper (e.g. I’d agree graphing parabolas is not particularly fundamental to understanding math). To avoid this, Papert advocates identifying for every subject X the difference between “school X”, “proto X” (knowledge about X presupposed by school X), and “missing X” (what students should understand about X that is not in school X). He notes that education should probably be rethought entirely; the car was not made by gradually trying to improve the horse and carriage. Only looking at what already exists is insufficient. Not only is school bad, but research to improve it also in a rough spot. There is no recognized place in academia for e.g. people whose research is really physics, but in educationally meaningful directions. Such people are not particularly welcome in a physics department, as their education goals trivialize their work in the eyes of other physicists. Nor are they welcome in the education school, where their highly technical language is not understood and their research criteria are out of step. These hypothetical physicists will see their work very differently, as a theoretical contribution to physics that in the long run will make knowledge of the physical universe more accessible, but which in the short run would not be expected to improve performance of students in a physics course. The concept of a serious enterprise of making science for the people was, at the time of writing, quite alien. (And perhaps still is. That makes me very sad – for once, research that would interest me! but apparently nobody’s hiring.)

IV. Used intentionally, computers are a very good way to improve the learning situation. Okay, I was on board so far. But Papert argues that the computer in particular is a likely panacea. Computers, he argue, cross cultural barriers and make scientific knowledge intimately part of individuals’ lives, personalizing otherwise obscure facts. Initially, I viewed his comments akin to how famous physicists fell in love with radio sets or cars. Because of the computer’s simulation capabilities, he considers them universal vectors for cultural seeds, and cultural assimilation is inculcation of a way fo thinking.. (Perhaps he foretells the Internet.) Children appropriate all the things in their environments (e.g. the models cherished, the metaphors and connections drawn) to build their own, and when the computer becomes ubiquitous, children will have access to better data for better models. His argument became convincing with the following line: “in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think…Thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologist”. He continues drawing more connections between good learning and programming: debugging gives students a growth mindset (turning the dichotomy from “right/wrong” into “fixable/not”), and also forces students to verbalize what exactly the next step is or should be. (That is, getting a computer to do something requires the underlying process be described with enough precision to be carried out by the machine.) Students may learn to have the discipline to think before mindlessly calculating (pseudocoding, at least to some extent, before typing). Even if computers are not the only way to learn this skill, I admit it’s a pretty transparent and accessible way to start being articulate about debugging strategies. As learners become experts in any field, they have not just the object-level facts, but the connections/network between them. Papert speaks of how “expert learners” use certain metaphors to talk about important learning experiences. They talk about “getting to know” an idea, “exploring” a field, and acquiring sensitivity to distinctions that seemed ungraspably subtle just a moment ago. That is, learning about developing aesthetic and taste! But to do that, one needs many examples to “machine learn” off of. Computers can provide those simulation worlds, giving children the relevant data/training set. But computers don’t just help by simulating. Papert believes the computer is much more than a tool for pre-programmed instruction – and thus fundamentally different from the fuss the invention of the radio or TV created in education. Instead, he says that its importance is computing culture and computational thinking. Computers facilitate the Piagetian learning that takes places as a child grows up. But “teaching without curriculum” does not mean spontaneous, freeform classrooms or simply leaving a child alone. In this model, educational intervention means supporting children as they build their own intellectual structures with materials drawn from the surrounding culture, a culture educators can add constructive elements to and eliminate noxious ones from. (That is, educators ought to feed the student-evidentialist good data.) He adds that the vocabulary CS introduced is a key part of its culture. In general, people need more structured ways to talk and think about the learning of skills. Many scientific and mathematical advances have served a similar linguistic function by giving us words and concepts (models) to describe what had previously seemed too amorphous for systematic thought. Why is it, he asks, that children are unable to systematically and accurately list all the possible combinations of colored beads until 5th or 6th grade [citation needed]? (This was shocking.) He claims this is because there was no commonly used vocabulary for things like “bug”, “nested loops”, or “double-counting”. Our culture, he claims, is poor in models of systematic procedures. With computers, children can learn to be systematic before they learn to be quantitative. [I’m a fan of the argument that vocabulary influences thinking (weak Sapir-Whorf). Much of the value in reading TFaS, for instance, was getting a library of labels for cognitive biases. CFAR vocabulary (“debugging”) is suggestive of the impacts CS has had on “rationality”. But can you acquire such vocabulary through some metacognatively rich approach that doesn’t so heavily rely on computers? I’m not against computers per se – just unconvinced they’re a necessary or even optimal ingredient).] So is learning systematic/”algorithmic” thinking the only way forward? No. While curriculum reformers are often concerned about making the choice between learning strategies X and Y choice from above and building it into the curriculum, what Papert hopes for is for learners to learn how to make that choice for themselves. He considers algorithmic thinking a tool among many, and wants learners to become expert in recognizing and choosing among varying styles of thought. No knowledge is entirely reducible to words, and no knowledge is entirely ineffable – having the vocabulary for this mode of thinking isn’t a panacea after all. But still, an important part of becoming a good learner is learning how to push out the frontier of what we can express with words.

V. Lingering thoughts/concerns/questions (or, inchoate opinion) Throughout, I wondered about other ways to introduce algorithmic thinking. Math was an obvious one. But I also wondered how much of my anti-algorithmic-thinking view was just viewing CS as bashy and math as elegant – after all, whenever Papert spoke of implementation via math instead of CS, I had no issues. Am I just biased against CS? Why? I don’t even mind casework – in math, at least… I also wasn’t convinced by the claims that students who learn CS will learn to favor modularity. A working program can certainly be bashy, and I’m not convinced people will clean it up by default. At SSP, students produced some nasty, convoluted code to avoid learning how to e.g. write a for loop. (That is, S1 tries to minimize effort, even if the process ends up taking longer.) I grudgingly agree this is fine insofar as students will always produce stuff they understand instead of regurgitating things they don’t, but I’m not sure they’ll push themselves to do it better. Papert depicts what I agree an optimal learning situation looks like, and I agree that subdividing problems into simpler steps is a good metacognitive technique that CS might, in the right circumstances, promote. But how does theory translate to practice? How should educators implement these ideas? Ah well, I suppose that’s beyond the scope of his book. Papert’s computer “microwords” and simulations are artificial – that is, deliberately invented – Piagetian material. Indeed, they function as carriers of powerful ideas for learners, separating the powerful big ideas from their inaccessible formalisms. His microworlds are stripped of complexity and is graspable. Debugging is most effective when the modules are small enough for it to be unlikely that any one contains more than one bug. Skills and discrete facts are easy to teach and learn one at a time. [E.g. it’s easy to teach people to associate “protein” with “amino acid”, but hard to give them the whole network of knowledge without throwing the (not-necessarily-proverbial) textbook at them.] In some ways, this feels similar to replacing Shakespeare with simplified text. Do I agree with this technique in general? Not sure. (My literature sensibilities scream no, but I admit I do this when teaching biology and chemistry.) Distilling something to its core & stripping away all the exceptions makes the inaccessible (to the point of arcane, really) enjoyable for a larger audience, which seems at the very least like a reasonable entry point. A big concern throughout was this notion of “over-scaffolding”, or breaking things down for learners too much. In coming up with the perfect analogy or model for a learner, I’m doing the cognitive lifting, leaving them only the bite-sized, standards-focused, overly-predigested pieces. Am I oversimplifying? Do students just chalk the existence of such models to magic? – Then again, is that not what we do with real world phenomena? At some layer, perhaps it gets axiomatic… Maybe more struggle would be better: there’s benefit in things that are just hard. I think [some] SSP students build character (or at least learn something valuable) in their struggles. And what if students break the concept down into small parts and understand the units but never chunk upward? – if they understand each line without seeing the bigger picture. How do you make students generalize reflect upon what they’ve learned? Is it really as simple as feeding evidentialists good evidence? Are people even good evidentialists to begin with?! Do people really strive to be logically consistent by default?? Is this what Papert assumes?

Well. I suppose some of this depends on what the learning goal is. In general, scaffolds should support the goal and clear away unnecessary underbrush. Thus, it’s worth keeping in mind that the point isn’t teaching the content, but rather improving students’ metacognitive skills. This is why I can’t make learning e.g. astrophysics too easy for SSPers. This way, students can practice their own meta-skills and figure out how to learn better themselves, in situations beyond the models given in the classroom.

Last May, I had my teaching license. I could’ve been employed in a public school already, indoctrinating over a hundred students for the duration of the school year – but two big reasons I felt uncomfortable diving into teaching were 1) I didn’t know what I was going to do on a day-to-day basis and 2) I didn’t know exactly what kind of teacher I wanted to be.

Though I haven’t worked on (1) a ton yet, I think I’ve finally worked through a lot more of (2).

One of my hopes going into the year was to experience a teaching setting different from the ones I’m used to. Though I haven’t gotten to see “inquiry-based labs” or “project-based learning” (among other models) in action, I was placed at a turnaround school that served a population of low socioeconomic status – in a remedial test prep classroom of all places.

And I was pretty nervous to actually start. What would “that kind” of school be like? Frankly, it was the closest to a “ghetto” I’d ever been, and I’d grown up with my mom locking the car doors when an African-American walked by. So I read up on the subject to prepare myself. For a short period of time, books about stereotype threat, school segregation and teaching for social justice sat on my coffee table. What if I was racist? – or, I knew I was implicitly biased, but what if it showed? Would I fail to meet people’s eyes as I walked through the streets of South Dorchester? Would some part of me believe these people were somehow less than people?

Walking into the school on day one, I did a mental double-take. Are you kidding? Is this 2018? I expected a skewed student body composition, but not a populace where literally every student in all my classes was black. Students were being herded through metal detectors as they and their backpacks were searched by security. Was segregation really illegal?

And their teacher – this teacher with 17 years of experience, purportedly helping remedial students pass the test they’d need to graduate – did very little. Most days, she gave students a worksheet and a Chromebook, and they were expected to fill in notes from a powerpoint or website. If I were still a high schooler, these students would be the ones I couldn’t get – like, “wow, how are you so bad at memorizing the two facts you’d need to pass this unit test?” But watching these people struggle through things I never had to go through – watching as they were given no clear meta-framework for the curriculum and were thrown word after word after word (not even grouped by topic!) to learn, effectively sitting through a foreign language class where they only ever grinded (ground?) vocabulary; watching as they jumped from one blank to the next on the worksheet, not even reading the question most of the time, since grades were eyeballed and those who wrote down any sort of words (including the question verbatim!) got points and those who knew it but didn’t want to write failed; watching as people who literally did not understand English were forced to through this same process, and ended up about median gradewise – watching this all, I realized how ridiculous the system really is for them.

And as I worked with these students in small groups for a couple months, my S1 updated strongly away from them being scary in any way. The people who were failing were just people. The people who were loud and “disruptive” were just people. The people getting into fights in the halls were just people. They’re all just people. I didn’t get that because I was sheltered from “that kind of person” growing up, and over time, I began to fear that which was unknown. But now I’ve finally gotten to – S1 can finally overlook, more or less, the color of their skin. Sure, these are clichés you learn about in kindergarten on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but not ones I truly internalized. Now I see – truly believe – they’re just students like any other, with friend groups and the ensuing sitcom-esque dramas, hungry for lunch a period or two beforehand, ready for the bell to ring five minutes before class ends, curious about cool things in the world around them, with parents who tell them to work hard and be kind. And sure, they’re also students that may have grown up without the supports of “here’s how you traditionally show respect in the classroom”, or “did you remember to bring your homework?”, or “here’s how you get an A” – but their values, goals, & dreams on a higher level are the same as mine or anyone’s.

So after all this belated revelation, have I decided to go teach in an inner city school? “Close the achievement gap”? In my time placed at Tech Boston, I learned more than empathy. I also came to understand that teaching in this kind of environment requires a fairly different skill set from teaching in an “average classroom” – in particular, a skill set I don’t have. While I was able to connect to and work with individuals well, I’m not convinced I could effectively show care, elicit buy-in, and teach them as a group.

That said, I have updated fairly significantly towards teaching these “struggling” students. I see systemic issues that are pretty troubling. For instance, the higher level the class (where AP > honors > college prep > remedial), the better the teachers tend to be. Struggling students aren’t receiving support, and teachers are so biased that when students actually try and do better, they don’t even notice and still give an eyeballed D by default. And there’s that whole disturbing trend that the remedial class is all African-American males. Even if I can’t realistically solve these problems single-handedly, surely I could make a small but positive difference. Even without the skills needed to do this well, I’d do better than a nonnegligible proportion of the teachers I observed. I’m much more open to this idea than before.

But even after all these updates, it’s ultimately not enough to actually change my course. Since then, I’ve also had some other thoughts about why I think it’s good for me in particular to push for gifted education. After all, just because better teachers exist at higher levels doesn’t mean that people on the high end of the curve are served well either – most teachers simply aren’t equipped for that, or can’t empathize. I’ve seen the quiet people and the people who already know what’s going on get passed over in classrooms so many times now. I bet even I’m guilty of this – they’re not the ones being disruptive or confused, so they don’t get the attention by default. As my education teacher last year was fond of saying, “90% of your attention will go to those 1 or 2 ‘trouble kids’”. As someone who does empathize deeply with this underserved population, can’t I do a better job than most people? I think so. I hope so. Pompous as it sounds, I believe it enough to pursue it.

But why teach at all? I’ve been asked this too – by slightly-condescending professors, by acquaintances, by close friends. Even though I know I like education and am excited to think about thinking, there are still many paths within the field. Why this one? Is it just because it’s the clearest path, if not the easiest?

Teaching isn’t going to make me rich. It’s neither glamorous nor particularly intellectually stimulating. It isn’t the most impactful job – I could be “doing good better”. But after overhearing someone I look up to (E) that impact at an EA level didn’t really matter to them, that stayed with me. It felt right in the same way that I was astonished to hear a friend want to major in astronomy. Like, wow, that’s actually an option. I don’t need to be so purely S2 about this decision. Because you know what? I like working with individuals. I like ranting about cool things. I’ve decided it satisfies enough parameters – I will have enough to live on fairly comfortably; I’m not doing explicit evil (and maybe doing good); I don’t hate it (and maybe even like it sometimes). All that, and the schedule is extremely good and gives me autonomy to pursue other things. But are these reasons good enough? Am I sure I’ve thought of enough of the alternatives? What happens in a year if I hate it? What are these “other things”, and why am I not doing those all the time?

Ugh. Is it not enough that for once, I’m actually excited about what I’m doing? That I like to talk and think about teaching and learning? And another thing – realizing I want to catalyze people’s growth as much as possible, that I want to be what Gaida was for me – but even better – also made me update astronomically towards teaching. I can barely begin to imagine how different my life would be right now without him as a teacher. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to attribute most of where I am now to him – his class had this huge butterfly effect across my entire life. One person’s time & energy saved me from being “just another 4.0 student”; led me to all my friends today; gave me a green light to look towards, telling me not to settle, a mindset that led me to become a more confident and fundamentally happier person – for no matter how lightly he intended the comment, it was exactly the push I needed. I want to help people be their best selves. As one SPARC instructor puts it, being Professor X, finding mutants and making them into X-Men. I want to be that push, the catalyst towards greater things. As a teacher, you’re given so much time to work with students, and hopefully, mentor them for the better. With great power, great responsibility. And I think I want it.

So here I am. I’m getting all my principles straightened out, consistent, distilled into words. And don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to be exclusively for the “gifted” people either. I’m one for high ceilings, low floors, & wide walls in my classroom. That is, I want to design environments for everyone, with low barriers to entry but high expectations, and probably even many ways to get there. And sure, nothing works for everyone. Still, I’m going to strive to not hurt anyone, or make anyone’s life worse. And yes, perhaps you’d laugh at how weak that statement sounds, but actually achieving it is pretty hard. I’m for teaching meta-skills and metacognition. I’m for helping people verbalize their goals and figuring out how to get there. I’m for exposing people to different ideas & perspectives. I’m for being flexible and reasonable, and remembering all my students are people. And maybe along the way, I’ll really change a handful of people’s lives for the better.

So is teaching the only way to achieve these goals? No. Do I think I’ll be teaching forever? Not with particularly high confidence. But I’m pretty happy where I am and where I’m headed. I still don’t have a good answer to what I’ll do if I hate it, but this scenario feels unlikely for a while. Sure, I could probably think about this a bit more, and I might look back at this post with a raised eyebrow. But worst comes to worst, it’ll probably end up as a fun journey to figure it out anyhow.

Next step: actually develop a curriculum worth teaching…

Over the past few days, I’ve been talking to a classmate at WW about the order of the biology curriculum (fascinating stuff, right?). But actually, it was a lot more interesting than I expected, and I left with some new thoughts about the meta-structure of biology.

Normally, the standard grade school curriculum goes something like: biochemistry, parts of a cell, cellular respiration, DNA [replication], central dogma [transcription + translation], mitosis and meiosis, genetics, evolution, ecology. It simply goes from small to large scale. Seems reasonable enough.

But then questions come up. The whole middle part is a bit odd – who’s to say where mitosis and central dogma go relative to one another? While some parts of the curriculum are tightly linked (e.g. genetics leads so well into evolution), others pieces seem to be able to flip flop around (e.g. all the stuff between parts of a cell and genetics); others don’t seem motivated at all (why learn the parts of a cell? that membranes are “security guards” and mitochondria “powerhouses”); and there are entire reams of biology that don’t fit into this hierarchy. For instance, where do we teach anything physiological? How about all the stuff about plants? Or classification?

And why does anyone care about those, anyway? “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, said Dobzhansky – a sentiment I’d like to agree with – but I don’t really see how differentiating a sponge from a protist (if protists are even still a thing) makes much sense in the first place.

After wrestling with a rough curriculum map a bit more and trying to convince my classmate that evolution is more important than the central dogma, I settled on a slightly more satisfying axis to classify biology curriculum. One part – the part I like – talks about why things are they way they are (e.g. the principle of natural selection; the way ecosystems are balanced and function as networks). The other part talks about what the things actually are, like how our respiratory system happens to look, or how fungi are structured, or what the parts of a cell happen to be. These are things that came about by chance, and could exist fairly differently in a different organism, ecosystem, or planet.

A month or so ago, I also prepped for the physics MTEL. (Think of it as…around the same difficulty as trying to get a 500-600 on the SAT II.)

For background: I’ve told myself this narrative of “I’m bad at physics” for so long that I’m almost unsurprised it didn’t raise a red flag in my head. (The phrase “I’m not a physics person” should’ve set off a TAP.) But ever since I met self-declared physics aficionados JM and AP back in high school, I knew I wasn’t like them. And so I claimed that I couldn’t see the beauty in it, that I didn’t know how to appreciate it. It truly wasn’t as exciting to me as, say, biology or astronomy.

Sitting down for the practice exam, though, I finally had a chance to actually apply theory, problem solving skills, and heuristics for symmetry to simple problems for the first time. And though it was far from a breeze and I made many mistakes, I finally believe that I a) learned something by taking undergraduate physics, b) can easily pass a high school E&M class, and c) can see the beauty in physics. And all this through just one evening of sitting down with easy problems! [And an extremely helpful tutor, I suppose. Not to trivialize his (admittedly vital) role in it.]

I walked into the exam confident – I could say the phrase “I’m competent at physics” to myself without laughing, a welcome change from a mere 24 hours ago. I was able to do the 90 multiple choice questions in 100 minutes, which was my goal, and felt amazing doing the free response (a basic circuit analysis question) – all my knowledge was just synthesized in one problem! Though results for this test are still pending, I’d be pretty surprised if I didn’t pass.

Still, I didn’t appreciate (a)-(c) fully until I read a physics pedagogy paper about learner models and preconceptions:

Many of our students do not have appropriate mental models for what it means to learn physics… Most of our students don’t know what we mean by “doing” science or what we expect them to do. Unfortunately, the most common mental model for learning science seems to be:

• Write down every equation the teacher puts on the board. • Memorize these, together with the list of formulas at the end of the chapter. • Do enough homework and end-of-the-chapter problems to recognize which formula is to be applied to which problem. • Pass the exam by selecting the correct formulas for the problems on the exam.

I call the bulleted list above “the dead leaves model.” It’s as if physics were a collection of equations on fallen leaves. One might hold F = ma; another, F = kx. Each of these equations is considered to have equivalent weight, importance, and structure. The only thing one needs to do when solving a problem is to flip through one’s collection of leaves until one finds the appropriate equation. I would much prefer to have my students see physics as a living tree (Redish 1994)

I don’t see physics as dead leaves – in fact, I never have! Instead, my problem is that my leaves are all blank, or I’m too far away to see any of them. But thanks to course 8, I do appreciate the living tree, the structure between the parts, and something vague like “how physicists think”. In particular, I’m glad that I can appreciate and start to articulate its aesthetic, even if my sense of it will never rival that I have for other sciences. I guess my major wasn’t a complete waste of time after all…

On communication

The one- vs. two- box paradox

On ideas and process

On literature

On blame, updating, how to win arguments

Courseload Senior Fall

“Everything that matters can be reduced to objective truths.”

My first thought: well, that seems reasonable. My first feeling: well, that’s stupid.

I had asked for a controversial opinion or claim, and that’s the response I got. And I immediately felt a little cheated. It wasn’t exactly controversial in the sense that, it was already fully thought out. (Another example: Hitler was not evil. Obviously, if you have a self-consistent theory with definitions for evil given ahead of time, this will work out to be true.) There was little to say against the statement – in some ways, I agreed. Yet, I felt something about it was still very wrong. All I could do was offer the obvious bit about whether or not some things would get lost in translation, which wasn’t specific enough to get to the heart of the matter. Those things, he claimed, would either be definable with some care, or just “not matter”.

I found that weeks later, I was still bothered by the conversation. What was wrong with it exactly? Why couldn’t I pin it down? Why did my system 2 kind of, sort of, but not really agree? I mean, perhaps it was a little silly to take up so much space in the back of my mind, but it was less about the subject matter and more that I couldn’t seem to put together a coherent argument refuting it.

When I stumbled across a description of double crux* a few weeks later still, I was surprised that I was reminded of this topic once again. On some level of my understanding, it’s about finding the more concrete things to resolve disagreements to better seek truth. And again, this is a principle I agree with. (I am hesitant to comment on double crux. Though there exist unofficial canons of applied rationality, I found a strong enough argument against looking at it [see first comment on above linked post] – at least until I’ve gone to that CFAR workshop [which isn’t that far away!]. So I’ll end this paragraph now.)

Well, that’s true of arguments, to some degree, then…maybe reduction to these truths is not inherently wrong. But what about the rest? Daily conversation? Opinions? Does the majority of the rest fall into ‘reducible’ or ‘irrelevant’? That still felt entirely wrong.

Poking through the lesswrong canon instead, I ended up finding some key words for phrasing my thoughts. I suppose one point I had entirely neglected was the difference between defensibility and the right way to actually think about it. Arguments can be self-consistent and thus fully defensible, but that doesn’t mean they’re the right approach. Various things fall into this category, I think – e.g. something too vague and ambiguous to be properly attacked, something As a close analogy, a strict rule with black and white is easy to enforce, but isn’t necessarily going to be the best way to go about things (fine, depending on your definition of ‘best’). And despite this paragraph coming at a point that isn’t intuitively the Main Point of the post, or anything important at all, I think it’s the biggest takeaway on a personal level.

And then there’s that whole thing about denotation (dictionary definition) vs. connotation. A quote from a lesswrong example shows the point nicely enough:

I have perseverance. You are stubborn. He is pig-headed. I am patriotic. You’re a nationalist. He is jingoistic. I’ll slash red tape. You’ll decrease bureaucracy. He’ll destroy safeguards.

Yes, it’s possible to unpack each of those terms, to fully explain that you mean that “X cares about the country” is the definition for the second line, and all those things become equivalent. If you’re having an argument to get down to the truth of the matter, perhaps that’s the way to go about it. Find an objective definition to start at, and explain why you think that that definition is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But then, when you get down to it, you’ll have to define good and bad, which is always a bit of a sticky subject. Not to mention, I don’t think you can throw the majority of the dictionary away just because there are connotations, calling that ‘useless’. I think it’s useful, to convey opinion, express feelings with various . And there’s that bit where maybe a good definition won’t exist. Or maybe unpacking certain connotations can continue ad infinitum, or lead to tautology, or some other trivial and unsatisfying conclusion…

I suppose the above arguments (save defensibility != best approach) are still a little fuzzy, more hypotheses than well-defended arguments. But the lack of a defense doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I’ve also mostly focused on the fact that the rest isn’t useless, as opposed to whether reduction to objectivity is always the best for arguments. I don’t very much like absolutes, so I would tend to mull over this a bit more. But some part of me does think it’s possibly true. I guess a similar, if not equivalent, question is whether truth-seeking is the ultimate goal in argument/discussion. I don’t think – and this conclusion surprises me – that it’s the goal of every conversation – or maybe even discussion/argument. It seems that in phrasing it all this way, I’ve somehow convinced myself to see the other side?…the side where my sister argues just for the sake of getting her point across, the side where I don’t understand others’ stubbornness. The matter warrants more thinking, but I’m glad to have set down some of my problems with the original statement.

I guess I’ll end with this (supposed[?]) quote from Feynman, which I haven’t fully considered yet: “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. It is better to keep the focus on the facts of the matter and try to understand what your interlocutor is trying to communicate, then to get lost in a pointless discussion of definitions, bearing nothing.”

On blame, updating, how to win arguments

A review of Stoppard's _Arcadia_

I am a physics major. The reasoning for this isn’t very well-developed, but I am not regretting or reconsidering my choice. It just goes something like this: I enjoy science, but loathe finding myself illiterate in one of its major subdivisions. In short (as overly self-assured as it sounds), it’s the one science I don’t know anything about yet.

Of course, one could argue along the lines of, well, you don’t know orgo or molecular bio - why should physics take precedence? But I find these criticisms don’t perturb me: do I seek to be consistent or need to justify these things, even to myself? Though the basis of knowledge is somewhat arbitrary and fluctuates from one time period to the next, physics seems as good a choice as any.

So, after laboring at physics for two years and completing most of my requirements: Do I like physics? Have I learned physics as I set out to do?

Physics is hard. It often feels like a lot of getting a pset back with a grade like 70something (when a 50something or lower was probably deserved) while watching everyone else get 100s or at least 90s (confirmed by class histograms; it’s not just some confirmation bias). It’s a lot of waving my hand around and what feels like bluffing my way through a problem. I couldn’t even tell you the formula for capacitance (thanks to the more advanced ver). But is it worthwhile?

I think so. Working through these problems makes me much aware of my (very acute) limitations. I’ve to learn that I can do better if I put in more effort – that concept, of being agentive in my own future, is still somewhat foreign to me. Physics becomes a tool through which I am developing my own character, something becoming increasingly important to me.

What would I major in if my character development were further along though? Or in other words, what subject actually appeals most to me? A trickier question, for certain. In high school, I already believed chemistry was not that interesting to me, and generally felt somewhat ‘solved’ (I’m sure this is perfectly unfair to all the chemists) - despite my only exposure coming from APs and science bowl. Biology, too, felt a little silly (at least at the high school level), and the understandings which come from memorization may be interesting to teach, but not to major in. Plus, research in both feel rather…applied, for my taste.

I remember asking a high school friend whom I looked up to what he wished to major in. When he responded with astronomy, I was pretty amazed; for some reason, I hadn’t thought that was truly an option, a thing that people went out and actually did. The subjects taught in school had severely limited my conception of the space of possibilities. From there (alongside a summer program’s professor’s recommendation), I decided to go with physics, checking off course 8 with mild disbelief on my own part. Coming into MIT, I also picked up the notion of going into linguistics, despite never having taken a course in it. And this year (sophomore), I realized it’s definitely more of a minor-level hobby for me, and I opted to concurrently pursue EAPS instead. But here too I’m noticing some trend of liking the first three classes, then quickly becoming disillusioned and growing tired of derivations or niche knowledge.

So onto the untouched possibilities. What about math? Many a friend of mine is a math major. It is so elegant, and so entirely unlike what I imagined myself doing. But everyone I know is so accomplished in this field already; entering the world of abstract math without a solid foundation seems like such an uphill struggle. I watch the ease with which the people I know solve these problems I don’t even understand… they’ve developed this intuition that I feel so lacking in, that I do not believe I could just start learning now. In some parallel universe, I’d’ve loved to have done this. But my poor brain is does not feel up to the challenge this time around. I look on them all with admiration, awe, and some amount of quiet jealousy.

In this universe, then, what would I major in if it were all the same to anyone? That is, where do my passions lie, if indeed I have any? Geology? perhaps, though that may lose its appeal after a few more classes (for I enjoy variety, and the notion of generalists). but I think there’s a more obvious answer still: literature.

What, you say, not STEM?! And indeed, this is my reaction on some level. But I do wish I took more literature classes, and it is probably the academic thing I enjoy doing most: reading, thinking, and writing on those thoughts. Of course, I’d still happily elect to take sciences, languages, and other courses - but what could be more satisfying than fully and deeply exploring thoughts set down in books? But alas, I was “a STEM person” by simple virtue of succeding at it in high school, and thus ‘twas never to be.

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