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ROUND 7

Puzzles can become a comfortable plateau

Puzzles can be really fun. They’re interesting, they’re challenging, they let the kid feel mathematically alive. But eventually puzzles can become a comfortable plateau, where a student is still ahead of grade level doing impressive things but not really climbing up into that next layer of math. At some point, they have to make the leap into calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, you know, the serious tools. Because the tools can unlock a much bigger world than puzzles alone can reach.

A holistic story cannot replace prerequisites

Holistic admissions might tell you a lot about a student’s story: Their activities, recommendations, and grades. But the math placement has one very specific question. Does the student know the prerequisites? Do they know algebra? Do they know calculus? Because if they don’t, then the next course is gonna expose that immediately. See, a beautiful story does not make the prerequisites disappear. At some point, the math asks, what can the student actually do? And the answer has to be real.

Concrete examples are not baby math

Concrete examples, that’s how the real understanding gets built. And a lot of undergrad math skips that step because examples feel less prestigious than theorem, proof, theorem, proof. But that is backwards. The computations are what make the objects feel real, and once the objects feel real, the proof is not this mysterious ritual anymore. It’s just explaining something that you already understand. So skipping those examples doesn’t make the course deeper. It often just makes the confusion harder to diagnose and remediate.

The real prize is compressing time

The real prize of learning advanced math early is not just bragging rights, it’s time compression. If a student shows up to college already knowing the core engineering math and all the coding applications, then they don’t have to spend the first two years just skilling up enough to become barely useful. They can start trying things right away: research, internships, harder projects, real problems. And that matters because young people are still figuring out what they’re interested in. And the earlier they become capable, the earlier they can test serious opportunities and the faster they can find the thing that they actually wanna pursue and lean into that.

Math facts are not a tiny skill

 People sometimes talk about multiplication facts like they’re some kind of small old-fashioned detail. But the thing is they’re not, because if those facts are not automatic, then every algebra problem gets heavier. See, the student is not just thinking about variables or equations or structure, they’re also spending mental energy on basic arithmetic. And working memory is limited. So now the algebra problem is competing with the multiplication inside the student’s head. That is why automaticity matters because it frees up the student’s head space to think about the harder thing.

Don't hold students hostage to the calendar

The rule should not be, “ Hey, you’re in eighth grade, so you do eighth grade math.” No, no, no. The rule should be what have you mastered? If the prerequisites are mastered, move the student forward. If the prerequisites are not mastered, fix them. That’s it! The calendar should not be the thing that’s controlling the learning. Mastery should control the learning. Because when students are ready and you make them wait, you’ll waste their time. And when students are not ready and you push them forward anyway, you create holes that follow them for years.

The worst time to remove measurement

The pandemic created a ton of learning loss. And then right around that same time, a lot of schools decided to remove the test scores, which were the only metrics that were giving a useful signal of actual math readiness. That is the worst possible time to remove the measurement because now you’ve got students with inflated grades, weak foundations, less objective placement data, and everybody’s pretending that the transcript tells the full story until the student gets to college level math and the truth shows up all at once. Not because the problem suddenly appeared. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s just that the system stopped measuring it.

Being ahead of grade level is not the same as progressing

A kid can be way ahead of grade level and still not progressing much anymore. That’s what adults have to notice because on the outside it looks impressive, right? The kid is doing puzzles. The kid is doing math above their peers. The kid is clearly talented. But talent development is not just about being ahead. It’s about continuing to climb, and at some point, you have to move into the next level of the domain. And sometimes that means learning the thing that the kid is avoiding because that thing unlocks the next mountain.

The fastest looking path can waste the most time

Sometimes the fastest looking learning path is actually the slowest. You rush ahead, you stack topic after topic, you avoid mastery checks. You turn a blind eye to weak skills, you don’t do the problems. This may feel like progress because the student is moving. They’re going through the material, they’re consuming, they’re nodding their head. It may feel like information is passing through their brain, but none of this is actually being learned or retained. And so then later, everything has to be relearned. So the shortcut was not actually a shortcut. It was a debt. And eventually the student has to pay it back.

A transcript can look better than the student's actual skills

A student’s transcript can look pretty good while their actual math skills are just full of holes. And that’s the scary part because from the outside, you see the grades, you see the course names, the recommendations, the whole polished package. But then you put the student in front of fractions, exponents, basic algebra, and suddenly the signal collapses. And you see that the paperwork was not actually measuring what people thought it was measuring. It was measuring the system’s ability to make the student look ready, not whether the student actually was ready.

Weaknesses don't stay in one grade level

A missing skill doesn’t stay where it started. If multiplication is weak, algebra gets weak. If algebra gets weak, calculus gets weak. If calculus is weak, it’s hard to build more college-level math on top of it. The weakness just travels along with you on your educational journey. That’s how it goes in hierarchical subjects like math. And that’s why early standards matter so much. See, you’re not just deciding what a student does this year. You’re deciding what they carry along with them into every course after this year.

Difficulty vs. Rigor

People confuse difficulty with rigor. If you take undergrads and give them a graduate level textbook, and you bury the intuition, you skip the concrete examples, and you make them fight their way through it. Yeah, the course is hard, but hard does not automatically mean well-designed. Sometimes it just means inefficient. Sometimes it means painful for no reason. See, the thing is, real rigor is not about making the path as brutal as possible. Real rigor is about getting students to understand the material without wasting their energy on avoidable confusion.

The thing kids resist may unlock the thing they love

Even a gifted kid can resist the exact subject that later becomes one of their favorite tools. I’ve seen it happen over and over and over again. They need adults to help them see beyond the mood of the moment. I mean, the kid’s just thinking, “I don’t feel like learning this right now.” The adult has to see that this unlocks the next level And try to communicate to the kid or otherwise just get them through it. Because so often at first it’s resistance, and then it becomes kinda useful, and then it becomes enjoyable, and eventually, it shows up inside that advanced work that the student really cares about. I mean, sometimes the door to the interesting stuff is the topic the kid just doesn’t wanna learn yet, and they need an adult in their life to keep them making progress.

College admissions needs real academic signals

The problem with removing test scores is that you still need some real academic signal. If grades are inflated and every recommendation is glowing, then how do you know what the student actually knows? Especially in math, because math has prerequisites. You can’t just vibe your way into calculus If you’re missing algebra or fractions, exponents. See, a placement signal is not an insult. It’s just a way to avoid pretending that a student is ready When the foundations are not there yet.

Improvement is the motivation

Deliberate practice is not motivated by the practice feeling amazing. That’s not the point. The motivation is that practice improves performance. You do the hard rep because it makes you better. You face the weakness ‘cause that’s where the growth is. And this is where a lot of education gets confused. If every activity has to be enjoyable in the moment, You lose the thing that actually develops skill. The reward is not always in the rep. Usually the reward is realizing I can do something now that I couldn’t do before.

The steady student wins

People sometimes over-focus on raw aptitude. I mean, it’s important, But there’s another variable that matters a lot. And it’s called conscientiousness. You can have a student who’s not the fastest, not the flashiest, They’re not getting everything right on the first try, but they align with the process. They do the work, they correct their mistakes, They keep moving, they’re reliable. Meanwhile, the smart student who only works when it feels easy, they can fall apart the moment the work starts pushing back. Talent is great, but you need also the reliability because that reliability is what compounds.

Soft standards become hard consequences

When standards get lowered, It can feel really compassionate in the moment. Just let them move on. Give them the higher grade. Don’t make the homework too painful. Don’t test directly. But these skill deficits don’t disappear. They travel with the student And eventually the student hits a serious course, And the consequence arrives all at once. These soft standards early can become really catastrophic consequences later.

Too much depth in one day becomes fake progress

There’s this version of learning that looks really aggressive, But it’s actually just fake progress. You take one topic and then stack another on top, and then another after that, and then another on top. You build this tower of hierarchical knowledge all in one day, and you think it’s sturdy, But it’s not. ‘ Cause none of those ideas have consolidated yet. Every new layer is sitting upon A foundation your brain has not really stored yet in long-term memory. That’s why going too depth-wise in a really short amount of time can overload working memory. It feels like speed, But really you’re just trying to build a tall tower on wet concrete.

The parent-teacher boundary disappeared

When I was in high school, teachers did not meet with parents all the time. That boundary was just different. But now, Parents send emails to the teacher, then the principal, And just make this whole situation painful enough that the school starts bending. And that changes the system Because now the teacher is not just teaching the student. The teacher is also managing the parent, And administration is managing the parent, And the standard gets negotiated and bent by all that pressure. So you get your never-ending supply of extra credit, retakes, retakes on the retakes, And parents learn That if you just apply enough pressure, Your kid can come out with a grade that’s way higher than they deserve.

A check mark is not feedback

A check mark on homework? That, that’s not feedback. If a student writes something wrong, and it still gets marked as complete, full credit, then the student learns the wrong lesson. They learn that all that matters is you turned it in, and it doesn’t really matter whether you got it correct, did it properly, actually learned anything. So they can half-ass it, just turn in slop, gibberish, not really try, not really learn. But the errors are accumulating, the lack of knowledge, lack of skill, it’s accumulating. And by the time a student hits a serious class, It looks like they suddenly fell apart. But they didn’t suddenly fall apart, it’s just they were never getting corrected along the way.

ROUND 6

A toy problem is what you get when you're not ready

Justin Skycak (00:00) When undergraduates get research opportunities,

a lot of the time they get a toy problem.

Not because the professor is being mean,

just because the student isn’t ready for anything bigger yet.

They’re still missing too many basics, need too much supervision.

They can’t exactly be counted on to move the real work forward.

But,

if a student

shows up already knowing the core engineering math,

and they can code,

and they understand the applications,

that changes the entire situation.

Now they’re not just some puppy dog to manage.

They’re someone who can actually contribute.

You can't tighten the reins later

Justin Skycak (00:00) A lot of teachers make the same mistake.

They start too loose, too friendly, too casual,

and then when their class gets completely out of control,

they try to tighten the reins later.

But by that point, the kids have already decided

how seriously or unseriously they need to take you.

And once that tone is set,

it’s very hard to undo.

So that’s why you start firm,

you make the standard obvious immediately,

and you hold students accountable for meeting it.

And then you can loosen up later

because the respect is already there.

The parent has to be on board

Justin Skycak (00:00) With gifted kids, the parent has to be on board

because the kid may be brilliant,

but the kid doesn’t have the long perspective yet.

They don’t know what happens three years from now.

They’re probably not even thinking about three months from now.

So if the parent treats resistance as the final answer,

the kid can just stall out.

But if the understands the long game,

then the kid is gonna move forward one way or another.

Not because you’re crushing their curiosity,

but because you’re helping them get to the place

where their curiosity actually has more room to run.

Advanced math makes domain experts more valuable

Justin Skycak (00:00) I guess you don’t need advanced math for every job

in computer science or medicine, economics.

But the people in those fields who do know

their advanced math

are extra

because they can combine two things.

They understand the domain,

and they have the mathematical tools to go deeper.

That’s where the leverage is.

Not just knowing code, not just knowing biology, not just knowing business,

but being able

to bring serious math into the field

and see things that other people can’t.

Calculators can hide weak algebra

Justin Skycak (00:00) Calculators and Desmos, they’re not problems by themselves.

The problem is when they become a smoke screen.

A student can produce a graph how to graph.

get an answer without knowing how to solve.

They can move through the course without the algebra ever becoming solid.

And then everyone says, well, they passed.

But passing is not the same thing as mastering.

If a tool is hiding the weakness, the weakness is still there,

just waiting

to come back and smack you down in a harder class.

Placement tests are not the enemy

Justin Skycak (00:00) You gotta understand, a good placement test

is not there to insult students.

It’s there just to tell the truth

before the course tells it more painfully.

Because if a student is missing the basics,

and you place them into a course

that assumes all of those basics are automatic,

then you are not being kind, you’re setting them up to fail.

When tuition turns into grade pressure

Justin Skycak (00:00) At some private schools, parents are paying 30, 40, 50, 60

dollars a year?

When that much money is involved,

school completely changes.

Because now if the kid is getting a B or a C,

the parent is not just thinking, my kid needs to learn more.

What they’re is, much money am I paying for this?

So the emails start.

The meetings start, the pressure moves up to the administration.

And over time,

the school’s incentive

becomes just keep the parents at bay instead of the standard.

Proofs become easier after computations

Justin Skycak (00:00) Writing proofs does not have to be this terrifying leap,

but it becomes terrifying

when students never really even learned the computations first.

See if row echelon form feels natural

and eigenvectors feel natural,

eigenvalues feel natural,

then the proofs are not coming out of nowhere.

At that point proving something about linear algebra

is not really harder than proving something about or parity

because the objects make sense to you.

See, the proof is not the first step.

The proof comes after the intuition has something to stand on.

There are countably infinite courses after calculus

Justin Skycak (00:00) People think calculus is the big finish line,

but even after single variable calculus,

you still got linear algebra, multivariable calc,

differential equations, probability and statistics,

and all these other specialized courses that branch out after that.

There are so many

university math courses above calculus

that a serious student could not fit all of them into a standard four-year undergrad schedule,

even if they overloaded every single year.

So getting to calculus

early

is not about being done early.

It’s about having enough runway to reach the math that comes after.

High school grades stopped being a clean signal

Justin Skycak (00:00) The craziest part about the UCSD situation

is not just that students were missing middle school math.

No, it’s that the high school grades

that these students came in with

were not a good signal as to what was happening.

You had students coming in with strong looking grades,

but they still didn’t know fractions,

order of operations, exponents.

And there’s no test scores like SAT, ACT.

The UCs removed those, they went test blind.

Even though those test scores

were actually giving a cleaner signal of math placement.

So now you have inflated grades,

pandemic learning loss,

and fewer objective measurements.

And you end up surprised by this problem

that you simply chose not to measure.

Students inherit the system adults created

Justin Skycak (00:00) When students show up with holes in their math foundation,

it’s really easy to blame the student.

But the reality is adults created this system.

Parents, teachers,

administrators, school boards, politicians.

Everybody contributed something:

inflated grades, weak standards,

missing tests,

watered down courses,

smokescreens everywhere.

And the student eventually reaches a class where weakness

cannot be hidden anymore.

At some point, you have to say,

The system is broken, and we have to dig out this rot.

Most professors are not trying to teach well

Justin Skycak (00:00) There are some professors that take pedagogy really seriously, but it’s rare.

Most are just not building the course

around how students actually learn.

You know, concrete examples, review,

making sure prerequisites mastered before moving on.

They’re just presenting the material,

and they’re hoping that the strongest students survive it.

The rot starts with multiplication tables

Justin Skycak (00:00) Mathematical rot.

It starts really early.

It starts with things like,

we don’t really need kids to memorize multiplication tables.

But then,

multiplication never becomes an effortless skill.

It always takes up a bunch of space in their brain,

and they can’t easily reverse

when it comes time to find factor pairs or stuff in algebra.

So algebra becomes way harder,

and because it’s so hard, it gets watered down.

And then we let them lean on calculators and Desmos

because they can’t actually graph things or solve things

or manipulate expressions by hand.

Now there’s a weakness, it just travels up the ladder with them.

You don’t fix that in calculus. You gotta get it at the beginning.

Smart but unreliable students

Justin Skycak (00:00) There

things that people confuse all the time.

There’s aptitude and there’s conscientiousness.

Some students are not the fastest.

They’re careful.

They follow the process.

They do what they’re supposed to do,

and they end up moving really steadily through a ton of material.

And then you have the smart knucklehead type.

High accuracy when it’s easy.

Fast on the stuff that comes naturally.

But the moment they struggle,

they just rage quit.

and completely fall off the rails.

See, here’s the thing, talent matters.

But if a talented student won’t align with the learning process,

then the talent just leaks out everywhere.

UCSD needed remedial remedial math

Justin Skycak (00:00) One in 12 freshmen entering UCSD

didn’t know middle school math.

We’re not talking shaky on calculus,

they forgot their trig identities. No, no,

We’re talking like fractions, order of operations.

What’s an exponent?

Like, they already had a remedial math course,

and that was too advanced for some students.

So they had to create a remedial, remedial math course.

Two layers back.

And the craziest part of all this is that high school grades didn’t give a good signal

about this problem.

The best signal was the SAT or ACT math score,

which a lot of schools decided they just didn’t want to accept anymore.

Gifted kids still need to be pushed

Justin Skycak (00:00) The most mathematically gifted student I ever worked with,

he still had to be pushed to learn calculus.

He was way ahead for his age, but he didn’t see the long game yet.

I mean, kids usually don’t, right?

Adults can see it.

just thinking about what’s interesting right now.

What do I want to do right now? It’s gotta be right now.

Anyway, this kid, eventually,

learned the calculus.

And then calculus became one of those things he actually enjoyed.

And now he’s doing advanced math research.

He’s throwing derivatives and integrals all over the place,

and he’s having a great time. He loves it.

Not just for the long game, but also for the right now.

But if nobody had pushed him through that resistant phase,

he would not be doing what he’s doing right now.

Teachers have to set the tone early

Justin Skycak (00:00) Listen, as a teacher,

you have to set the tone early.

You can’t just walk in there like, hey,

I’m your buddy, I’m your study pal.

We’re all friends here.

Yeah, that doesn’t work.

Because a lot of kids, they’ll hear that and will think

What a joke.

You can just blow this class off.

And once they stop taking you seriously like that,

it is very, very hard to get that back.

So that’s why you

You make it clear that the work actually matters.

And then once the standards are established,

that’s when you can lighten up.

Grades stopped measuring learning

Justin Skycak (00:00) A lot of homework now, it isn’t even graded for accuracy.

It’s just, did you upload something to Canvas?

Not whether it’s correct, not whether you actually learned it,

just whether something got turned in.

And then people are shocked

when students get to algebra or to calculus or to college,

and they have these massive holes in their foundation.

This is how the smoke screens get built:

inflated grades, weak homework checks.

There’s no real signal.

And then everybody finally acts all surprised

a student finally hits a course where they can’t fake the math anymore.

Harvard having remedial calculus support is insane

Justin Skycak (00:00) Harvard having to add a ton of remedial support to its calculus courses, it’s just insane.

Harvard.

These students are coming in who are supposed to be ready for calculus,

but a lot of them have missing foundations from high school.

Maybe even middle school?

And this is the part that people don’t want to say out loud:

If the foundations are rotten,

then calculus isn’t the problem.

Calculus is just where the rot finally becomes impossible to hide.

Concrete examples first, proofs second

Justin Skycak (00:00) One of the biggest mistakes

in undergrad math

is making students push symbols around before they even understand what these symbols even mean.

You do the theorem proof, theorem proof.

Everybody just pretends that this is deep learning.

But without concrete examples,

this is just an inefficient game of symbol manipulation.

You gotta, gotta, gotta get your reps with the calculations.

Make it all feel instinctive in your bones.

And then, when you write proofs about it,

you’re not proving something alien.

You’re proving something that you actually understand.

Make honest work the easiest option

Justin Skycak (00:00) Homework is a tricky topic now, especially given chat GPT.

It’s really not that tricky if you just set up the right incentive structure

that if you cheat you lose.

You can detect cheating

really, really easily.

If you have the kid in person,

and they turned in a homework full of

perfect solutions to problems, and you don’t think that’s real?

Just get the kid in front of you, ask them to do the have to solve every single problem in front of you, just pick out one. You don’t have to even do it every day for every homework assignment. do it frequently

and have the stakes high

that the kids know they don’t want to be caught out.

And I’m not saying blow up their life, I’m just saying,

make them understand that that is actually the lowest effort way to get through your class is just do what you’re supposed to do.

Why STEM dreams die

Justin Skycak (00:00) Eventually, the truth comes out when the kids graduate and they go to college.

Whatever kind of cool thing that they said they wanted to do, like, I wanted to

build rockets or whatever. Guess what? You actually have to know your math.

And if you’re coming out of years and years of just being graded on completion and not being held to account for actually learning the skills, you don’t know your math.

And this is not a problem that you can just fix in couple months of tutoring.

it’s gonna take of time and effort to resolve. So what’s gonna happen is you’re just gonna say, know, math is hard, I was never cut out for it. I’m just gonna switch my major to something else.

If the people who are responsible

for making sure that you develop these skills earlier in

you’re going to miss out on a lot.

You don't grade it, they don't do it

Justin Skycak (00:00) You don’t grade it, they don’t do it.

That’s how it goes. If you don’t grade the work, vast majority of students are not going to do it.

If you don’t grade it for correctness, the vast majority of students are not going to do it correctly.

They’re just going to submit some slop.

Make it just look like work so if the skims over like they made an attempt. Check. Completed. Guess what? They didn’t actually do anything. didn’t actually learn anything. They didn’t even try.

You grade the homework,

but you weight it small enough compared to test performance

that a reasonable amount of mistakes in the homework

is not going to pull down the student’s grade.

When teachers are forced to dumb down classes

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you just give completion grades on homework,

that makes

the next year suck for the next who has to teach them. It’s terrible.

What happens down the line is the teacher, they have no choice

but to kind of make the class a more A little more fluffy.

Everybody just collectively agrees that this isn’t really a problem,

that we can do a fluffy watered down course just graded on completion. I mean, Eventually, the truth comes out when the kids graduate and they go to college. and they get smacked their first course in math or physics and realize they can’t do anything they didn’t learn shit

in high school.

But by that time they’re out of high school, so high school’s like, it’s not our problem.

Kid got into college.

We did our job here.

So everyone’s just kind of passing around this problem like a hot potato.

The pull of mediocrity in schools

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you just give completion grades on homework,

that makes

the next year suck for the next who has to teach them. It’s terrible.

Cause you come in as like a calculus teacher and you think your kids have learned their basic algebra? Guess what? They haven’t!

It’s like this pull of mediocrity. Once a

school program starts

especially in these hierarchical domains like math and physics,

you get caught in this trap of fluffy curriculum.

And you’ve gone so far

that you’re just stuck in it unless you are willing to go back to step one, which is like learn your basic

learn your basic algebra.

There’s no way to learn anything that builds on top of that unless you’re willing to go back down to your basics and rebuild

Teaching physics to students who don't know algebra

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you just give completion grades on homework,

that makes

the next year suck for the next who has to teach them. It’s terrible.

Cause you come in as like a calculus teacher and you think your kids have learned their basic algebra? Guess what? They haven’t!

I mean, I was in that position myself as a teacher.

I had to somehow teach physics kids who couldn’t even solve a linear equation,

but supposedly they had taken algebra.

Their algebra class was just such a waste

because they just had their class discussions and they’re plotting on Desmos.

Nobody learned how to solve the equations,

so they just don’t have any of this knowledge.

And I’m supposed

teach them

long it’ll take for an object to fall, and you gotta calculate of the angles and stuff.

So What happens down the line is the teacher, they have

but to kind of make the class a more

because nobody knows anything.

Completion grades destroy math education

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you just give completion grades on homework,

that makes

the next year suck for the next who has to teach them. It’s terrible.

Cause you come in as like a calculus teacher and you think your kids have learned their basic algebra? Guess what? They haven’t!

They don’t know how to do the most basic things and somehow you still have to them calculus?

And you get in that state because somebody the line

decided it’s fine to just give everybody completion grades.

If you’re a teacher and you want to completely wreck your school’s math program, then just a foundational course and just give everybody completion grades. Pass them on. Fail them upwards.

Because after a year of that passes by,

the problem becomes so big that nobody wants to accept that it’s even a problem anymore.

The rookie mistake that kills careers

Justin Skycak (00:00) Here’s a rookie mistake and it’s so common, it’s so painful to watch it play out over and over and over again:

Do not show up and immediately start trying to become important.

That’s not how you become important.

You gotta first focus on just becoming useful.

And if you become useful enough,

then you start earning leverage.

And if you earn enough leverage, then you become important. That’s how it works.

A surprising amount of wisdom

is just doing the next obvious thing

correctly repeatedly

without letting impatience

trick you into skipping the level that you’re actually on.

The real world rewards execution, not potential

Justin Skycak (00:00) You gotta understand this:

A natural edge that you don’t cash in, it eventually expires.

I mean, students often don’t realize this, but

after you graduate,

the game changes.

It eventually becomes 100% about what you’ve actually done,

not what you just have the potential to do.

And this transition, it happens faster than you think.

And you know, this can be a hard truth.

Students get used to hearing, oh you’re gonna do great things, and then they never take action.

But it’s really a welcome truth

for those students who are willing

to put in serious work and get serious results.

Abstract math needs concrete roots

Justin Skycak (00:00) Abstract math is not the problem. Proofs are not the problem.

The problem is when students are thrown into abstraction they even understand anything concrete.

The math just becomes symbol pushing.

Definitions, theorems, proofs, more theorems, more proofs.

But no intuition, no examples,

no real grip on the objects.

That’s backwards.

Build the concrete understanding first,

make the calculations instinctive,

and then abstraction actually means something.

The grade inflation trap

Justin Skycak (00:00) High school grades are not giving us a clean signal anymore.

A student can have a really strong transcript, but still be missing math foundations.

And that’s the trap. Everybody sees the grades, and they assume that learning has happened.

But really the grades can be inflated, the homework can be completion based.

The tests in class can be diluted on retakes on retakes,

participation points,

extra credit.

You just keep beating the grade

with this onslaught of let’s pretend you learned this activities.

So that by the time the student reaches college, transcript says they’re ready,

but the placement test says they’re not.

Bad feedback creates fake confidence

Justin Skycak (00:00) If homework is only checked for completion, students can be wrong for weeks and not know it.

They submit the assignment, they get the check.

The grade looks fine.

The parent thinks everything’s fine, the school thinks everything’s fine.

But guess what? It’s not fine, because the math was never actually learned.

And nobody knows that because the homework wasn’t checked.

Then later, weeks later, maybe months later,

on the test, where all the missing pieces show up.

But by that time, the situation is too painful to correct because it’s compounded

into this big skill gap.

And at this point it’s easier to just kind of brush it under the rug,

kinda fudge the grades, give retakes on retakes on retakes.

How about some extra credit for something else?

And so it continues being the case that the math was never actually learned.

And that’s why feedback matters very soon after the student completes the problem.

Not just encouragement, not completion points, actual correction. Did you get it right or not?

Undergraduate math teaches you to survive, not to understand

Justin Skycak (00:00) A lot of undergrad math is taught like this:

Professor shows lectures, assigns a problem set.

Good luck!

And that’s basically the course.

I mean, yeah, there’s some professors that take the teaching more seriously,

but that’s a small minority.

The reality is most courses are not structured how students actually learn.

They skip examples, they skip intuition, jump straight to abstraction, just pushing symbols around

before they even know what the computations mean or how to run real numbers through them.

And then everybody just pretends that the students are learning math.

And really, they’re surviving the course.

Projects are not an efficient way to learn math

Justin Skycak (00:00) Projects sound great, and they can be great, but they’re not magic.

They only work when students have enough skills to actually do something with them.

Otherwise, project just becomes this giant mess.

Students don’t know what they’re doing. The teacher has to carry everything.

And the learning is inefficient, but really it’s probably not happening at all.

Thing is, you can’t skip the foundation

and jump straight to the fun part.

The fun part works because of the foundation.

ROUND 5

Kids are capable of so much more than standard school allows for

Justin Skycak (00:00) What is effective math training? What can students be doing? When I joined this radically accelerated math program to teach in it, these kids are AP Calc BC, passing the exam, often getting five on the exam in eighth grade. You get them in sixth grade, and these kids are nowhere near your conception of math genius, they’re like the typical honors level sixth grade. Using effective pedagogy and cognitive science-learning strategies, you can just transform them into having the skills that you would normally associate with somebody who has a much different cognitive profile. These things are so rare because standard education does so little. What you’re looking at is mostly natural talent and motivation. If school were actually leveraging all of the research that we know about what effective training is, you should get these kids who look almost like normal kids, and then you put them through this skills training program, and they just come out the other side, just complete monsters.

Good training programs transform ordinary people

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you have a really good gym training program, it’s not just the people who are absolute tanks walking in there who are going to walk out being absolute tanks. If this thing works effectively, you’re going to see a lot more people who just look like normal people, and then they go through this training regimen, and they follow it for months, a year, couple of years. And like they come out the other side and everyone just assumes that they had always been like this Greek God looking strong man. And that’s not at all what they looked like when they started. A hallmark of a really strong training program is the amount of transformation that you see in the students.

You build a life around what you can't do

Justin Skycak (00:00) It’s kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. A lot of people only need basic math for everyday life because they never got the math skills, the coding skills and everything to make something other than the default standard life. And then life solidifies around their current capabilities. You don’t learn a bunch of math, you don’t learn a bunch of coding. Well, guess what? You’re very limited in what you’re able to do skill-wise. And so you build up a life that doesn’t leverage the skill. And then you question why would anybody need the skill?

Calculators are a crutch when learning math

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you don’t learn the actual stuff, the calculator just becomes a crutch for you. You’re limited to the mathematical ceiling that is a calculator, which is a very low mathematical ceiling. If you don’t learn any of your math, all you learn is how to punch buttons on the calculator, you don’t actually have the skills that you need to support the higher level math that lets you go above the level of a calculator.

Lectures are a waste of time

Justin Skycak (00:00) Lectures are terrible. They’re just awful. You just talk at the students for like an hour. Whose eyes are not going to glaze over after an hour of anybody talking anything? The only people who are going to enjoy this are the students who love the subject, but they’re already operating at this kind of high level. Us who think about math all day, we are not the ones that you can design an education system around. It’s not a basketball practice if the coach is the only one bouncing the basketball and just doing slam dunks. As entertaining as it might be, it’s not going to get them better at the sport. And it’s the same way in math.

The myth of the "aha" moment

Justin Skycak (00:00) People think that there’s some phase transition that happens where at one point you went from like being unskilled to being skilled. That’s not how it works. Once in a while, when you get an aha moment, that’s really this last missing prerequisite clicks into place, and it’s like this big unlock for you. But there’s not anything particularly about that missing prerequisite. That just happens to be the last keystone that you needed to support this next level. And so it feels special because it’s the last one. There’s that satisfaction when it clicks into place.

Consuming content doesn't lead to mastery

Justin Skycak (00:00) You can’t even talk about a subject the same way as somebody who actually does it. Talking to somebody who has watched a lot of Three Blue One Brown, talking to somebody who has watched a lot of AI hype channels online versus somebody who is actually building the stuff, who is actually working out the math problems. Talking to somebody who watches a bunch of history on physics versus somebody who actually solves the physics problems and can tell you about it, do research into physics, figure this out, compute that. Like it’s just completely different.

Miscalibrated coursework leads to students hating math

Justin Skycak (00:00) Math class is moving everybody forward at the pace of the median student of the class. Almost nobody is the median student. For the bottom half of the students, they’re just like utterly confused. They have no idea what’s going on. They’re being asked to do things that they just have no idea how to do. And they don’t even know how to get started. And they’re building all this emotional hatred up around the subject. If you put them in that situation long enough where they’re just like, this subject is not for me, they’re not going to participate in the process. Even if you give them material that’s perfectly calibrated, the situation has gotten so bad that not only do you have a pedagogical problem, not even a motivational problem, not even just like a build relationship from scratch, but like an actual completely broken relationship.

The active learning loop

Justin Skycak (00:01) You gotta have students solving problems. The thing that’s gonna improve students’ performance is really doing the action themselves. This is not to say that no instruction should be provided. You actually have to show them what they’re supposed to be doing, but it’s just the minimum they need to start doing it on their own. Again, minimum effective doses. Now they know what they’re supposed to, now they practice it. And then at that point, you say, OK, good. Now let me show you the next thing. And you keep dangling the next thing in front of them. It’s a cycle. That’s the active loop.

Upskilling is the result of consistency

Justin Skycak (00:00) Just like when you’re doing a sport, you’re developing muscle tissue, your muscle memory, in math, it’s the same way. You’re physically changing your brain. And this requires the same type of reps. It’s a constant cycle of strain and adaptation. You microstrain, micro adaptation, rinse and repeat over and over again. And you’ll look up months later, years later, and you’re at a totally different level of skill. People think that there’s some phase transition that happens where at one point you went from like being unskilled to being skilled. That’s not how it works. It’s this day in, day out, these little wins happening.

How to master anything

Justin Skycak (00:00) You need these tight cycles of instruction to activity to feedback, correction. That’s the loop to mastering anything, whether it’s math or it’s sports or it’s music. Any skill that you can learn is most effectively learned in this way. The more of these loops that you can cram in to the learning session, the further you’re going to go, the more you get done. Each loop is a small incremental improvement, but you compound a lot of them, and you get really solid skills.

The right way to learn math

Justin Skycak (00:00) Repetition is necessary. But, you’re not just taking one problem repping on into the zone of diminishing returns. You wanna focus those reps on kind of the minimum effective dose and then switch over to doing on other reps. Now of course, you have to make sure your prerequisites are in place for all of these. So it’s to arrange this sort of practice setting because depending have, like what are they ready for? What are they not ready for? How many problems do they before moving on? This all depends student to that’s what it looks when you do it right.

If you build on shaky ground, you're doomed to struggle

Justin Skycak (00:00) When students struggle with math, usually the reason they’re struggling is because they don’t have prerequisites in place. And you’re assuming that they have prerequisites in place and then there’s this new combo punch. You’re going to struggle with the combo if you can’t even do the things individually. You ask them to factor cubic before they can even factor a quadratic. You ask them to solve a linear equation with a variable on both sides before they can solve an equation with a variable on only one side. You build on shaky ground and that’s what makes it hard.

Bottom-up learning is the most efficient

Justin Skycak (00:00) It’s a difficult problem to identify exactly which prerequisites they’re missing. The solution is really just start at your level with things that you able to do and just work through a well-sequenced curriculum up from there. If you build it from the bottom up, you can just spend all your time building, building, building, instead of searching for missing pieces.

Different students need different amounts of practice

Justin Skycak (00:00) Bottom up learning: you start at a student’s level and you don’t want to be too aggressive and put them ahead of their skis because things are just going to topple down. The way to build up to more challenging stuff pretty quickly is just you need to adapt the dosage of the practice to how well the student is doing. Don’t give them too many problems if they’re just knocking it out of the park. If they’re struggling, then you just ask more questions. You basically just adapt the amount of practice to how well the student catching on to the skill.

Most of class time needs to be individual learning

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you have a class, it has personalized to each student. You have to make the material appropriate for them at their pace. And there’s no way to do that if you are teaching the same thing to every student at the same time. Now, you can do group activities in class that depend on knowledge that all the students have learned, but that’s not going to be the majority of class time. That’s going to be kind of like the icing on the cake. Most of the time it’s just going to have to be occupied by skills practice and that’s going to be different for every student.

Accelerated learning unlocks opportunities you can't even see yet

Justin Skycak (00:01) Accelerated math education and coding always unlocks these new things that you probably would not have even thought of. You don’t even see the road ahead of you until you have the foundations in place. The more skills that you have the more surface area you have those skills further, combine them in various sorts of opportunities. These things are not years away. These are like, could sit down and start working on this tomorrow. And that makes a huge motivational impact.

Stop rotting, start compounding

Justin Skycak (00:00) Spending one hour per day on brain rot, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling is just insane. Spending one hour a that doesn’t some kind your life is just insane because that’s like 6 % of your waking day. That may not seem like a lot, but when you just think about how much of that time are you spending accumulated throughout your life, 6 % of your day, that’s 5 years of your waking life. That’s half a decade, just gone. Zero return, zero fulfillment, zero meaning, zero contribution to any other parts of your life.

Prerequisite knowledge is intellectual capital

Justin Skycak (00:00) It is so easy to think that you’re untalented, maybe even dumb, when really you’re just unpracticed on some prerequisite skills. Talented students can struggle if they’re missing prerequisites. The flip side of that it’s so easy to think that you’re just hyper talented, that you’re a genius when really you’re just better practiced on prerequisite skills than everybody around you. If you conclude that, I’m a genius, and I don’t need to practice, well, your genius is going to be short lived. So you have to recognize that the amount of practice you put in got you into this situation. And if you take your foot off the gas and you stop practicing, you’re gonna get behind. So the moral is that prerequisite knowledge is intellectual capital. And it can take you from academic rags to riches or from riches to rags, if you squander it.

You can't develop intuition without lived experience

Justin Skycak (00:00) Everybody wants intuition as a way to bypass this hard work of getting experience, of grinding through the computations, the life experiences. You cannot skip the experience and still come out with the intuition. Somebody can tell you all the kind of intuition that they have built over the years. But what you don’t realize is that this is just a compression of all their experience. It’s a lossy compression. You don’t know the edge cases where this is generally true, but watch out for this, watch out for that. Intuition emerges when you’ve done the grunt work so many times that your subconscious has automated the pattern recognition. It’s a very bottom-up kind of thing. It’s not a top-down thing.

You gotta get your reps

Justin Skycak (00:00) Repetition is necessary. You have to do the reps if you want learn and retain the material, just like you strength engaging in resistance training repeatedly. Say you go to the gym, you’re doing a 45 minute workout. You’re not doing bicep curls for 45 minutes. You’re not doing 45 minutes of deadlifts. That’s the same way that it needs to go in math education is you need reps, but you’re not just taking one problem and repping on into the zone of diminishing returns. You wanna focus those reps on kind of the minimum effective dose and then switch over to doing reps on other things.

Stop repeating, start interleaving

Justin Skycak (00:00) Repetition is necessary. You have to do the reps if you want to really learn and retain the material. But, you’re not just taking one problem and repping on into the zone of diminishing returns. You wanna focus those reps on kind of the minimum effective dose and then switch over to doing reps on other things. So you’re not doing this worksheet of like 30 problems that are like the same type of problem. Imagine dividing this worksheet into six sections and then five problems from a completely different area of math in each section.

The illusion of prior knowledge in fast learners

Justin Skycak (00:00) Maybe you have some student who actually doesn’t know the skill, but they just catch on so fast because they’re incredibly bright, have high generalization ability. The prerequisites are very strong. And they can grasp it so quickly they almost look like somebody who has learned it previously and is just remembering it really quick. That’s kind of what it feels teach some of these incredibly bright just like, wait, do you know this already? Did you learn this already? No? Okay, wow, that’s crazy.

You can't teach every student the same material

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you have a math class, and you’re doing a one size fits all, you’re trying to teach the same thing to everybody, you’re not going to be able to challenge high flyers. Likewise, there is no way to reach the struggling students without filling in their missing prerequisites. It has to be personalized to each student. You have to make the material appropriate for them at their pace. And there is no way to do that if you are teaching same thing to every student at the same time.

What if students mastered college math by 10th grade?

Justin Skycak (00:00) In this super advanced math and computer science program that we taught in the Pasadena district, the idea is we would build up students coding skills and also have them like really super powered in math, so basically your core undergrad engineering math. The students would get this in place by 10th grade. That leaves a couple of years a lot of that depend on these foundations. Like, have students build their own machine learning libraries from scratch and research papers in 90s artificial intelligence. In high school!

You're not dumb, you just lack the prerequisites

Justin Skycak (00:00) It is so easy to think that you’re untalented, maybe even dumb, when really you’re just unpracticed on some prerequisite skills. This reminds me of a time that I tutored a real analysis student who hadn’t gotten much practice with proof writing beforehand. She thought she was gonna fail the class. She thought she might not be cut out for it. But we just shored up some of those missing proof writing foundations. And she came out of class with a well-deserved A. And then she took Fourier analysis the following year and just absolutely crushed it. Didn’t even need my help at all. So she was a talented student who’s capable of doing highly advanced math but was just missing some prerequisites.

People don't hate math, they hate missing prerequisites

Justin Skycak (00:00) When you just hit a wall in something that you’re trying to learn, this is typically just a massive debt of unlearned prerequisites that are being called due. People don’t really hate math. They hate the feeling of being lost, of not knowing what the hell is going on. They hate this compounded debt of prerequisites that they haven’t learned and being asked to continually learn things that depend on them.

It's never too late to do the work

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you are willing to put in the work, it’s the same amount of work, whether you start in your teens, 20s, 30s, 40s. What changes is not the amount of work. It’s the amount of free time that you have to do the work. People often say like, it’s too late for me. But usually what that really means is just that I’ve got less time now. I’ve got more responsibilities now and it’s harder to carve out the hours. And that’s real, but the work itself is still doable if you can make time for it.

Silent educational failure

Justin Skycak (00:00) What do you mean homework was never meant to be graded? If you’re not going to grade the material at all, everybody’s pretending that this learning is happening. Nobody’s measuring it. Everybody’s pretending that it’s happening. You can go on like this for a long time. Maybe a student doesn’t learn in high school all the math that they’re supposed to have learned, and they get to college, and can’t do can’t even do the remedial precalculus. And what this is chalked up to is typically, know, this stuff’s hard and I’m not cut out for it. Things just get so bad that people just accept because it’s so far the original circumstances that were causing this situation. responsible are no longer really in your life. You can’t really hold anyone accountable anymore. You just got to deal with the situation. So it’s easier to just pretend this was an inevitable thing. But that’s really what’s happening is, Nobody’s measuring the learning and making sure it’s happening.

Why math education has gone to crap

Justin Skycak (00:00) The dumbest of feedback I ever got from administrator who sat in and watched one of my classes. At the beginning of class, I asked students to recall information that I’d taught them the previous day. And of course, they just learned this information, so they’re gonna be a little fuzzy on it. You try to make them experience that effort of retrieval and get them retrieving successfully because that’s what strengthens the long-term retention. This admin saw this friction, and she was like, Well, you should really remind the students of what you did yesterday. That way it goes smoother. And it’s like, we’re doing strength training, right? And I’m the coach, and I’m telling the students, hey, go lift that weight, because I want you to get stronger. And admin walks in, she’s like, You should lift the weight for the students. That way the weight will get lifted faster. Like, seriously? This was a math coach for the district. So you wonder why math education has just gone to crap. It’s because we got so many people who are in charge of math education who just don’t know the most basic stuff about how memory works, how the brain works, learning works. They just run on vibes like, what kind of feels like it should be good for learning? You have to know about how learning works. And retrieval practice is one of the most important techniques long-term retention.

Problem solving ability comes from technical skills

Justin Skycak (00:00) Here’s the thing. Everybody wants to talk about like, we should teach students problem solving skills. They should be solving all these problems, these hard problems. That’s where the learning really happens. It’s like, you realize that the problem solving skills, they depend on not just abstract, like meta skills. They depend on actually being able to do things: to solve equations, to manipulate mathematical expressions, to code stuff up, to write for loops, if statements, functions, modular systems, like all this stuff. You can’t solve technical problems without technical skills. There is no such thing as technical problem solving in the absence of technical skill building. You can’t solve problems with skills you don’t have.

Good challenges convert into progress

Justin Skycak (00:00) Sometimes I’ll talk about inefficiency and about how student had such a poor educational experience. This is what should have been done to skill them up more efficiently, and some people will just comment things like, you know, adversity isn’t a bad thing. It builds character. Do you really where if you take that to its logical completion? It’s like, why even have a teacher guiding students, trying to teach them things in ways that they will understand? The kind of challenges you want students to be facing in the classroom challenges most efficiently into progress You should help them overcome these challenges and make it like a mental workout the students. If you’re just letting them flail around making things harder than they need to be. A lot of that, it’s just like heat loss. This is like a thermodynamic engine. And so much of what could be converted into skill just gets lost. It’s a waste.

What's the point of homework if nobody checks it?

Justin Skycak (00:00) What do you mean homework was never meant to be graded? So you’re gonna make a student do half an hour to an hour or more of every night and you’re not gonna grade the material? Like what are they even doing it for then? You know that saying like practice makes permanent? I mean, just doing an hour of practice, waiting for the next day or next week to get feedback on that, that’s bad enough. But if you’re not going to grade the material at wall, hat is even the point of this whole thing? It’s just a performative exercise where you’re just asking the student, scribble on this paper, and then turn it in, and we will pretend that that indicates that you have learned the material even though I’m not going to check it. We’re just going to assume that it’s all correct and that you’re understanding it.

School "works" because nobody is held accountable

Justin Skycak (00:00) What do you mean homework was never meant to be graded? So you’re gonna make a student do half an hour to an hour or more of every night and you’re not gonna grade the material? You know, what’s really happening is it’s like, it’s less work for you. It’s less work for me. The student doesn’t have to really make sure it’s like all correct. The teacher doesn’t have to grade it, doesn’t have to deal with the consequences when a student doesn’t know the material. Principal’s happy, parents happy, because everybody’s pretending that this learning is happening. Nobody’s measuring it. Everybody’s pretending that it’s happening.

Teacher training programs ignore the science of learning

Justin Skycak (00:00) So many of these admins don’t even know what spaced repetition is. They don’t know about blocked versus interleaved How are you gonna run any sort skills training program if you don’t know these basics? It’s just ridiculous. I guess to be fair to them, this is not taught as part of their credentialing. This is not taught as part of their programs and education schools programs are just so unserious. It’s been taken over by these academics who run on vibes too. And so they set the bar of what it means to pass teacher credentialing for moving up in the education administration world. And these bars are also just set on vibes. It’s not based on science. It’s not based on actual effective learning results.

Unnecessary difficulty in learning is not helpful

Justin Skycak (00:00) Sometimes I’ll talk about educational inefficiency and about how this student has such a poor educational experience. This is what should have been done to scale them up more efficiently, stacking little wins instead of just continually asking them to do things they don’t have the prerequisites in place to do. and some people will just comment things like, you know, adversity isn’t a bad thing. It builds character. You’re going to get enough adversity in life outside the classroom. You don’t need additional adversity inside of your skill building.

Kids won't do work that's not graded

Justin Skycak (00:00) All these comments about you’re not supposed to grade homework. “It’s independent practice of a new skill, not an assessment.” If you don’t assign a grade, do you really think that the kid’s gonna take it seriously? Like this is ungraded. This is just for completion. What kind of world are you living in? That does not work at all. Kids are effort minimizers for the most part. Like they’re gonna do the minimum amount of get the grade in the class. There are exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, that’s how kids work. That’s how students in general work.

Breaking down the excuses against grading homework

Justin Skycak (00:00) Now there’s a bunch of really dumb excuses being brought up like, “oh, I have 160 students. Should I look over every problem of homework during my 50 minutes of prep time? Do the math on how long that would take.” Well, you don’t have to look over every single problem. You can choose a subset of problems to grade. Just don’t tell the students what they are beforehand. That still puts in the incentive that the students have to try their best on all the problems because any of them could be sampled for the grade. It’s just an excuse to say things like, I can’t grade every problem because you don’t need to do that. There are ways to work smarter than that.

Kids are effort minimizers

Justin Skycak (00:00) Kids are effort minimizers for the most part. There are exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, that’s how kids work. That’s how students in general work. That’s just how people work. They’re going to minimize the amount of effort that’s needed to attain the goal they want. And for most students, the goal that they want is not really mastery of the material. It’s just the grade, getting the teacher off their back and the parents off their back because they generally don’t really understand the importance of having a good foundational base of knowledge.

Kids don't naturally think long-term

Justin Skycak (00:00) Kids are effort minimizers for the most part. Like they’re gonna do the minimum amount of needed get the grade in the class because they generally don’t really understand the importance of having a good foundational base of knowledge. Even if the teacher or their parents explain it to them, “you this in order to opportunities in the future,” kids, they don’t have really the whole experience to see this play out. It takes a certain amount of foresight that kids just generally don’t have.

Why kids need immediate incentives and consequences

Justin Skycak (00:00) So the role of the teacher is to make sure that the kids are actually learning the material. And one way to ensure that kids don’t master the material is to not set up an incentive for mastering the material. Not just a couple of weeks we’ll have an exam and you need to be prepared for it incentive. Kids aren’t going to take it seriously until it’s imminent. And kid imminent is a lot shorter than adult imminent. Adult imminent is like a few weeks in the future. Kid imminent is like, If tomorrow can go by and my not doing something today doesn’t really matter the outcomes of tomorrow, then guess what? I’m not going to do it.

Homework has to be graded

Justin Skycak (00:00) Homework has to be graded. And not just checked for accuracy, but also factored into the grade to some amount. Now, obviously not as much as tests and quizzes. But there has to be some incentive for the kids to actually do what they’re supposed to do every step of the way. If you don’t collect it, you don’t check it, it’s not going to get done. And if you don’t check it for accuracy, it’s not going to get done correctly.

Students fall off the rails without immediate accountability

Justin Skycak (00:00) Homework has to be graded. If you don’t collect it, you don’t check it, it’s not going to get done. And if you don’t check it for it’s not going to get done correctly. You ever hear that saying practice makes permanent? If students are just doing the same misconceptions over and over because they don’t care about whether they’re actually getting it right or not, they’re just, how can I just write something in the fastest way possible so I can get back to video games or hanging out with my friends or whatever else I’d rather be doing. The incentive has to be there and it has to be tight, where if they’re not doing what they’re supposed to there’s going to be a penalty right away. if they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, there’s got to be a reward right away. That’s how you keep things on the rails.

Calculations before proofs

Justin Skycak (00:00) When I took linear college, it was embedded in abstract and it was mostly proofs. And it was way harder than it needed to be. You can’t skip intuition and go straight to abstraction. Students need to compute first. Row echelon form, eigenvalues, eigenvectors. This stuff should be instinctive, and then the proofs aren’t scary anymore. Once you understand the objects concretely, the proof is just the next step.

Grades don't mean they know math

Justin Skycak (00:00) A lot of homework now. It’s not graded for correctness. It’s just graded for whether it was even uploaded. A student can write down complete nonsense and then submit it to Canvas still get full credit. And everyone thinks things are fine because the grade looks fine. And then they get to college, and it is revealed that they’re missing fractions, exponents, order of operations, middle school math, sometimes even elementary school math. Because that’s what happens grades stop measuring learning.

Coding makes math click

Justin Skycak (00:00) A lot of people don’t really care about learning math in school. But then they get into coding, and they realize. Wait a second, if I knew more math I could build so much more. And that connection should happen way earlier. Imagine graduating high school knowing not just calculus, but also multivariable algebra, differential equations, all with coding applications. Now you’re not just doing toy projects. You can walk into college ready for research, internships, and serious technical work. Math becomes capability.

Projects don't replace skills

Justin Skycak (00:00) Project-based learning can go way too far. Projects are built on skills. And if students don’t have the skills, the project doesn’t magically teach them efficiently. It just becomes slow and confusing. You need the foundation first. The same in math, coding, research, anything really. Meaningful, fulfilling, and exciting work comes after a lot of reps, and you don’t get to skip the skill building stage. Because that stage is what makes the interesting projects even possible.

Calculus is not the finish line

Justin Skycak (00:00) A lot of people think calculus is the end of math. And it’s not, it’s not even close. After calculus, there’s linear algebra, there’s multivariable differential equations, probability, statistics. Then all the specialized courses after that. There are more university math classes above calculus than there are high school math classes below calculus. So getting to calculus early, that doesn’t mean you’re done. It just means you finally to start.

Differential equations is taught so badly

Justin Skycak (00:00) Differential equations. It’s one of the worst taught math courses because the subject has all these branch points. I mean there’s a trunk at the beginning where you do linear differential equations, then second order equations with characteristic polynomials. But then, suddenly…The instructor just goes to their favorite research area. So depending on who teaches the course, students get a totally different idea about what the subject even is. A core math course should not feel like a random tour of the professor’s interests.

Parents only want three things and it’s impossible

Justin Skycak (00:00) A lot of parents want three things at once: They want their kid to get amazing grades, they want their kid to learn a lot, and they want their kid to not have to do too much work. And that doesn’t work. Kids don’t learn unless they put in a real amount of work. But when the grade drops, parents often just start lobbying. Email the teacher, the principal, push the school, and over time that lowers standards. School’s not supposed to be grade negotiation. It’s supposed to be skill acquisition.

The most gifted kids still need pushing

Justin Skycak (00:00) The most mathematically gifted student ever worked actually resistant to learning calculus. He was already way ahead. He liked puzzles. He liked math that felt interesting, which really often just meant familiar. But eventually he just wasn’t really progressing. You see, there are levels of math that you have to climb in order to unlock the next thing. And kids don’t always see the long game, so adults have to see it for them. And so this kid, once his parents and I pushed him to learn calculus, he ended up loving it. And now he’s doing serious math using ideas from this area that he originally resisted. You know, sometimes a push is what opens the door.

Most math major math is taught backwards

Justin Skycak (00:00) When you’re a math major in undergrad and you get up into the junior and senior level courses - real analysis, abstract algebra, topology - you start to realize that a lot of this stuff is really taught backwards. Theorem, proof, theorem, proof. But you don’t really have a concrete grasp of what’s even going on. You’re just pushing symbols around. Maybe you can follow the rules, but you don’t really understand the subject. That’s because you need the concrete examples first. You gotta work through computations and then do the abstraction. Skipping the concrete stage doesn’t make the course rigorous. It just makes it inefficient.

Homework should be checked

Justin Skycak (00:00) A lot of students aren’t actually getting feedback. They submit the homework and the grade is basically, did you upload it? Not, is it correct? And that’s a huge problem because students can be over and over again and still think they’re doing just fine. And math doesn’t work that way. You need reps, you need correction, you need to know what you got wrong. Otherwise, you’re just accumulating knowledge gaps.

The SAT was measuring something real

Justin Skycak (00:00) For more than two decades, UCSD’s math department found that the best predictor for math placement was a student’s SAT math score. And ACT was just as good. But not high school grades. And then a whole bunch of colleges and universities removed those signals - the test scores - right after massive learning loss, grades getting inflated. And now students show up with strong transcripts, but missing basic math: fractions, exponents, order of operations. That’s not a mystery. Everyone just stopped measuring the thing that they needed to measure.

ROUND 2

Middle school math is the biggest waste

Justin Skycak (00:00) The worst part of K-12 math is sixth through eighth grade. Kids learn arithmetic in elementary school and then spend three years spinning their wheels before Algebra 1 in 9th grade. That is such a waste. If you actually use those years well, you teach efficiently, you require mastery, and you move kids forward when they’re ready, honors students can be finishing all of high school math by the end of eighth grade. Not by doing extra math, just by not wasting three years.

The most hard-hitting two sentences in all of talent development research

Justin Skycak (00:00) The most hard-hitting two sentences in all

talent development research: Deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance.

That’s according to K. Anders Ericsson, one of the most influential researchers in the field of human expertise and performance.

In other words, maximal learning does not happen naturally as a result of maximizing other things like enjoyment, comfort, convenience, and ease of practice. In fact, maximal learning is at odds with some of these things.

Must read: Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom

Justin Skycak (00:00) Every young person and every older person who has young people in their life needs to read this book: Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom.

That’s the same Bloom as Bloom’s 2 sigma problem, Bloom’s taxonomy,

This guy is one of the most influential scientists in the history of education.

Everyone seems to have their own opinion about how talented people become talented and what roles working hard, working smart, and getting lucky play in the process. But Bloom being a scientist, he didn’t want to settle for some subjective opinions. He wanted to formulate conclusions based on real data. So Bloom studied the training backgrounds of 120 world-class talented individuals across 6 talent domains: piano, sculpting, swimming, tennis, math, and neurology. And what he discovered

was that talent development occurs through a similar general process, no matter what domain. In other words, loosely speaking, there is a formula for developing talent, though, of course, executing it is a lot harder than simply understanding it.

What’s great about this book is the level of detail presented. This is not one of those corny pamphlets where somebody tells you about their three keys to success framework, and all the information is obvious.

and too abstracted to be useful. Each chapter covers a different talent domain and goes into extreme depth,

making heavy use of direct quotes from the interviews with world-class individuals and their parents.

Instead of handing you some kind of abstract framework and expecting you to accept it at face value, the book walks you through the process of starting with first principles, detailed interviews and backstories, and zooming out to identify the general trends. You go from microstructure to macrostructure.

The big conclusion is that talent development occurs through a similar general process, no matter what the domain. First, fun and exciting playtime, then intense and strenuous skill development, and then finally, developing one’s individual style

while pushing the boundaries of the field. It’s an older book, so you can get a used copy relatively cheap.

The worst segment of the K-12 mediocrity is 6th-8th grade math

Justin Skycak (00:00) The worst segment of the K-12 mediocrity is sixth through eighth grade math. Typically kids learn counting and arithmetic in elementary school - grades K through five - and spend the next

three full years spinning their wheels without learning much new math, only moving on to Algebra 1 in 9th grade. If you just take those three years and you put them to good use,

just avoid wasting kids’ time,

teach them efficiently,

make them master the material,

and move them on to new material once they’ve mastered the prerequisites, you can actually enable gifted kids to cover all of high school math during those years and pass the AP Calc BC exam by the end of 8th grade

without spending any extra time doing math.

Just do the frickin' work

Justin Skycak (00:00) Just do the fricking work. If you want to develop serious skills, you have to engage in intense taxing workouts.

Amateurs sometimes make up all sorts of excuses for why this rule doesn’t apply to them, but real pros don’t try to weasel their way out of the hard work.

You think you’re too good for the grunt work?

Too smart to listen to your coaches feedback? Then what are you waiting for? Go on, succeed all by yourself in your current state. Either prove your inherent greatness or fall and get your ass handed to you enough times to knock some humility into your head.

At the end of the day, can either waste your time debating your coach on the training regimen or you can actually use that time to put your head down and do some freaking work.

Do you want to turn into a pro or do you want to stay tethered to amateur level the rest of your life? It’s your choice. If you want outsized results, then you’re going to have to put in an outsized amount of work. Achievement, expertise, greatness, whatever the hell you want to call it. It

doesn’t happen naturally.

It’s about transforming yourself from normal to abnormal in ways that confer a competitive advantage. There’s nothing natural about it.

Your goal is not to prove you're smart, it's to make problems go away

Justin Skycak (00:00) Your goal is not to prove that you’re smart. It’s to make problems go away.

Yeah, the more knowledgeable you are, the better you are equipped to solve problems. But if your primary focus is peacocking your intellect, then

you’re gonna create problems instead of making them go away. You don’t get points for creating an unnecessary problem on which to demonstrate your smarts.

You don’t get points for creating an overcomplicated solution to a simple problem. You lose points for these things. What you get points for is taking a problem and making it go poof.

completely solved, easy to maintain, nobody has to think about it anymore.

Your mathematical potential has a limit, but it's likely higher than you think

Justin Skycak (00:00) Your mathematical potential has a limit, likely higher than you Most people can learn basic math like arithmetic and some algebra, but beyond that, higher levels of math become increasingly abstract and technical, and fewer people have the cognitive resources to learn it quickly enough to make a career out of it, much less get to that point relatively early in their lives. But at the same time, few people actually reach their full mathematical potential because they get knocked off course early by factors like

missing foundations, ineffective practice habits, inability or unwillingness to engage in additional practice when needed, or lack of motivation.

Effective people maintain a gigantic locus of control and bias towards internalizing blame

Justin Skycak (00:00) The most effective people I’ve met, they all maintain a gigantic locus of control and bias towards internalizing blame.

Whenever something doesn’t go their way, they deeply analyze the circumstances to identify what they should have done differently. Or even if they acted appropriately based on all the information available, how could they have gotten more information or taken intermediate actions to extract more signal to inform later bigger actions?

They don’t dwell. don’t make excuses. They just learn and apply that learning to the future so they don’t make the same mistake twice.

You need to practice retrieving information from long-term memory

Justin Skycak (00:00) You ever have that experience of being unable to remember something despite repeated exposures because you kept automatically looking it up from a reference instead of trying to retrieve it from memory? happened to me an embarrassing number of times with addresses, phone numbers, directions, you name it.

And any books you read, any movies you watch, the only ones you remember in proper detail are the ones that you periodically think about and replay in your head. If you just consume and you don’t reproduce the information, then you just forget it almost entirely.

Retrieval is the act of pulling information from long-term memory into working memory.

That’s what increases your ability to remember and use the information. Each time you successfully recall a fuzzy memory, it stays intact longer before getting fuzzy again. Each time you successfully recall a memory with less priming, its recall becomes less dependent on priming in the future. But if you don’t practice retrieval, then this doesn’t happen. The information just quickly dissipates. It stays with you briefly, just long enough to trick you into thinking that it’ll stick with you

when it’s really on the way out the door.

But of course, you don’t notice that it’s gone if you’re not actually testing whether it’s there.

The most generalizable skill is climbing hierarchical skill trees

Justin Skycak (00:00) The most generalizable skill out there is probably learning how to climb skill trees, and in particular ones that are relentlessly hierarchical.

Of course, you can’t acquire that general skill without practicing it on particulars. You gotta lean into specific domains and acquire measurable demonstrable skills. But once you see it, once you get a feeling for the process, you see it everywhere.

Individual learning styles are a myth

Justin Skycak (00:00) There is a common myth that goes like this: Everybody has the same cognitive horsepower and learns at the same rate, but different people learn differently depending on their preferred learning style.

In reality, the exact opposite is true. Different people generally have different working

and they learn at different rates. And while people may have preferred learning styles, like visual or verbal whatever, they don’t actually learn better when given information in their preferred style.

The style needs to be matched to the content, not the person.

The myth is that different people need the same amount of practice, but in different forms. But the reality is that different people need the same form of practice, but in different amounts.

Always play the long game

Justin Skycak (00:00) Always, always, always play the long game. Nothing really matters unless it matters in the long term.

The short game is just a trap,

and no matter how big you win it, it will leave you feeling empty at the end.

Lots of people in education disagree with the premise of maximizing learning

Justin Skycak (00:00) Took me too long to realize that many educational debates

aren’t really about the effectiveness of various learning strategies. They’re about whether education should even begin with the premise of maximizing learning.

A shocking number of people would prefer education to maximize other things like fun and entertainment while as a secondary concern

meeting some low bar for shallowly learning some surface level basic skills.

You can make serious progress climbing any skill tree if you just put in 30 minutes of focused effort every day

Justin Skycak (00:00) It’s just amazing how many people will rationalize avoiding skill development on the grounds of something like, nah, bro, I’d rather have a life. Here’s the thing. You can make serious progress climbing pretty much any skill tree if you just put in 30 minutes of focused effort every day.

But it has to be fully focused, a full-assed effort, and you have to be continually upping that level of challenge as your capabilities increase.

Effective learning feels harder than ineffective learning

Justin Skycak (00:00) A well-known finding in education research is that the perception of learning is often at odds with actual, measurable learning.

When using effective learning perform better on assessments, but they may feel like they’ve learned less. Why is that? It’s because effective strategies increase cognitive activation, enhancing learning despite students feeling that it’s harder. It’s like weightlifting. The strongest people lift weights heavy enough to make them feel weak.

It’s true in the gym, it’s true in the classroom, it’s true in every skill domain.

Bloom's 3 Stages of Talent Development

Justin Skycak (00:00) The journey to developing a high level of talent can be divided into three stages. That’s what Benjamin Bloom discovered while studying the training backgrounds of 120 individuals across six talent domains: piano, sculpting, swimming, tennis, math, and neurology.

Talent development occurs through a similar general process no matter what talent domain. There’s stage 1: fun and exciting playtime, where students are just starting to develop awareness and interest in the talent domain.

The teacher provides copious positive feedback and encourages students to explore whatever aspects of the talent domain they might find most exciting.

Students are rewarded for effort rather than for achievement, and criticism is rare.

Then there’s stage 2: intense and strenuous skill development. Students are fully committed to increasing their performance. The teacher becomes or is replaced by a coach, focuses on training exercises where the sole purpose is to improve performance. These exercises are demanding and the coach provides constructive criticism to help the student perform the exercises properly.

Positive feedback is provided in response to achievement and effort is assumed.

Finally, there’s stage 3: developing one’s individual style while pushing the boundaries of the field.

At this point, students are proficient in all the foundational skills in the talent domain. And they are so committed that they center their entire lives around the talent domain, no matter the sacrifice. And they typically work with a world-class expert in the talent domain.

The expert helps the student identify and lean into their individual strengths so that they can excel beyond perceived human capabilities.

You need to practice retrieving information to transfer it to long-term memory

Justin Skycak (00:00) What’s the thing that transfers information into long-term memory? Retrieving from memory. When you take notes, you know what you’re not doing? Retrieving from memory. When you take great notes and you constantly refer back to them, you know what you’re still not doing? Retrieving from memory. Retrieval is the specific action of pulling information from one part of your brain, long-term memory, to another part of your brain, working memory. It’s like your brain is lifting a weight.

off the ground of long-term memory and raising it up into working memory.

If you load information into working memory by looking at a reference material, instead of pulling information from long-term memory, then you’re not strengthening your retention. It’s like you’re going to the gym to lift weights, but you’re just going through the motions and you’re letting the spotter lift the weight for you. No strength is being developed.

This leads to a vicious cycle of forgetting. You take notes because you can’t remember things. You can’t remember things because you’re not transferring them into long-term memory. You’re not transferring them into long-term memory because you’re not practicing retrieving them from memory.

and you’re not retrieving them from memory because you’re always looking back at your damn notes.

If you fall into this vicious cycle of forgetting, it will completely rip apart your whole learning process.

The reference material becomes a crutch and you’re lost without it. You miss out on making connections and understanding things deeply. You can’t connect the dots because you don’t actually have the dots in your head.

Sure, they’re in your notes, but not your knowledge base. And you can’t cook with ingredients you don’t have.

You learn slower, you forget faster, and eventually you just grind to a halt.

And you might think it’s because you’re not doing enough review really it’s because you’re not doing those review problems properly, pulling information from memory.

Ability is built, not unlocked

Justin Skycak (00:00) Too many people waste their time searching for a magical motivational unlock that’s going to bring about a transition in their ability.

Don’t bother, doesn’t exist. Ability is built, not unlocked. You do not have a latent superpower that can be unlocked in a day. You gotta build up a skillset. You build it up high enough and then other people think it’s a superpower you always had.

If you're struggling with discipline, try getting some work done first thing in the morning

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you’re struggling with discipline, try getting some work done first thing in the morning, before you eat, before you shower, before anything.

Getting some work done is your meal and shower ticket. The longer you go in your day being lazy, the harder it is to get yourself to break out of this laziness and put forth some effort. But if you start your day off with some momentum, then that momentum can help carry you through the rest of a productive day.

Passing a class does not mean you've mastered the material

Justin Skycak (00:00) It is absolutely shocking how many people think that passing a class at school implies having learned all of the material in proper depth.

That’s just so false.

I mean, just think about it.

Are students made to a bar for mastery on every single one of the hundreds of granular topics covered in a course?

Nuh-uh.

A student can typically pass a course despite not having mastered a ton of material.

even a student who gets an A may have only mastered 90 % of the material in the course.

Well, less actually, if some of that grade comes from participation.

And to top it all off, the course might not even be comprehensive. It might not even cover all the topics that ought to be included in a proper treatment of the subject.

Even in the topics that it does cover, learning tasks might be cherry-picked or watered down to be artificially easy or otherwise not truly representative of what needs to be learned.

Kicking the can down the road in education

Justin Skycak (00:00) This is how kicking the can down the road happens in education.

It starts with students passing a course without demonstrating sufficient mastery of the material.

In the next course, instructor discovers that these students are struggling to learn the material due to missing foundational knowledge.

The only true remedy in this situation is to hold the students accountable for learning all the material in the course, including the prerequisite material that they’re missing.

But this requires the instructor to work overtime and support the students with remedial assignments and help sessions.

And it’s not just the instructor. I mean, the students also have to work overtime to pay off their learning debt,

which leads to tension when the instructor has to hold the line on what it means to pass the course.

So what usually ends up happening instead is that everyone turns a blind eye and kicks the can further down the road.

Instructor just gives the usual lectures and assignments, then curves or otherwise inflates the grades, and students go along with it, and the problem is left for the next instructor to deal with or not deal with.

The hard truth about educational products

Justin Skycak (00:00) It’s a hard truth that if you want to build a serious educational product, you can’t be afraid to charge money for it.

You can’t back yourself into a corner where you depend on a massive user base.

Why?

The reason why not is that most people are just not serious about learning.

And if you depend on a massive user base of unserious learners,

then you have to employ ineffective learning strategies that don’t repel unserious students.

Which makes your product suck.

ROUND 1

Prelearning math sets you on a virtuous cycle of opportunities

Justin Skycak (00:00) The greatest educational life hack is learning math ahead of time. Why learn math ahead of time? Because it guards you against numerous academic risks and it opens up all kinds of doors to career opportunities.

When you pre-learn the material in a math course before taking it at school or college, You guard yourself against all sorts of risks, such as the course moving too quickly, explaining things poorly, assuming knowledge of

prerequisite material,

goes on and on.

That’s especially true at university when lectures are often unsuitable for first introduction to a topic. But if you pre-learn the material, then you’re not depending on the teacher to teach it to you, which means you’re immune to even the worst teaching.

Of course, the natural objection is, won’t you be bored in class? But here’s the thing, if you do super well in advanced classes, especially at university, then that opens all kinds of doors to recommendations for internships, projects with professors, and so on.

Basically, you can use pre-learning to kick off a virtuous cycle. Even if you aren’t a genius, you appear to be one in everyone else’s eyes, and consequently, you get a ticket to those opportunities reserved for top students.

Students who receive and capitalize on these opportunities can launch themselves into some of the most interesting, meaningful, and lucrative careers that are notoriously difficult to break into.

There is so much more math after calculus to learn

Justin Skycak (00:00) Many people think that calculus is the end of the road for math and that it doesn’t matter if you get there many years ahead of schedule. But that is so far from the truth.

There are even more university math courses above calculus than there are high school courses below calculus. is not even halfway.

After a single variable calculus course like AP Calc BC, most serious students who study quantitative majors like math, physics, engineering, and economics have to take core engineering math courses, including linear algebra, multivariable calculus, differential equations, and probability and statistics.

Different majors include plenty of specialized courses that branch off in different ways.

There are so many courses that a student could not fit them all into the standard four-year undergrad course load, even if they overloaded their schedule every year.

However, the more of these courses a student is able to take, the more academic opportunities and career opportunities are open to them in the future.

And while it’s true that students don’t need to know much beyond algebra to get a job in fields like computer science or medicine,

The people in those fields who do also know advanced math are extra valuable and in demand because they can combine domain expertise and math.

Competition math has little ROI for most mathematically gifted students

Justin Skycak (00:00) When a middle or high school teacher has a bright math student, and the teacher directs them towards competition math, it’s usually not because that’s the best option for the student. Rather, it’s the best option for the teacher. It gives the student something to do while creating minimal additional work for the teacher.

Competition math problems generally don’t require students to learn new fields of math. Rather, the difficulty comes from students needing to find clever tricks and insights to arrive at solutions using the mathematical tools that they’ve already learned.

But if you look at the kinds of math that most quantitative professionals like rocket scientists and machine learning researchers use on a daily basis, those competition math tricks show up rarely, if ever. What does show up everywhere is university math level subjects like linear algebra, multivariable calculus, differential equations, and calculus-based probability and statistics.

So given that most students who enjoy math end up applying math in some other field as opposed to becoming pure mathematicians,

it would be a lot more productive for them to get a broad view of math as early as possible

so that they can sooner apply it to projects in their fields of interest.

Mathematical acceleration is developmentally appropriate for students who have learned the prerequisites

Justin Skycak (00:00) Many people think that learning math early is not appropriate for students’ social emotional, academic development.

But the reality is that educational acceleration does not lead to adverse psychological consequences in capable students. According to a study titled “Academic Acceleration in Gifted Youth and Fruitless Concerns Regarding Psychological Well-Being:

a 35-year longitudinal study,”

“there is little evidence that academic acceleration has negative consequences on the psychological well-being of intellectually talented youth.

Those who were accelerated had few regrets for doing so. Indeed, if anything, tended to wish that they had accelerated more.”

The takeaway is that whether a student is ready for advanced math depends solely on whether they have mastered the prerequisites. If a student has mastered the prerequisites, then it is appropriate for them to continue learning advanced math early and not appropriate to stunt their development by holding them back.

Educational acceleration allows you to win the race against time

Justin Skycak (00:00) Here’s the thing that many people don’t understand about educational acceleration. At the core, it’s not really a race against your peers. It’s a race against time.

When somebody gives up on their dream or gives up on figuring out what that dream is, it’s typically the result of time closing in on them. No matter how many times you claim you’ll never settle,

it doesn’t prevent the time from passing, and it doesn’t prevent you from increasingly desiring things that only a stable life can provide.

The further time gets ahead of you, the more likely you are to settle into a life that is fine, or even good. But deep down, you just can’t shake the feeling that it’s less than something more you could have found if you had more time.

Educational acceleration is about winning that race against time.

It’s about opening doors early and running down avenues that you might be interested in exploring.

That’s why learning advanced math ahead of time is the greatest educational life hack for any student interested in a science, tech, or engineering career. It helps you find your place in the world before time closes in on you and forces you to settle for something else.

Accelerating mathematically talented students is inconvenient for schools

Justin Skycak (00:00) Why do so many people think that academic acceleration is developmentally inappropriate, given all the research to the contrary? Well, it becomes pretty clear if you look at the incentives.

Acceleration requires extra work, but people typically don’t like to do extra work, so they will gladly rationalize that the extra work wouldn’t have really helped them anyway, even if that rationale is incorrect.

Now you might ask, What about

If accelerating their capable students will lead to beneficial outcomes, wouldn’t they be pushing it or at least not discouraging it? The problem is that acceleration is also very inconvenient to schools.

In schools, each grade typically progresses through the math curriculum in lockstep, which means that accelerated students would need to be placed in above-grade courses, and this can lead to major logistical challenges.

When your ego makes you uncoachable

Justin Skycak (00:00) A common thing that keeps mathy people from actually learning math is having an ego that’s too damn big.

It’s like a basketball hobbyist who shows off at pickup games at the park, thinks they’re the star of the show, signs up for private coaching with an ex-NBA player, and thinks they know better than the coach. And consequently, they’re uncoachable.

Learning ennui

Justin Skycak (00:00) You know how if you spend the whole day sitting on the couch watching TV, you get kind of restless, but somehow also too tired to get off your butt?

Like you’re tired of doing nothing, yet you’re also tired from doing nothing. You know what I’m talking about, that state of blah. Well, that also happens with learning. If you binge a bunch of lecture videos, documentaries, textbooks, whatever, without actively working exercises, solving problems, building stuff, then you’re gonna fall into that same state of blah.

You are consuming too much and producing too little.

Satisfaction comes from pulling through and achieving something that you know took real work, something that you really earned. If you don’t go for something that takes real work, you just waste away in a state of blah. The blah is a

The only way out of the blah is to start actively doing things that require you to put in work.

your problem isn’t about being tired. It’s about being unsatisfied.

And I know, I know, it’s tough because the satisfaction only starts appearing after you put in some work. But if you muscle through and accomplish something that took real work, even if it’s the tiniest thing, you will start to feel the blah and you’ll find some motivation

to accomplish incrementally bigger things.

You keep doing this and before you know it, you’re out of the blah. You’re doing stuff, you’re earning satisfaction. And by the end of the day, you feel tired, but in a good way, where you can actually feel yourself absorbing rest and recharging your battery for more action and satisfaction the next day.

Channel your anger into productivity

Justin Skycak (00:00) One of the greatest meta skills in life is learning to channel anger. Anger can be an incredible source of motivation. When it consumes your focus, you can channel that into positive action. But if you don’t channel it into something productive,

It can consume your entire life to no end at all. You can stew an anger for hours, days, even weeks at a time. And we all know people who do.

You can lose years of your life that way.

Some mathematicians wear the inaccessibility of their work as a badge of honor

Justin Skycak (00:00) In college, I did some work under a math professor who told me, with a sigh, that some of his peers, other mathematicians, that is,

considered it cool to publish papers that were hard to follow. Like, the more time and scratch work and mental energy it takes to understand your work, the cooler you are.

I’m not suggesting that research papers be held to the same pedagogical standard as courses, but it’s something that stuck with me as a mentality to avoid.

Personalized learning dramatically accelerates student progress

Justin Skycak (00:00) When you let students move at their own pace, some will take off flying faster than you could ever imagine.

many students can learn calculus in middle school

if they are given individualized learning tasks and allowed to progress as soon as they’ve mastered the prerequisites.

All you have to do is let them sprint independently on a paved road instead of chaining them up to their classmates and making everybody trudge through mud in lockstep.

High expectations can only be met with a rigorous learning experience

Justin Skycak (00:00) When students aren’t expected to climb a sky-high skill tree, you can get away with putting fun front and center

while checking the box on a few basic skills as a byproduct.

If every student in gym class were expected to do a backflip by the end of the year, the instructional approach would have to change. But nobody expects that. Playing kickball works fine. In math, however, students are expected to climb a sky-high skill tree.

Every student takes many, many years of math courses, increasing in difficulty, continually stacking more advanced skills on top of previous ones.

So when students do the mathematical equivalent of playing kickball during class and then are expected to do the mathematical equivalent of a backflip at the end of the year, it’s pretty easy to see how struggle and general negative feelings can arise.

How to do a ton of intense work

Justin Skycak (00:00) It’s a lot easier to put forth a massive volume of intense work when you 1) love what you do, 2) are heavily incentivized to do it, 3) you know that you’re learning a that you’re continuing to skill up at a rapid pace, and 4) you have

so much and such a high diversity of work to do that you can take a break from one thing

by working on another task that is very different in nature.

Max-efficiency learning in a nutshell

Justin Skycak (00:00) In a nutshell, this is how max efficiency learning works: 1) you solve progressively more challenging problems that are bite size, given your level of prerequisite knowledge. 2)

Implicit spaced repetition credit trickles down to component skills that you’re practicing implicitly.

and 3)

You choose new learning tasks along your knowledge frontier that knock out all of your due reviews

while minimizing the amount of explicit review. All of the required review you’re trying to knock out implicitly.

Standard milestones are based on an unserious approach to work

Justin Skycak (00:00) A grade level’s worth of learning can be compressed much, much shorter than a year if you just avoid wasting time. And once you see this in academics, you see this everywhere in life. Standard milestones are based on what anyone can accomplish with a high volume of unserious, inefficient work. Why? Because that’s the standard approach to work. Show up, mess around, waste time, do the bare minimum, run out the clock, rinse and repeat every weekday.

But if you just take things seriously, work efficiently, and put in the same volume, you can take off flying.

It’s the biggest edge: actually giving a shit.

But in order to capitalize on this edge, you have to get into a line of work where outsized results reap outsized reward. Not every line of work is like this.

Most people don't train seriously

Justin Skycak (00:00) If you are willing to train seriously to achieve a goal, don’t let yourself get faked out and discouraged by how long it takes people who don’t take their training seriously.

This is especially true in academics where standard grade level learning paces are based on unserious, inefficient training.

A grade level’s worth of learning can be compressed much, much shorter than a year if you avoid wasting time.

One group work problem is not a brain workout

Justin Skycak (00:00) Sometimes people think it’s enough to have a class as a whole discuss and solve a single problem over the whole duration of the period.

That’s not enough. That’s like going to the gym with your friends, having everybody crowd around a single standard weight dumbbell, lift it together for one rep, and then put it down, leave, and call it a workout.

Satisfaction is earned by doing real work

Justin Skycak (00:00) Satisfaction comes from pulling through and achieving something that you know took real work, something that you really earned. If you don’t go for something that takes real work, you just waste away in a state of blah. The blah is a

The only way out of the blah is to start actively doing things that require you to put in work.

your problem isn’t about being tired. It’s about being unsatisfied.

And I know, I know, it’s tough because a brief period of time when you switch from doing nothing to doing something when it feels like you’re just getting more tired. and more blah. But if you muscle through and accomplish something that took real work, even if it’s the tiniest thing, you will start to feel the blah and you’ll find some motivation

to accomplish incrementally bigger things.

You keep doing this and before you know it, you’re out of the blah. You’re doing stuff, you’re earning satisfaction. And by the end of the day, you feel tired, but in a good way, where you can actually feel yourself absorbing rest and recharging your battery for more action and satisfaction the next day.

Learning requires you to produce, not just consume

Justin Skycak (00:00) You know how if you spend the whole day sitting on the couch watching TV, you get kind of restless, but somehow also too tired to get off your butt?

Like you’re tired of doing nothing, yet you’re also tired from doing nothing. You know what I’m talking about, that state of blah. Well, that also happens with learning. If you binge a bunch of lecture videos, documentaries, textbooks, whatever, without actively working exercises, solving problems, building stuff, then you’re gonna fall into that same state of blah.

You are consuming too much and producing too little.

Producing is where learning happens. Consuming is only helpful insofar as it enables you to produce.

Your problem isn't about being tired; it's about being unsatisfied

Justin Skycak (00:00) your problem isn’t about being tired. It’s about being unsatisfied.

And I know, I know, it’s tough because the satisfaction only starts appearing after you put in some work. There’s a brief period of time when you switch from doing nothing to doing something it feels like you’re just getting more tired. But if you muscle through and accomplish something that took real work, even if it’s the tiniest thing, you’ll find some motivation

to accomplish incrementally bigger things.

You keep doing this and before you know it, you’re earning satisfaction. And by the end of the day, you feel tired, but in a good way, where you can actually feel yourself absorbing rest and recharging your battery for more action and satisfaction the next day.

Interleaving topics is counterintuitive but highly effective for learning

Justin Skycak (00:00) Effective learning strategies sometimes go against our human instincts about conversation.

During a conversation, people generally want to focus on a single thought and explore it to the fullest extent and completely finish the thought before moving on to other things. We converse depth first.

But effective learning strategies like interleaving and spaced repetition are all about stopping the flow of thought, doing other things for a while, and then coming back to remember the flow of thought just before you’ve forgotten it.

breadth first, not depth first.

Now granted, when you’re creating content for a course, it’s easiest to proceed in the form of a story and close the loop each time before moving on and opening another loop.

That’s how to create good content, but it’s not how the content should be presented.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that learners should be switching to a different topic every other minute while first learning the material. That would be excessive.

What I’m saying is, imagine taking the usual week-long or month-long units that a traditional classroom marches through and chopping those up into mini-segments that are cohesive, yet scoped down to 10 or 20 minutes and interleaving through those segments. A 60-minute class period would cover about 15 minutes across each of those four different units.

That’s been our approach at Math Academy. Students work through one full topic at a time. The topics are bite-size, atomic, and consist of about three to four knowledge points of increasing difficulty, each knowledge point consisting of about two to five practice questions, depending on a student’s performance. Students go through these individual topics one at a time, but the individual learning paths through future topics are interleaved.

Richard Feynman admitted that his classes failed to teach 90% of students

Justin Skycak (00:00) According to Richard Feynman himself, his classes were a failure

for 90 % of his students.

In his lectures, he did a phenomenal job of appealing to intuition and conceptual thinking and making complex physics feel simple and accessible without getting too deep into the math. But on the flip side, however, when it came time to solve actual problems on exams, Feynman’s students failed.

He wrote, I quote,

When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on their examinations, I think that the system is a failure.

These are Feynman’s own words.

some may view the Feynman-style pedagogy as supporting inclusive learning for all students across varying levels of ability, Feynman himself acknowledged that his methods only worked for the top 10 % of his students.

Now, it’s worth noting Feynman taught at Caltech, which is one of the most selective universities in the world, possibly the most STEM-focused university in the world,

The top 10 % of Feynman’s students were well above the top 1 % of students in general.

So, for the other 99 % of students, what method of learning does work? Well, what works is starting out with a minimal dose of explanation

in which intuition and conceptual thinking do have a place, but then immediately switching over to active problem

During the active problem solving, students should begin with simple cases, but then climb the ladder of difficulty to cover

the cases that the student could reasonably be expected to demonstrate their knowledge of on an assessment.

Teacher credentialing programs focus on political ideology over the science of learning

Justin Skycak (00:00) Speaking as somebody who had to suffer through a teacher credentialing program, it’s actually an anti-signal when somebody references their teaching as a qualification to speak about how learning happens. It’s typically centered around political ideology rather than the science of learning.

You see, there exist learning strategies that have been scientifically shown to improve student learning, such as mastery learning, spaced repetition, retrieval practice, and interleaving.

these learning strategies have been researched extensively since the early to mid 1900s, with key findings being successfully reproduced over and over again

Yet when I completed my teaching credential from 2020 to 21 and attended numerous professional developments from 2019 to 23,

Not once did I hear any mention of these learning strategies. Instead, the focus was 100 % on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

anti-racism training, sharing circle training, and even a presentation on the gender unicorn complete with an extraordinary complex gender classification flow chart. I mean, forget the science of learning, even the most obvious practical skills that a teacher would need to exercise on a daily basis, such as managing a rowdy classroom communicating with parents holding students accountable for their dealing with academic dishonesty, none of these were covered at all.

there was no shortage of time to cover them.

It’s just that that time was devoted towards pointless activities.

I also wish that my experience with teacher credentialing was an edge case, some kind of dysfunction that wasn’t widespread. But if you look at the curricula of standard teacher credentialing programs within well-reputed universities, find the same phenomenon.

The curricula are focused entirely on making education engaging, diverse, and unbiased, and there’s little to nothing about the science of learning.

Like workouts, the best study sessions are short and frequent

Justin Skycak (00:00) The best study sessions are short and frequent as opposed to long and sparse.

For instance, suppose you’re budgeting three hours per week to learn math. If circumstances allow, it would be much better to study 30 minutes, six days a week

as opposed to 90 minutes twice a week. And here are several reasons why.

First, you want to form a habit. The more consistently you study math, the more it will become a habit that you naturally do each day without thinking.

The habit is what will carry you through the long game once the initial adrenaline wears off.

Second, you want to operate at peak productivity during your session. It’s easy to maintain high levels of focus and intensity throughout a short 30-minute session, but during a long 90-minute session, you become significantly less productive as fatigue sets in.

And third, you want to minimize the amount that you forget between sessions.

However, there are some caveats to consider. First of all, whenever you switch to a new activity, it can take a few minutes for your brain to spin up on the new context. And if you make your sessions too short,

then the proportion of study time that’s wasted on context switching will outweigh all the other benefits of daily practice. So while it’s good to spread out your practice, each session should be long enough that context switching cost is proportionally negligible.

Additionally, if you have a hectic schedule and six days per week in theory ends up being just three days per week, then you need longer sessions just to achieve the same volume of practice. think of it like working out. 30 minutes, six days per week. That’s no problem. Easy.

45 minutes, four days per week, 60 minutes, three times a week. I mean, it takes more discipline, but it’s doable. 90 minutes, twice a week

of high intensity workout? damn, it’s gonna feel like a grind with slow progress, and you’re gonna be constantly skip workouts.

PEMDAS follows what you would do naturally

Justin Skycak (00:00) Why is the order of operations the way that it is,

where multiplication takes precedence over addition?

the following explanation feels so intuitive to me that I’d be shocked if there were a different reason.

When you use multiplication and addition

For simple real life applications,

you’re typically trying to find the total of some number of this and some number of that.

For instance, say you buy two 3-kg bags of rice and four 5-kg bags of wheat.

And you want to count how many kilograms of grain you have altogether.

Well, you do the 2 times 3.

get that then add it to the four times 5.

You do the multiplications first and then you add them afterwards.

Cognitive activation vs. cognitive load

Justin Skycak (00:00) Common confusion in education.

is cognitive activation versus cognitive load.

Everyone talks about maximizing cognitive activation because that’s good for learning. But you also talk about minimizing cognitive load

Because when students have too much load, they get overwhelmed

and can’t learn effectively.

So here’s the way I think about it: The purpose of cognitive activation to get students to think deeply about what they’re learning

so that they incorporate it into their mental tree of knowledge as opposed to just going through the motions and memorizing facts and procedures.

Whereas the purpose of minimizing cognitive load is to make lessons accessible to all students avoiding undue stress on working memory.

since students have different working memory capacities and different amounts of background knowledge.

Serious learning is just like training at sports practice

Justin Skycak (00:00) the purpose of minimizing cognitive load is to make lessons accessible to all students avoiding undue stress on working memory.

And I think there’s a strong analogy to sports practice where athletes do drills and scrimmage against each other.

During the drills, athletes are generally focused on improving a particular skill. If you want to improve your three-pointer accuracy, first thing that you should do is drill shooting from the three-point Once you’re good at that, you can run progressively more advanced drills,

And that drill progression is like cognitive load minimization. If you take somebody who can’t even shoot a three pointer,

and you immediately have them practice shooting against a hardcore defender, then it’s going to be too overwhelming and they’re not going to improve.

That’s what happens when a learning task exceeds a student’s working memory.

But what happens if you do 100 % drills and you never scrimmage?

Well, you end up getting pretty good at the skills practiced in the drills, you have no idea how or when to apply them during an actual game.

Should I try to go in for the layup or should I hang back and try to do a fadeaway shot or could I pass to one of my open teammates?

Well, in order to answer these questions and perform well during an actual game, you need a good meta level understanding of the game.

So,

you also scrimmage during practice and critique tape recordings of prior games.

Learning is like climbing a staircase

Justin Skycak (00:00) Learning is like climbing a staircase, and students get stuck at any individual stair that is too tall for them to climb. So the smaller you make the individual stairs, the more students can climb all the way to the top.

The size of a stair that a student can climb is like their working memory. By minimizing cognitive load, you’re making the individual stairs smaller so that more students can climb them.

Cognitive activation

is the meta reasoning behind the why and the where. Why are you climbing the staircase? Where are you trying to go?

The purpose of cognitive activation to get students to think deeply about what they’re learning

so that they incorporate it into their mental tree of knowledge

Students need to know the component skills before they do projects

Justin Skycak (00:00) Can you teach a math class on the basis of projects only, as opposed to more traditional exercises? not really. Sure, projects can be useful for pulling a lot of skills together to do something cool and exciting, and that’s valuable. But the thing is, students need to acquire the component skills first. Most students can’t learn component skills on the fly in the context of the bigger project.

They need plenty of practice on each particular skill, where lots of scaffolding is provided at the beginning and then gradually removed.

For example, let’s say you want to do a project where students sketch an image by graphing a bunch of straight lines in Desmos.

Obviously, going into the project, students are going to need to know how to represent points in the coordinate plane and find the equation of a line between two points. And they should also know how to manually create the graph of a given linear equation.

Each of these component skills has to be built up beforehand,

and it takes plenty of time and practice to build them up. Most students are going to need a worked example and a handful of practice problems with feedback on each separate case of each component skill.

Because if they don’t get this practice, then they’re just going to be totally overwhelmed by the project. And they’re going to spend a ton of time working unproductively. And ultimately, they’ll learn little to nothing from it.

Like in fitness, making progress in learning math requires sticking to a plan

Justin Skycak (00:00) When somebody tries to learn math by poking around Wikipedia, checking out whatever math articles pique their interest,

They often end up marveling at equations and diagrams,

But for the most part, they’re unable to understand what they’re Unless it’s something that they already learned in more structured environment.

The end result is that a wide variety of mathematical objects and fields of math sound familiar to them, they have lot of difficulty describing what those objects and fields actually are, and they are completely incapable of using them in any sort of problem-solving context.

To understand why this strategy is so ineffective, imagine somebody who frequently goes to the gym but doesn’t have a solid workout plan in place. They sporadically walk around to whatever piece of equipment piques their interest, and they perform an arbitrary number of reps with some arbitrary weight.

And then after a month of this, they’re disappointed to realize that they look no different in the mirror.

To make any sort of fitness progress, this gym goer will need to develop and stick to a proper workout plan, will likely require the assistance of a personal trainer. The personal trainer will help them choose a sequence of exercises will help them make progress towards their fitness goals. And in each exercise, the amount of weight will be calibrated so that the weight can be successfully lifted, but there is sufficient struggle to stimulate muscle growth.

Nonstandard mathematical algorithms distract students and slow down learning

Justin Skycak (00:00) Should you teach alternative multiplication algorithms like the lattice method?

Well, personally, I would be very cautious when introducing any algorithms other than the standard methods. The standard algorithms are standard for a reason. They’re easy to set up and they’re hard to mess up.

The lattice method, for instance, it’s hard to set up. It takes a lot of time and effort to draw the entire grid with the diagonals, And it’s easy to mess up.

I mean, I’ve seen this happen so many times where a student draws a sloppy grid with misaligned diagonals and then screws up the calculation as a result.

But the biggest issue is probably that kids will often latch on to whatever method they like best, And their incentives are often misaligned. For instance, I’ve tutored students who straight up told me that they preferred the lattice they liked being able to take a break from the math to draw the And believe me, they took their sweet time drawing the grid and making it perfect.

Of course, it took these students forever to complete their problems because they were working with incredibly low efficiency, And that frustrated them.

But another factor leading them to resist switching to the more efficient standard method was that they had completely forgotten it.

Why? Because they were using the lattice method for so long not practicing the standard method. And so they got into a situation where relearning the standard require some additional upfront time and effort on top of what they already an overwhelming workload.

I mean, listen,

If the alternative method is just as efficient and just as general, mean, sure, introduce it.

But if not, then I wouldn’t introduce it because students who latch onto it and resist letting go are going to be in for a world of hurt.

Even if you try to introduce that alternative method as a fun, temporary vacation away from standard techniques, some students will try to stay on that vacation forever.

Struggle does not imply inability

Justin Skycak (00:00) Struggle does not imply inability. If you do poorly in a math class, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are incapable of learning that level of math. There’s a number of reasons that could be the root cause of your struggle.

While it’s true that everybody’s mathematical potential has a limit, in practice, the ceilings we hit rarely represent our true abstraction ceilings. All sorts of factors can artificially lower our ceilings, such as missing foundations, ineffective practice habits,

inability or unwillingness to engage in additional practice, or lack of motivation.

Mathematical struggle is caused by gaps of missing foundational skills

Justin Skycak (00:00) Struggle does not imply inability.

Struggle can be caused by missing foundations.

It’s kind of like how when people age, they accumulate biological damage that eventually reaches a tipping point and leads to a cascade of catastrophic health issues. The same thing happens to students learning mathematics.

Students accumulate weaknesses and knowledge gaps as they progress through math.

Once they accumulate a critical number of gaps, then the student is doomed to struggle unless proper remediation is enacted to fill in those gaps.

Remediation is extremely difficult to accomplish outside the context of an adaptive automated learning system. It rarely happens in the classrooms. just don’t have

Enough time

with each student to figure out exactly which pieces of foundational knowledge are missing.

Students will almost certainly accumulate these deficits in traditional classrooms. It’s only the most gifted and most motivated students who are able and willing to identify and self-repair their gaps on their own.

Effective learning requires deliberate practice

Justin Skycak (00:00) Effective learning is active. It’s not It’s not effective to attempt to learn by passively watching videos, attending lectures, reading books, or rereading notes.

Effective learning should center around deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice requires repeatedly practicing skills that are beyond one’s repertoire.

However, this tends to be more effortful and less enjoyable, which can mislead non-experts to practice within their level of comfort.

Classroom activities that are enjoyable, collaborative, and non-repetitive, like group discussions and free-form or project-based or discovery learning, these are only supplements, not substitutes, for deliberate practice.

Lastly, deliberate practice must be part of a consistent routine. The power of deliberate practice comes from compounding

incremental improvements over a longer period of time.

It’s not a quick fix like cramming before an exam.

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