Education is about lighting fires


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My teachers recognized that I lacked internal motivation, but they never really addressed it. _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LucasVB/Gallery   This is incredible! Such an amazing asset for thinking. I wish we had tools like this when we were kids. Reminds me of a TEDtalk by a math teacher, Dan Meyer: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover He describes how we tend to remove […]

July 5, 2018

Being Smart vs Being Kind


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Originally written in July 2017, over at @1000wordvomits. When I was a child, I was told that I was smart. I wasn’t great at socializing, but I was alright. I was the class clown, the smartass, so I did have some friends. But I never really developed the deep, lasting sort of friendships that some […]

June 19, 2018

Radical Candor


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I find myself referencing Radical Candor in many conversations over and over again. It’s a very powerful, simple and useful concept from a book by Kim Scott. I haven’t read the book yet, but the chart alone has given me tonnes of mileage. Here are some blogposts from the site that are worth reading: Radical […]

May 28, 2018

One Must Imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing


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Life, particularly in modern civilization, is an absurd circus. We’re all clowns living in boxes trying to amuse ourselves with elaborate games in the face of inevitable death and meaninglessness. What’s additionally absurd is that we go through a lot of trouble to avoid facing up to this fact. We avoid discussing it with children […]

May 19, 2018

taste is the beating heart of all creative value


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This post is a work-in-progress. It’s really just a set of notes for now. I’ve been finding myself sharing it with people on several occasions. — 1 — I was re-reading Playboy’s 1994 interview of Quentin Tarantino, and I was struck by a point he made about taste and opinions. He talked about how movie […]

May 28, 2016