Author: barboakley

(Partly) Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Books of the Month

We continue our reading of history and society—reading books is one of the best ways to broaden your learning about everything!  This week, we have two books to share:

• Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, by William Trotter. It’s all too easy to think that war is so rare that it will never happen. When war does happen, then, countries can be blindsided by their own naivete.  Such was the case with the brutal, hellish Winter War between the Soviets and the Finns in 1939-40 as Stalin sought to make an “easy” expansion of the Soviet Union to prepare for the coming conflageration with the Nazis.  Much as with Ukraine today, the Russians were surprised and lost tens of thousands of men due to poor leadership.  Frozen Hell gets right into the nitty-gritty of what happened. A quick read and a good reminder of the dangers of lack of preparedness—and the value of Finnish grit. 
• Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China, by Desmond Shum.  This is a fascinating look at the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by a brave man who stands out from the many others who gain privately as they enable and support mass public harm.  The CCP enabled Shum and his wife Whitney Duan’s rise into China’s billionaire class as the couple used their insider connections and natural smarts to built a massive air cargo facility at Beijing International Airport, as well as one of Beijing’s premier hotels.  But, much as with Bill Browder’s experiences in Putin’s Russia, (as told in Red Notice), Shum and his wife gradually became inconvenient for the CCP, and she was to disappear even while Shum himself escaped to the West. A riveting cautionary tale of how one superpower can operate.  

Neural Manifolds

Anybody who is interested in the latest developments from neuroscience should try their best to understand neural manifolds—a VERY hot topic!  One of the best introductions to this complex topic is that by  Artem Kirsanov,  a computational neuroscience student and researcher. Artem’s enthusiastic and beautifully illustrated video will leave you hungry for even more information about this fascinating topic! 

“Mob Mentality” Podcast

A fascinating development in programming is when small teams work to program together. This is beneficial not only in helping good code develop more quickly, but also in helping programmers have a bit more fun while they’re working.  An excellent podcast about this approach is “Mob Mentality,” by remarkable senior programmers Austin Chadwick and Chris Lucian. Barb was fortunate to be on the show to share ideas and to learn more about this fantastic approach to programming.  Enjoy the episode!

(Here also, incidentally, is a great article about using Agile to teach students to work effectively in teams.)

The Controversial California Math Framework

After an approximately year-long revision by State Board of Education staff, the final California Math Framework was recently approved by the California State Board of Education.  Diligent mathematics professor Brian Conrad is on the case, noting in his most recent comment on the controversy “Given that the [California Math Framework] is going to be influencing math education in this country for the next decade, it is unacceptable that the State Board of Education is providing such an extremely short time period (including a weekend followed by a federal holiday) to review the Framework.  Critical concerns remain, and the CMF does not live up to the standards of a document that sets state-wide education policy.”  

“Citation misrepresentation persists.  Despite objections from more than 440 STEM faculty from across the state, guidelines have still not been developed for data science to be in alignment with math education content standards.  The document also has critical inconsistencies that open up the possibility for public schools to implement the CMF in contradictory ways.  Finally, the CMF still invokes a UC policy on data science courses substituting for Algebra II that has been challenged at multiple levels, including its recent outright rejection by the entire California State University system. All of the above are critical shortcomings, due to which the CMF cannot be approved in its current form.”

In short, the public is witnessing the consequences of regulatory capture of a state governmental agency. On a side note, Stanford University, associated with the problematic developments in the CMF, has recently witnessed the resignation of its president in relation to the disgrace of falsified data.

But there was also a positive development. As Stephanie Lee reports in this perceptive article for the Chronicle of Higher Education: “[F]aculty members across California have expressed concern that the UC system is rubber-stamping courses that bill themselves as “data science” but that do not impart the algebra needed to major in data science or other science, engineering, math, and technology major… Those courses, especially ‘Introduction to Data Science’ and Youcubed, should not have been approved as an advanced math course or a replacement for algebra II.” 

“The vote throws into question California’s math framework, which gives guidance to the state’s K-12 schools about how to teach math.”

There is hope for those who care about legitimate, solidly research-based approaches to teaching and learning!

Noam Chomsky

Don’t miss this spot-on review of MIT linguist Noam Chomsky’s corrosive effects on linguistics as well as politics. What’s sad is to realize that no matter how deceitful or duplicitous their researchers can get, major universities tend to whistle and look the other way.  

“The Autism Surge: Lies, Conspiracies, and My Own Kids”

Jill Escher, the president of the National Council on Severe Autism, writes that in our well-meaning efforts to understand and support neurodiversity, the very groups that should be supporting research into understanding the causes of this sometimes devastating condition are abrogating their duty. Escher’s hard-hitting piece is a must-read at a time when rates of autism are unquestionably skyrocketing. (Again, pathologies of altruism rear their head.)

That’s all for now. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!

• Mindshift—the book and MOOC

• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC

• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers

For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

The Story of Spanish, by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. This fascinating volume gives a comprehensive overview of the Spanish speaking world and its history by using the unique lens of language.  Beginning with how Spanish evolved from the remnants of Vulgar Latin in the then-obscure Kingdom of Castile and León in what is now northern Spain, Nadeau and Barlow take us through a unique tour of the twenty countries that have evolved to share a common, sometimes locally quirky language.  This is the book we’ve been waiting for to gain a better understanding of Spanish-speaking world.  If you’re learning Spanish, or even just thinking about or admiring the language, this is the book to read. An intriguing companion book is Nadeau and Barlow’s The Story of French. Ever wondered why there are French-language schools in many seemingly unlikely places (e.g. Miami, Florida) around the world, where other major languages, such as Portuguese, don’t have them?  This book explains why!

Computer Programming in Ensemble Groups

Barb had a great time recently on the Mob Mentality Show podcast, about computer programming in groups to solve problems better and keep one another on track.  

Class Central’s Guides to Great Value in Online Learning

We’re always a fan of Class Central and its ability to guide you to good online learning materials through its encompassing review system. Don’t miss Pat Bowden’s Class Central review of the “5 best neuroscience courses to take in 2023.” (Pat and Barb both comismerated that somehow Idan Segev’s
phenomenal “Synapses, Neurons and Brains” just didn’t pop up in the number crunching to be added to the list–yet it is still one of our favorite courses.)  And here is a Class Central report on the best Coursera courses that include thoughtful well-designed peer reviews for a more personal and deeper pathway to mastering the material.  multiple-choice questions.  

Success Academy: Schools in New York Lead the Way 

This important article by Eva Moskowitz,  describes the remarkable success of a New York school system approach:[behind a paywall, but key grafs below]

“The school we founded, Success Academy, has blossomed into a network of 49 schools educating 20,000 children. If we were our own school district, we’d be the fifth largest in New York state. Over the past several years, our mainly poor and minority students have done better on average in all subject areas than students in any school district in the Empire State, including affluent suburban districts. Our success is due in no small measure to the Success for All curriculum that Mr. Greenblatt [who initiated and bankrolled the initial charter school approach] championed.

“The city’s education bureaucracy, which for two decades insisted on using an ineffective reading curriculum that doesn’t emphasize phonics, is finally coming around. David Banks, New York City’s schools chancellor since January 2022, recently acknowledged that the old approach was “fundamentally flawed” and offered the following mea culpa to the tens of thousands of public school parents whose children can’t read: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault.”

“Mr. Banks’s admission of responsibility is refreshing, but it can’t repair the incredible damage that has been done. In the two decades it took the city to figure out that phonics work, an entire generation of students has been miseducated, with minority students suffering the most. According to the NAEP test, only 12% of black fourth graders and 18% of Hispanic fourth graders in New York are proficient readers.

“How is it that New York City’s massive Education Department, filled with highly trained professional educators, couldn’t see what Mr. Greenblatt saw? The elevation of ideology over evidence is principally to blame. Instead of objectively evaluating what actually works, educators fell in love with the utopian idea that children would naturally learn to read if only teachers made reading fun. In reality, most children need explicit phonics instruction.

“At Success Academy, we have a simple approach: We do what works.” 

You can read more about this remarkable story in Moskowitz’s riveting book: The Education of Eva Moskowitz: A Memoir.

Coursera’s exciting plans!

This EdSurge article on online learning provides fascinating insight into Coursera’s new personal learning assistant, “Coach.” As Coursera’s CEO Jeff Maggioncalda observes “Coach is going to be both reactive and proactive for learners. It’s going to be a thinking and writing partner in multiple languages.” Coach is able to provide explanations, summarize lessons, link videos and suggest further courses for the learner to check out.

Two types of muscle memory

This fine article “What you should know about muscle memory to help you stay fit” gives insight into the learning process. Key grafts: 

“When you’re initially learning a new movement or skill, you are in the cognitive stage… where your movements are slow and inefficient and there’s high activation in the prefrontal cortex, which is your brain’s thinking region.

“From there you progress to the associative stage, during which your brain is still working hard, but your movements are becoming more fluid and consistent.

“Muscle memory is achieved when you reach the autonomous stage. Your performance is now smooth and accurate, and your brain’s main activity has switched to the basal ganglia, the region involved with automatic functioning.” 

[Hat tip Sylvia Gholson, who notes how she finds these ideas useful for her music students.]

A wonderful link for all things “retrieval practice” 

Apologies, bad link last month for our favorite book on teaching—Powerful Teaching! Also, we’d like to point you toward Retrievalpractice.org, which houses all sorts of additional practical resources and tips on retrieval practice. For a great list of tons of books on the science of learning, also check out retrievalpractice.org/books. 

That’s all for now. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!

• Mindshift—the book and MOOC

• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC

• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

Rhythms of the Brain, by Gyorgy Buzsaki. Ever wondered about the various rhythms—alpha, theta, gamma, and more—and how they play a role in our thinking?  Wonder no more, as this in-depth scientific expose walks you through why the brain’s rhythms are so important, and how those rhythms are thought to arise. Buzsaki’s first chapters cover the speed of neural signals and how this matters in large and small mammals.  The book then moves on to describe the different types of oscillators, and how the pulsating signals of individual neurons can aggregate to sinusoidal-appearing waves.  One might wonder how neurons can remain in sync even without direct connections—Buzsaki reveals how the brain’s rhythms can synchronize spatially separated areas, rather like a handful of corks rising and falling together on waves of water. In some sense, the brain’s rhythmic waves can serve as the forward “ticks” of a clock. Theta waves in particular seem to serve as discrete channels that hold higher frequency gamma wave information within them. As Buzsaki notes:  “Linear time is a major feature of our Western cultural world-view, and the experience of time flowing between past, present, and future is intricately tied to everyday logic, predictions, and linear causation… What I am proposing in this volume is that neuronal oscillations are essential for these deepest and most general functions.”  

This is a seminal, not-to-be-missed book in neuroscientific literature. 

Barb in Santiago, Chile for ResearchEd, October 21, 2023

We feel ResearchEd is the most forward-looking, fact-based education conference around.   If you are a Spanish-speaker, don’t miss this superb conference, which will feature Spanish translations of all key activities. Barb will be giving the opening keynote, and the conference will also feature superstars Natalie Wexler, Kate Jones and Katharine Birbalsingh. More information here, and you can register here.

Do your students’ minds go blank during an in-class retrieval practice activity? 

As cognitive psychologist Pooja Agarwal, co-author of our favorite teaching-related book, Powerful Teaching, observes: “You’ve probably had at least one student who was frustrated and said, “But I can’t retrieve anything!” Keep reading for 4 steps you can take to help your students retrieve something.”  This is a wonderfully simple, yet insightful, article!

IDoRecall has brilliant new redaction feature!

You’ve probably had to learn parts of a visual image, but may have struggled in the past about how to create sophisticated flashcards that test you gradually on parts of the image.  Struggle no more!  iDoRecall has a fantastic new redaction feature that allows you to cover up and test yourself on only parts of an image.  This three-minute video explains how easy this is.  

Flashcards beat mnemonics

This deceptively simple essay, by the ever-informative Scott Young (author of Ultralearning), is one of the best essays we’ve seen on internalizing new material–especially when learning languages.

Seeing your learning on Anki

We met Jonas Grincius in Vilnius, Lithuania. After reading A Mind for Numbers three years ago he became inspired to begin using Anki.  Take a look at his inspiring set of Anki statistics—just for the year 2022. Now that’s a cool way to monitor your learning!

A list of best ChatGPT courses to take right now

The always helpful MOOC analysis website Class Central has a not-to-be-missed article by Elham Nazif on the best ChatGPT courses to help you understand this paradigm-shifting new technology. 

Classical Music for the Next Generation

Barb and her Hero Husband Phil were lucky enough to have the best dinner we’ve had in all of Europe at the restaurant Fabrikėlis in the Lithuanian forest with concert pianist Monika Lozinskienė, learning more about current trends in classical music. 

As Monika told us, over the generations, a continuing stream of people begin to turn to classical music in their forties. Except that in this generation, those in their forties are not turning to classical music.  Why? Well, classical performances not nearly as flashy as, say, an ABBA hologram performance, or Beyoncé live or on video. In fact, while we may know a great deal about Beyoncé’s life, the back story of classical music is often hard to come by. We typically know nothing about, for example, great Finnish classical composer Sibelius, whose synesthesia allowed him to “hear” notes arising from certain colors (the green ceramic stove in his living room was dubbed the “F-major”). 

Monika with her husband Robertas Lozinskis are setting out to help excite and educate the next generation about classical music.  And what an exciting approach they’re taking! Take a look at these wonderful duo battling out Paganini Variations for Two Pianos. Notice that you can feel the tones by seeing them, just as a synesthete might do!  Look at the incredible number of notes they are able to hit per second, and their heart rate.  Compare Monika and Robert’s different methods and different feelings as they tackle their play.  Learn about the history of the composer as you listen. Incidentally, Robert comes from a world of being a top-notch video gamer—he used this knowledge to underpin their creative approach to letting us enjoy classical music in a whole new way.  Don’t miss this performance!

If this whets your appetite, you can hear even more with this Pride and Prejudice soundtrack.

That’s all for now. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

 Trilingual by Six: The Sane Way to Raise Intelligent, Talented Children , by Lennis Dippel MD. As the old joke goes:

“What do you call a person who speaks two languages?

“A bilingual.

“So what do you call a person who speaks one language?

“An American.” 

If you have young children or grandchildren, Dr. Dippel’s thought-provoking book provides a fountain of ideas about how to help your child grow up multilingual (that is, not like the typical US-born American!) in the easiest fashion possible—by learning new languages during their earliest years. Learning a language at this early time allows toddlers’ tiny basal ganglia procedural systems—which are then at their strongest—to soak up the rhythms and patterns in the easiest possible way. That is, by just listening and talking!  Incidentally, we have met many professors and business executives who have started out as au pairs. So if you use one of the approaches outlined in Dr. Dippel’s book and hire an au pair, (Dr. Dippel also has many other ideas) you may be providing a step forward in international acumen for both your child and the blossoming career of your au pair.

Raising a Multi-Lingual (beyond Bilingual) Child

Barb’s granddaughter, who is now five months old, is growing up being exposed to four different languages: English, Spanish, French, and Mandarin.  (She just LOVES the happy attention, no matter what the language! Could we add one more language?) If you might have any experience raising a multi-lingual (beyond bilingual) child, and you have suggestions or interesting comments to share, please  comment in the discussion forum here !  (If the link doesn’t take you directly there, just log in to Coursera/Learning How to Learn and go to the general discussion forum.)

Language Learning – Comments on Outdated Approaches

We were asked to comment on  this video  about language learning by prominent linguist Stephen Krashen, because the approaches that Krashen recommends are still prominent in language learning.  What Krashen says is accurate in many ways, (for example, the importance of comprehensible input and a low anxiety environment). But Krashen clearly knows virtually nothing of neuroscience—and to give him credit, at the time Krashen made the video, neuroscience had nothing like the insight it provides today.  

For example, Krashen implies that understanding is all you need to learn a language. That’s perhaps appropriate to say for kids, but not adults (note that all his examples involved children). 

The reality is, as we mentioned above in relation to Dr. Dippel’s book, the habitual “rote” procedural system in humans—so important in language acquisition—changes between infancy and adulthood. Neuroscientific evidence is increasingly revealing that adults have weaker procedural systems, so drill for adults can help facilitate the development of the procedural, intuitive sets of neural links that are so important for adults as well as children.  This fading procedural learning system appears to be related to why infants and toddlers are able to pick up languages with ease—where they cannot do it so easily at age 10, and not nearly as easily at age 20. A fascinating recent book related to the topic that we are in the process of reading, (review to come), is The Cognitive Unconscious: The First Half Century, edited by Arthur Reber and Rhianon Allen.

Do you have colleagues who get lost in the details and just can’t seem to see the big picture?

At last there is intriguing research, published in Nature, that gives a sense of why some people find it so difficult to generalize and transfer ideas: “ Uncertainty aversion predicts the neural expansion of semantic representations .”  The sprightly popular article we link to here, by researcher Marc-Lluís Vives,

gives a sense of why some people can easily see differences, but struggle when it comes to commonalities.  Notice the enlightening imagery of tight versus loose neural connections!

Could this be related to the phenomenon of universities that preferentially select doctoral students who are great at seeing the individual trees but struggle to see the forest?  That is, they do well when focusing on the limited scope of their doctoral dissertations, but struggle to see the greater context of their work. (Certainly gifted social scientists, when put to the test of making predictions involving multiple broad contexts can be  no better  than amateurs.) Or is it related to Kruglanski’s  theories  of the need for cognitive closure and  closed-mindedness ?

Don’t miss Barb on June 5th in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Reliance College “Jefferson” Dinner 

A few last seats have been opened for Barb’s presentation at the Reliance College “Jefferson” Dinner:  “The Road to Education is Paved with Good Intentions…”  Register here  today.  

Anna Stokke’s Brilliant Podcast Interviews on Teaching Math

In  this podcast episode  with experienced teachers Barry Garelick and JR Wilson, authors of  Traditional Math: an effective strategy that teachers feel guilty using , Anna, Barry, and JR share strategies and practical advice that they have used in their own classrooms with great success. This includes ideas about how to get students excited about math, how to effectively use the “I do, we do, you do” method of teaching and the role of understanding in math.  They also discuss critical math topics that teachers should focus on, tips for teaching word problems, how to keep advanced students challenged, and how to help struggling students.  (Don’t miss Barry’s insightful article “ Effective Math Instruction: Hiding In Plain Sight .”)

And in  this episode , Barb and Anna  discuss learning techniques such as chunking and deliberate practice.  They explore why being a slower learner may not necessarily be a drawback and consider whether it’s possible to catch up on math skills later in life.  

The Biggest Project in Modern Mathematics

 This extraordinary  video  by Rutgers University mathematician Alex Kontorovich is the most beautiful, insightful video on math we’ve ever seen.

MathGPT

Here is  an intriguing article  about MathGPT, an artificial intelligence-based program, featured at the ASU+GSV Summit, that is setting a pathway toward revolutionizing the way we learn math.  Of course, getting the patterns of math into our brain—which allows us to gain an intuitive feel for the numbers—is key, and this can only happen through plenty of practice.  But MathGPT could potentially help provide for targeted practice coupled with answers to student questions that could truly make a paradigm shift for students in their ability to learn math. 

Math app for Kids

Check out this interesting app,  Levebee , created to help ALL children learn math, including those with dyslexia, autism, ADHD, visual impairment, and other special needs. The creators have over 30 years experience in special education, where many worthwhile approaches to teaching math to ALL students is taking place.) All instructions in the app can be shown and played in two languages simultaneously. This allows a teacher who speaks one language to work with a student who speaks a different language.

That’s all for now. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching— the book  and Coursera  Specialization !

• Mindshift— the book  and  MOOC 

• Learn Like a Pro— the book  and  MOOC 

• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn— the book  and  MOOC . Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

• The LHTL recommended text,  A Mind for Numbers 

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

Barb on the upcoming John Stossel Town Hall webinar for Educators being filmed in New York City

Don’t miss this exciting discussion about the intersection of neuroscience and education with reporter John Stossel on Apr 19, 2023, 07:00 PM Eastern US time. Barb will kick things off with a brief 20-minute-or-so overview of learning, and then the excitement will continue and build even further as the floor is opened to the Zoom audience for questions.   Register now and pose your question!

Book of the Month

Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary, by Ozan Varol. The deluge of today’s lifestyles can ultimately lead to overload and shutdown. Awaken Your Genius uses uncommon stories coupled with research findings to lift and inspire.  This great book will help you hit refresh on your sense of possibility.  Highly recommended! 

As a special gift, Ozan is including a free bonus for ordering his book by April 14th. You’ll get a pack of 10, three-minute, bite-sized videos with actionable insights from Awaken Your Genius that you can implement right away. Among other things, you’ll learn (1) a completely counterintuitive practice that the best thinkers use to generate original ideas and (2) why comparing yourself to others is limiting your potential (and how to stop doing it once and for all). To get the videos, just forward your order receipt to genius@ozanvarol.com and mention Cheery Friday.

Using AI to capture key ideas in podcasts

Check out this fascinating post by Ann Michaelsen about how she used AI to help transcribe a podcast she was listening to, to help her better capture the key ideas.

The inadequacies of generative AI

Barb was recently reviewing conference papers, and found one related to whether generative AI should be used in education.  Wow—she glommed right onto that as a topic of immense interest!  But to her surprise, the paper had obviously itself been generated by generative AI—and it was terrible.  Even more surprisingly, perhaps half of the papers she has reviewed for recent conferences have clearly been generated by AI.  Tell-tale clues include fuzzy, vacuous conclusions, repetition of the same ideas using different words, and, perhaps most obviously, sentences and paragraphs do not logically follow one another.  In fact, a recent paper on AI pointed precisely toward this lack of logical predictability in AI-generated as opposed to human generated thinking: “Evidence of a predictive coding hierarchy in the human brain listening to speech.” For a fascinating discussion of why AI grading of essays isn’t as good as human grading, follow Daisy Christodoulou and Chris Wheadon’s Substack.

The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: How Altruism Can Become Pathological involving Meditation

On Friday April 21st,  12:00-1:30 pm ET, Barb will be giving a rare discussion of pathologies of altruism (good intentions gone awry), that touches on their application to meditation and rarely discussed potential detrimental side effects of meditation.  This session is a “don’t miss” if you want a scientifically-grounded yet contrarian take to the seemingly unassailable wall of goodness presented to the public about the benefits of meditation—and there are, of course, genuine benefits to be had.  Register here. (All registration proceeds go to the Cheetah House, a community invested in the recovery from, and reduction of, adversities resulting from meditation practices.)

Top Hat Presentation with Barb—Engaging Your Students

Declining attendance. Wandering eyes. Low participation. Students can easily become checked out. So what can you do to help them re-discover the joy of learning? As Barb—the award-winning co-author of Uncommon Sense Teaching—can share, engaging students starts by tapping into the world of neuroscience and moviemaking. Now’s your chance to hear from her live.  You’re invited to Top Hat’s special discussion with Dr. Oakley on Thursday, April 13 at 2 PM ET. You’ll leave with practical tools to motivate and engage all students.

Everest Memory Masterclass with 5 time US Memory Champion Nelson Dellis

USA Memory Champion) is opening his Everest Memory Masterclass for registration in a few weeks–here is the waitlist. With proven memory techniques and personalized instruction from Nelson himself, the course will teach you how to remember all the important things in life. If you don’t know Nelson’s story, he started training his memory after his grandmother passed away from Alzheimer’s disease in 2009. He ended up winning the USA Memory Championships a number of times and turned his new-found skill into a career teaching others. Registration for this year’s cohort opens on May 1st, 2023, so jump on his email waitlist to get notified when it goes live! Get your name on the waitlist early!

How exercise leads to sharper thinking and a healthier brain

Sometimes it helps (spaced repetition) to hear repeatedly how important exercise is for our health.  And this Washington Post article about a new study describes the strongest case yet that exercise improves cognition, based on findings from 350,000 study participants. Yes, it seems to be related to
“brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF, often referred to as ‘Miracle-Gro’ for the brain.” [Hat tip: Christian Crowley.]

That’s all for now. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!

• Mindshift—the book and MOOC

• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC

• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers

For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Practical Insights From Neuroscience: Improve Your Teaching of Math—or Anything Else—to Neurodiverse Students

Register now for this two-hour webinar from Learning & the Brain, (taught by none other than Barb), which offers CE credit for the live audience, as well as a recording available for one week following the live webinar. This webinar will run from 10:00 am – 12:00 pm ET / 7:00 am – 9:00 am PT on Saturday, April 1, 2023 for a total of 2 credit hours.

In this webinar, we’ll discuss how a growing body of research insight from neuroscience has revealed many surprises when it comes to teaching math. For example, some forms of teaching can engage students’ sophisticated pattern recognition systems, which can be invaluable in making math easier to learn, particularly at more advanced levels. And there are further surprises—for example, just because students know how to solve a problem in math does not necessarily mean that they can—or should—be able to explain it. In fact, forcing some neurally diverse students to explain their reasoning when they can already demonstrate their understanding can actually kill their motivation for deeper learning. In this talk, we will explore these and other counterintuitive insights from research that can allow you to make intelligent use of students’ differing underlying approaches to learning. We will also explore the intimate connection between retrieval practice in math and the metaphors used in art, music, and poetry.

This is a fantastic webinar with the best, most recent insights from neuroscience.  Don’t miss it—register now!

Spring 2023 On Course Conference

Recently, there’s been a lot of media coverage and college buzz on the impact Artificial Intelligence is having on education. Will ChatGPT support or prevent our students from effective learning? Our world of education is certainly on the cusp of a profound change! How might educators respond to this fascinating challenge? Attend the April 28, 2023 On Course National Conference (held virtually) for an exploration of AI.

• • Opening Keynote Session and Plenary with Dr. Derek Bruff, author of Intentional Tech and former director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Bruff is also the author of the Intentional Teaching newsletter and producer of the Intentional Teaching podcast.
  • Mid-Day Keynote Session and Plenary with Dr. Robert Cummings, author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia. Cummings is Executive Director of Academic Innovation and Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi.
  • Closing Keynote with Dr. Jonathan Brennan, author of Engaging Learners through Zoom and On Course: Strategies for Success in College, Career and Life. Brennan is a researcher in best practices in student success, holds a BA and an MA in English, an MA in Counseling Psychology, a PhD in Ethnic Studies (UC Berkeley), and an EdD in Educational Leadership and Change (Fielding Graduate University).
  • Register here 
  • More information 

Ken’s Korner

One interesting free newsletter we subscribe to, covering everything from the inner workings of Windows 11 to face recognition technology, is “Ken’s Korner.” We get a lot out of the short and informative technical articles.  You can sign up here.

Book of the Week

Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by William D. Cohan. This book has earned pride of place on The New Yorker Best Books of 2022, The Financial Times Best Books of 2022, and The Economist Best Books of 2022. Great leadership in business matters in providing for people’s needs, as Southwest Airline’s recent catastrophic meltdown attests. Power Failure is the magnificent telling of the rise and fall of one of America’s formerly greatest companies, and a cautionary tale of how eminence can lead managers to hubris—and disaster.  

General Electric Company grew in the late 1800s from Thomas Edison’s brilliant innovations. By 1896, the company was so important that it was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average. Ultimately, the company’s story revolves around two men. Jack Welch, who is sometimes called “the CEO of the Century,” took GE to greatness during his reign as Chairman & CEO from 1981–2001. Many people working for GE revered Welch, whose rapid-fire and flexible brilliance (he also sported a doctorate in chemical engineering) meant that he relished well-reasoned dissent.  Welch’s successor was Jeff Immelt, a Harvard MBA whose slick ability to present and glad-hand were enough to get him to the top—but not make great decisions. It turned out that Immelt, unlike Welch, didn’t tolerate dissent and rarely took advice from others. Under Immelt’s leadership GE lost over $150 billion in market value—the company was not only ultimately dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but dismembered. (Cohan points out how Immelt’s self-serving biography often seems at variance with the facts.) 

Cohan’s book provides a perceptive perspective on capitalism itself—the motivation and fulfillment of people’s needs that great companies can provide.  But also, the cutthroat death spirals that companies can fall into. As Cohan pointedly observes, General Electric’s current CEO is the one who seems to be making all the money—not share holders. A lengthy read, but worth every page.

That’s all for now. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!

• Mindshift—the book and MOOC

• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC

• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling. Barb glanced at the title of this book and thought, “The last thing I need is to be diving into, (amidst the hundreds of samples already downloaded onto the Kindle), is a book about the Black Sea.” Out of curiosity, she took a look at the first couple pages, and suddenly she was one hundred pages in, hooked by Mühling’s combination of scintillating prose (which comes across even in the translation by  Simon Pare from the original German) and remarkable ability to bring out fascinating bits of local lore and culture.  Troubled Water, as it turns out, is a compendium not only of adventure travel (fortunately, Mühling has a remarkable talent for holding his alcohol), but also of semi-forgotten and little-known groups. Mühling has no more than to hear about an outlying cultural group, whether it’s Turks in Romania, Bulgarians in Turkey, Greeks in Russia, or simply a hermit, and off he goes on the hunt to meet them. And we learn of all sorts of other aspects of the biology of the Black Sea—for example, the fact that its unusual top layer of fresh water and bottom layer of salt makes a poisonous mixture that leaves three-thousand-year old sunken vessels as fresh as if they had sunk yesterday. 

If you want a “you are there” reading experience that gives you a good feel for a vitally important region, you couldn’t do better than to read Jens Mühling’s fantastic Troubled Water. Highly recommended!

Lessons From This ‘Golden Age’ of Learning Science

Barb was on a panel at SXSW with EdSurge journalist and podcaster Jeff Young and her friends, neuroscientist Andrea Chiba and Norwegian educational expert Olav Schewe. The reaction from the audience was awesome—don’t miss the podcast, here!

Our very own Terry Sejnowski in the New York Times: “Why Do A.I. Chatbots Tell Lies and Act Weird?”

As this New York Times article notes: “One of the pioneers of artificial intelligence argues that chatbots are often prodded into producing strange results by the people who are using them… Like any other student, an A.I. system can learn bad information from bad sources. And that strange behavior? It may be a chatbot’s distorted reflection of the words and intentions of the people using it, said Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscientist, psychologist and computer scientist who helped lay the intellectual and technical groundwork for modern artificial intelligence.

‘This happens when you go deeper and deeper into these systems,’ said Dr. Sejnowski, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego, who published a research paper on this phenomenon this month in the scientific journal Neural Computation. ‘Whatever you are looking for — whatever you desire — they will provide.’”

Barb & Beth Rogowski together on Principal Center Radio

Principal Center Radio provides the best insights in professional practice for school leaders.  In this episode with host Justin Baeder, Barb teams with Beth, her co-author and co-instructor in the Uncommon Sense Teaching book and online specialization to bring you new insights from brain science about teaching.

121 Great Podcasts for HR Professionals in 2023

If you like podcasts, and are in HR, this list by London-based speaker agent Patrick Nelson provides a lot of ideas for good listening and learning!

IQ scores sinking in the US 

For many decades, IQ scores have increased around the world.  However, a recent study reveals that from 2006 to 2018, IQ scores declined within the US—evidence points toward educational systems.  As Terry and Barb’s essay in Law & Liberty suggests, unfairly dismissing  the vitally important habitual learning system (“drill is kill” rather than the much more accurate “drill leads to skill”) could be an important factor in the decline.  

Inspiring words from a learner!

We received this delightful email:

“Thank you for the fantastic course “Learning how to learn”, that is the best learning that I have received in my adult life. I am the person who definitely needs to receive this course. Now I am a postdoctoral scientific researcher, but I have always had many problems with concentrating and as I am very emotional, this also affected my focus. With much effort, I was able to achieve my professional objectives, but I paid a high price due to the time I had to put in, not to mention the accompanying frustration. Over the years, I developed some procedures that really improved my focus. The magic of this course is that it confirmed that I was on the right track. I was excited for each video, they were a good motivation during my intense work in my current position. You always focus on scientific work, which makes this course highly reliable. You are high quality professionals, it is evident. I am very happy now to understand more how my brain works, and how I can manage it to improve my life. Thank you for this fantastic, exciting, 

incredibly interesting course!! Today is better than tomorrow to watch this course.  Best wishes, Ana.” 

That’s all for now. Have a happy month in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Book of the Month

Traditional Math: An effective strategy that teachers feel guilty using, by Barry Garelick and JR Wilson. This wonderful book is highly recommended for parents, grandparents, and teachers of all kinds who would like a solid guide to help youngsters learn math in a simple, elegant, and straightforward way.  As Stanford mathematician Wayne Bishop has pointed out, leaders in modern mathematics education often sadly and erroneously continue to push Freudenthal Institute’s discredited “reform” approaches to teaching math. On the uplifting side, as Bishop also points out apropos Traditional Math, “this book is a wealth of down-to-earth, logically presented topics from kindergarten through beginning algebra. The work will be effective for most mathematics teachers but especially so for those who have been indoctrinated with reform math but are recognizing its ineffectiveness and in need of solid ideas.” 

Barb will be using this book with her new granddaughter as she grows up!  

On a side note, Barb & her Hero Husband Phil raised their two daughters with twenty minutes of carefully designed extra math practice through use of the Kumon math program. The result of this extra “drill and kill” practice?  One daughter is now a Stanford trained pediatrician, and the second is a graduate level statistician.  Yet reform educators would have one believe that the decade Barb and Phil gave their daughters of tiny bits of daily extra math drill would turn the girls away from math. What reform educators characterize as “drill and kill” is actually all-important “drill to skill”!

It certainly wasn’t that the girls loved every day of their practice. (Take heart, homeschooling parents!) But that practice led to the solid internalization of mathematical patterns that the girls needed long-term for professional careers in STEM—and for them to feel comfortable with and ultimately learn to love mathematics.  Incidentally, when Barb was recently in Vietnam, she learned that her daughter’s statistics graduate advisor rarely takes on students educated in the US, because he has found that US-trained students simply don’t have the comfort and ability with math of students from countries that use more traditional approaches to teaching math.  All those years of a little bit of extra practice a day for the Oakley girls paid off!  (And interleaving of math practice, as with Kumon and Smartick, rules!) 

Recognition of the need for change in K-12 education

And indeed, regarding the ineffectiveness of reform approaches to education, evidence continues to accumulate that conventional education approaches to teaching reading, writing, and math seem to be taking a great deal of children’s time without actually teaching these fundamental skills.  Some 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids, for example, can barely read. And when it comes to math, a recent analysis revealed that in 53 schools in Illinois, not a single student can do math at grade level. 

This perceptive analysis by Barry Garelick and Robert Craigen: “Reform Math: The Symptoms and Prognosis,” points toward what is needed to right the ship of learning and get children back on track, at least with math..

Math Teachers Everywhere!

For those who feel there might be something missing about modern math curricula, do NOT miss registering for Barb’s Learning & the Brain webinar workshop for math teachers (not to mention art, language, and other teachers) who want to see the latest insights from neuroscience about effective learning in math and other topics.

Do Intensive Learning Projects Work Better Than Slow Ones?

Here is a thoughtful and counterintuitive posting by the indefatigable Scott Young about why bootcamp-type intensive courses might sometimes work better than conventional spaced repetition.  (Certainly Barb found that her intensive training at the Defense Language Institute put her Russian language skills on a solid footing, even if they’d rusted a bit over the past fifty years.) Scott’s book Ultralearning, by the way, is a classic in the learning literature.

Tips for Fresh Subscribers!

A perceptive new learner named Yash wrote to ask:

“I am a new follower of yours. I have just enrolled in Learning How to Learn for Youth.  I wondered whether you have some tips for fresh subscribers?” [Learning How to Learn for Youth  is our different, shorter course oriented for younger people.]

 What a great question!  Barb’s answer was:

“Everyone’s a little different, because of their life schedules and needs and what-not.  But for me, one thing that works great is to make some forward progress in the course every day, even if it’s just five minutes of work.  There is truly something magical about 45 minutes a day, though, that helps the material click into place much more quickly.  It’s the consecutive, day-by-day work that will get you through.”

Do you have additional or different insights for Yash, or for any new subscriber?  If so, post here in Learning How to Learn, or here in Learning How to Learn for Youth.

That’s all for now. Have a happy month in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, by Daniel L. Everett.  At a time when ChatGPT has everyone’s attention, this timeless book of exploration by linguist Daniel Everett lends perspective on the nature of language.  It also describes what might be called the views of “happy stoics” (the Pirahã) and their perspectives on life itself.  

Daniel Everett was a brilliant missionary, graduating at the top of his class from the Moody Bible Institute, who was sent to crack the seemingly uncrackable Pirahã language in the far-off reaches of the Amazon and translate the bible into Pirahã.  What Everett found was unexpected—that the Pirahã language appeared to overthrow the vaunted linguistic theories of MIT’s Noam Chomsky. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Pirahã worldview challenged and changed Everett in ways he himself would never have predicted. 

Interestingly, Chomsky’s recursion theory, convincingly rebutted by Everett’s hard-won research, was developed with Marc Hauser, the disgraced former professor who resigned from Harvard after substantive allegations of scientific misconduct. As our own Terry Sejnowski describes in his Deep Learning Revolution, Chomsky’s theorizing is thought to have held back advances in artificial intelligence by decades. (We suspect far more will come out about Chomsky and his theories after his passing.)  If you like adventure, language, numerical thinking, or what happens when worldviews collide, you’ll almost certainly love Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, just as we did. Enjoy!

Calling all Lithuanians…

Barb will be in Lithuania in the May 24-25 timeframe. Would you like her to speak about the neuroscience of learning and teaching at your institution? If so, reach out to oakley@oakland.edu by February 17th.

Engaging Learners through Zoom Workshop

Need new strategies to teach through Zoom? A virtual professional development workshop that is actually energizing and fun? The Engaging Learners through Zoom Workshop offers teachers, college educators, administrators, and trainers the antidote to Zoom fatigue!  It’s so good even Barb (co-instructor of the highly rated “Teaching Online” MOOC on Coursera) is attending! Jonathan’s book on engaging learners on Zoom is also worthwhile. You’ll discover:

• Multiple synchronous online learning structures backed by cognitive neuroscience
• Dozens of active learning strategy examples with step-by-step directions
• Ideas for including diverse content across numerous disciplines

The Most Perceptive Essay We’ve Read about ChatGPT and Educational Assessment

Don’t miss this brilliant essay by polymath Daisy Christodoulou about the perils of conclusion-jumping when it comes to ChatGPT.  Key grafs:

“If computers really are so brilliant at these typical academic skills that are taught in schools, maybe we should stop teaching them completely or only teach the particularly advanced, specialist and niche ones that computers can’t do?

“No. First of all, we will always want to teach academic skills for personal development. It’s good to be able to read, write and count even if a computer is faster and quicker. We didn’t stop teaching PE because of the invention of the car, or drawing because of the invention of the camera.”

If you’re into ChatGPT (and who isn’t, these days?), this essay can’t be missed!

University of Texas to Offer Large-Scale Online Master’s Degree in A.I.

Inspired in part by the Georgia Institute of Technology, which became the first leading computer science school to start a large-scale, low-cost online master’s degree, The University of Texas at Austin is starting a large-scale, low-cost online Master of Science degree program in artificial intelligence.  As this New York Times article notes:

“The first of its kind among elite computing schools, the new program could help swiftly expand the A.I. work force in the United States as tech giants like Microsoft rush to invest billions in the field.

“The university announced the initiative amid a clamor over new technology powered by artificial intelligence that can generate humanlike art and texts. And while some of the technology industry’s biggest companies are laying off workers after years of rapid growth, hiring in A.I. is expected to stay strong.

“University officials said they planned to train thousands of graduate students in sought-after skills like machine learning, for a tuition of about $10,000, starting in the spring of 2024. School officials said the cost was intended to make A.I. education more affordable. By contrast, Johns Hopkins University offers an online M.S. degree in artificial intelligence for more than $45,000.”

A Sizzling Video Book Review of A Mind for Numbers

Business Analyst Pallavi Dharkar gives an eminently informative and watchable review of A Mind for Numbers.  She has a book club—we’ve followed her LinkedIn profile to learn more; her book choices are (obviously) terrific!  

Most Children in Poor Countries Are Being Failed by Their Schools

This fascinating article in The Economist describes winning efforts in education in both poor and wealthy countries through tightly structured approaches to schooling.  (Direct instruction!) Key quotes from the paywalled article: 

“In America…there is growing awareness that schools have been clinging to modish but ineffective “child-led” ways of teaching reading that other developed countries such as Britain have junked. Literacy programmes that were dismissed as old-fashioned are coming back into favour.

“McGraw Hill, an American publishing company, sells a series of highly scripted courses aimed at primary-school children. Bryan Wickman of the National Institute for Direct Instruction, a charity in Oregon, says that using the simplest, clearest language possible is crucial when teaching the smallest children. He says the idea that lessons based on scripts must inevitably bore children should surprise anyone who enjoys other things that are performed from scripts, such as plays…

“[T]eachers sometimes bristle at the constraints that scripts impose: “It is not what they teach you in teacher school.” Sceptics often come round…when they see kids making swift progress. Mr Wickman points out that other expensively trained professionals, such as pilots and surgeons, also have procedures that they must follow to the letter. After some initial complaints (similar to those expressed by dubious teachers) such regimented approaches have become widespread in those fields. They help reduce mistakes, and spread better ways of doing things.” 

There Is No Thinking without Memorizing

This beautifully-written article “There Is No Thinking without Memorizing” by Professor Jon Schaff gives a great overview of counterintuitive notions in education. Key graf: “We deploy faddish educational notions such as ‘critical thinking’ to the detriment of our students. What is often derided as ‘rote-learning’ is actually essential to sophisticated analysis. Memorization creates a base of knowledge. We draw upon this foundational knowledge as we engage in more conceptual thinking.”

Inspiring Feedback for the Day

You’re never too old to learn, as one LHTLer notes:

“I’m a 39 years old veterinary medicine student with an aviation background. I learned how to fly through repetitive practice (actual flying), while in vet school I’m learning to be a doctor through repetitive lectures and written exams. I find vet school very challenging, but I apply what I learned from your course every day of my academic career. So, I want to sincerely thank you for creating and making “Learning how to learn” available to anyone. It is the best help and tool a student can have!”

—Celia Angelica Barnett, BS, LMU-CVM Class of 2025, Student Ambassador, Tutor

That’s all for now. Have a happy month in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!