Cool, Khan Academy hired Vi Hart! Like peanut butter and chocolate.

Vi Hart’s What is up with Noises? (The Science and Mathematics of Sound, Frequency, and Pitch). Khan Academy should hire her.

I like the look of the Wolfram Alpha Course Assistant apps. This has got to be a great time to be a student.

Jeff Bezos’ commencement speech to Princeton’s Class of 2010: We Are What We Choose. Starts with a great story.

Really looking forward to watching Steven Strogatz’s math series unfold:

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

So, let’s begin with pre-school…

He then cites a Sesame Street video. Good man.

P.S. If you want to subscribe to just Strogatz’s stuff, I couldn’t find a separate author feed at the NYT, so I created a Yahoo pipe of his posts.

Phil Gyford compiled a list of all the books from the Metafilter thread What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople? (via waxy)

Chris Anderson says, do something new every three years:

When I was at The Economist, there was a policy to rotate everyone every three years. The idea was that fresh eyes were more important than experience. “Foreign everywhere” was the mantra, and around your second year in Cairo, you could expect to get a call from the editor asking you to consider Mumbai or Sao Paolo—ideally two places you’d never been to and knew nothing about.

He describes believably the feel of each of your three years (exhilaration, competence, cynicism), and ties it nicely into Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery” observation.

Two of my New Yorker heroes, Malcolm Gladwell and Hendrik Hertzberg both recently wrote about fixing public schools, and came to two different conclusions.

Gladwell, in his article Most Likely to Succeed:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hertzberg, on the other hand, writes in his blog post, Size Matters:

Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.

This is not hard to understand. Every teacher and every student knows that the smaller the class, the better the learning environment. Each kid gets more attention. Discipline and control are far easier to achieve. Disruptive kids have less scope for mischief. Teachers are happier and more likely to stay in the profession.

Hertzberg also notes that his way has the important advantage of being objectively measurable. True, and I do hate to throw money at stuff that isn’t measurable, but in my 16 years of school and however many teachers and professors that is, I only had four great teachers (four!), and it was obvious who they were. The subject and the class size were insignificant factors, they made the material great. Bad teachers, on the other hand, could work one-on-one with the most interesting material on the planet and still suck the life right out of the learning experience.

(To be fair, I probably had as many truly sucky teachers as great ones. The rest were in between, scattered along the curve.)

In short, in my experience a good teacher can overcome a large class size but there’s no redeeming a bad teacher. Teacher quality is everything, and good teachers are rare. If a genie popped out of the lamp and said to me, “you can either bump all teachers up a notch in skill, so sucky to poor, poor to average, average to good, good to great or you can keep the current teacher bell curve but halve all the class sizes, but you can’t have both,” it’s such an easy choice it feels pointless to even frame the hypothetical. Give me better teachers any day of the week, and on Sundays too.

(Besides, you know genies: you say you want to halve class sizes and suddenly half the students in the world are dead or worse, inevitably including your own, and then Rod Serling comes out and says something pithy.)

Even though I'm subscribed to a substantial number of programming blogs, you wouldn't think that would ever produce fodder for me here. Well, whadda ya know, Coding Horror on effortful practice:

It's an important distinction. I may drive to work every day, but I'm far from a professional driver. Similarly, programming every day may not be enough to make you a professional programmer. So what can turn someone into a professional driver or programmer? What do you do to practice?

The answer lies in the Scientific American article The Expert Mind:

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Effortful study means constantly tackling problems at the very edge of your ability. Stuff you may have a high probability of failing at. Unless you're failing some of the time, you're probably not growing professionally. You have to seek out those challenges and push yourself beyond your comfort limit.

The SciAm article Atwood links to above is fascinating, I encourage you to click through if you have a moment.

Three very good reads:

• Barry Ross: The Holy Grail in Speed Training.
• Mark Sisson: The Role of Lean Muscle Mass and Organ Reserve in Aging.
• Sister Corita Kent: Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules (really).

Read this older NY Times book review of "Wise Man" (a collection of Richard Feynman's letters) while I was on vacation and thought of my school committee duties when I read this:

The title of this book is taken from a letter that Feynman wrote for the California State Curriculum Commission, in which he appraised the science textbooks to be used in elementary schools. His son, Carl, was then three years old, due to go to elementary school three years later and learn from the textbooks. Feynman spent much time and effort reading textbooks and pointing out their deficiencies. He also examined the teachers' manuals that came with the textbooks. The manuals were supposed to explain the material in the textbooks so that teachers could teach it intelligently. Feynman was especially critical of the manuals.

Can you imagine?! Richard-freaking-FEYNMAN reviewing your science curriculum?! Awesome. But wait, it gets better:

He was particularly concerned that teachers using the manuals might penalize children who came up with original ways of solving problems. This actually happened many years later when Michelle was in high school and was penalized for going off the beaten track to solve an algebra problem. When Feynman went to the school to complain, the teacher accused him of knowing nothing about math.

!!!

They banned playing Tag? They banned TAG?!!. And not just Tag:

Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.

Liable? I'd be tempted to sue the school for preventing my kids from running around. You want to ban something from the school? Ban soda. Ban trans fat. But running? Outrageous.

UPDATE: The LA Times is running a good opinion piece on this.

Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Google Video, 50 minutes. Wonderful. « via kottke.org »

The Freakonomics guys on talent vs. hard work:

[Anders Ericsson and colleagues'] work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers—whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming—are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.