Hello. My name is Alex. I am the 10-year-old son of LessWrong user James_Miller.
I am very good at math for my age. I have read several of the books on rationality that my dad owns, and he convinced me to join this community. I like the idea of everyone in a community being honest because I often get into trouble at school for saying honest things that people don’t like and talking back to adults(which seems like it’s defined as not doing exactly what you’re told.)
My favorite subject in school is math. At home, my interests are playing the video game Minecraft and doing origami, but I also like to read and play soccer.
I have much to learn in the art of rationality, such as finding more ways to be in flow. My dad tells me that there are a lot of people on this site who were like me as children, and I would love advice on how to be less bored in school, controlling my emotions, and finding ways to improve myself in general.
I was similiar in some aspects to you when I was a kid, in particular being good at math (did calculus and programming at 12-13), getting in trouble, being bored in school, reading a lot, having trouble with emotions.
I hadn’t had an explicitly rational upbringing, and only recently (9 months or so) got into it after a chance encounter with HPMOR.
I’ll try to give advice on the things you asked. Bear in mind that I didn’t actually try any of this when I was in school, it’s mostly what I would advise my younger self if I had to do it over.
So, you mention being bored in school. There are at least three possible scenarios for that, which should be solved differently:
You have trouble concentrating or generating the will to concentrate on material that you don’t know, but think is important.
You think the material being taught is unimportant and therefore don’t care about paying attention.
You already know all or some of the material that is being taught.
I don’t really have anything for 1 aside from the standard “force yourself to pay attention”, maybe others can help.
For 3, you could consider asking (or having your parents ask) to be skipped a class, or ask to be allowed off, if you really know everything that is being taught. (I haven’t taken any real math classes since sometime around 7th grade. I’d take out books from the library and just go through them. Also someone gave me a bunch of old Martin Gardner books about math, which are quite interesting if you can find them.)
If you absolutely must be in a class where you already know what’s being taught, try finding math questions to think about that you can memorize, so you can work on them without looking like you’re doing something else. Try http://brilliant.org/ , and find your level. You should be able to easily memorize a few questions each day, and work them out mentally throughout the day, perhaps writing down the answers during recess or something. I’ve done this myself sometimes, when I had to wait for a bus and it would be awkward to read something while waiting.
For 2, you should carefully consider how likely it is that you already know, at 10, what kinds of things are likely to be important, better than whoever planned your curriculum. If you really feel that way, respond and I’ll come up with something for that, but I do think it’s unlikely.
Thanks! I’m the 3rd scenario in my case, and I joined that Brilliant website. It seems to be helpful so far. I do have to participate in classes where I know everything, so what I’ll end up doing most of the time is having my dad send me to school with special math worksheets that are at my level that I can do during math class.
I already have some Martin Gardener books, and will be ordering more, as you are not the only person who recommended him.
When I think back to when I was your age, I really wished I had gotten more involved in math competitions. Does your school have any programs like MATHCOUNTS, AMC8, etc.? I didn’t compete in any academic competitions until high school, and I really wished that I had known about them earlier on. It makes getting ahead in math so much fun and it helps lay some really important foundations for the more complicated stuff.
At a young age one of the most important thing to develop is a habit of perseverance and not giving up when trying to solve a problem and avoiding developing areas of learned blankness. You should develop an unfaltering confidence to use your own head when trying to solve the problems. Sharpening mental capabilities and developing good mental habits and attitudes seems to be more important than learning more things (for example, the author of many AoPS books, Richard Rusczyk, thinks that it is better for kids to sharpen their minds solving olympiad problems than learn calculus), although desire to learn more, to build your own understanding, is also important. And it is not necessary that the problems are mathematical in nature. For example, if you read Richard Feynman’s “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, you would notice that as a young boy he loved to fix things and everybody brought their broken radios to him. He would then fix them, seeing it as a challenge, as a problem to solve. He had to find a way to fix it, no matter how non-obvious the problem was. I think this helped him to sharpen his mind and instilled a good habit to see interesting problems everywhere. If you have to think for yourself, you lessen the risk of developing learned blankness. Try to think for yourself, even if it takes much more time than simply finding solution on the internet. In the long run, developing good mental habits is probably the most important thing.
I’m 29 now, but I was a lot like you at age 10. I think you’ll like it here—you might find some material too advanced, but then I still do sometimes, so don’t be too worried. You’ll pick it up as you go along.
I can tell you stories of what I was doing at your age, but frankly I don’t think it’d help much(since I did a lot of things wrong myself). The one piece of advice I’ll give you that I think might actually help is this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html—more than anything else, it’s what I wish I’d been able to read when I was your age. It does get better, and more quickly than you might expect.
Also, to a lesser extent, the ever-interesting Yvain posted this bit on his blog, which might help explain why what teachers do bugs you so much:
When I was a student, I hated all my teachers and thought that if they just ditched the constant repetition, the cutesy but vapid games, the police state attitude, then everyone would learn a lot more and school would finally live up to its potential as “not totally incompatible with learning, sometimes”.
And then I started teaching English, tried presenting the actually interesting things about the English language at a reasonable pace as if I were talking to real human beings. And it was a disaster. I would give this really brilliant and lucid presentation of a fascinating concept, and then ask a basic question about it, and even though I had just explained it, no one in the class would even have been listening to it. They’d be too busy chattering to one another in the corner. So finally out of desperation I was like “Who wants to do some kind of idiotic activity in which we all pick English words and color them in and then do a stupid dance about them??!” (I may not have used those exact words) and sure enough everyone wanted to and at the end some of them sort of vaguely remembered the vocabulary.
By the end of the school year I had realized that nothing was getting learned without threatening a test on it later, nothing was getting learned regardless unless it was rote memorization of a few especially boring points, and that I could usually force students to sit still long enough to learn it if and only if I bribed them with vapid games at regular intervals.
Yet pretty much every day I see people saying “Schools are evil fascist institutions that deliberately avoid teaching students for sinister reasons. If you just inspire a love of learning in them, they’ll be thrilled to finally have new vistas to explore and they’ll go above and beyond what you possibly expected.”
To which the only answer is no they frickin’ won’t. Yes, there will be two or three who do. Probably you were one of them, or your kid is one of them, and you think everything should be centered around those people. Fine. That’s what home schooling is for. But there will also be oh so many who ask “Will the grandeur and beauty of the fathomless universe be on the test?”. And when you say that the true test is whether they feel connected to the tradition of inquiry into the mysteries of Nature, they’ll roll their eyes and secretly play Pokemon on their Nintendo DS thinking you can’t see it if it’s held kind of under their desk.
My elementary school (I’m 28 by they way, so this is some two decades ago) actually had a program for students like that; one day a week , you would be pulled out of normal class for an alternative class where the material was taught through projects and discussions, logic was explicitly both encouraged in thinking and taught as a skill, and there was basically no rote memorization. We learned games like chess and Magic: the Gathering (I had no idea how huge that game would go on to become; I wonder if the teacher still has those first-edition decks?) during our breaks from “actual” instruction, and there were basically no tests.
It was a ton of fun, but I only stayed in it for one year; the other four days a week were still boring me out of my skull. After the year in that pull-out program, I transferred to another school that had a fully accelerated / “gifted” curriculum. That was less boring—the material and pacing were both better, but I was still the top math student in the class and frequently bored there waiting for others to catch up, for example—but I missed the one-day-a-week program from the old school.
As for what I did during the mind-numbing classes, I read. Fiction mostly, but some non-fiction—I really loved “The Way Things Work” books when I was about Alex’s age—and I usually tried to make it not-entirely-obvious what I was doing. The teachers knew, of course, but as long as I didn’t flaunt what I was doing and kept my scores up, they didn’t generally care. I was bad at the participation / stupid games stuff in those classes, but I learned to read stuff way “above my level” and got way more benefit out of it that I would have from listening to the teacher drone on about how to do long division or whatever.
My school board did similar—I did the full-time gifted class, my brother did the one day a week.
I also got accelerated to a rather extreme degree—I skipped 3 grades, and started highschool at age 10. It was a mixed blessing, frankly—it got me past the “kids are pure evil” years, and turned me from the obnoxiously nerdy kid into a curiousity, which got me picked on a lot less. The material didn’t get much more interesting—once you catch up, it’s being taught at the same pace. And on the downside, it made me a lot more awkward in highschool years than I probably would have been otherwise, because the age gap meant that the usual diversions of dating and drinking didn’t open up for me until years after they had for everyone else(and when everyone else is years more experienced than you, self-consciousness sets in with dating, and slows you down even further—I didn’t even ask a girl out until I was about 18-19).
I pretend to be named Ilzolende, and I’m 16, which puts me closer to you in age than the majority of commenters here. I’d suggest learning about common cognitive biases for general self-improvement. In terms of academic boredom, it may help to find a secondary activity that you can perform that does not interfere with your ability to absorb spoken information. Small, quiet things for you to play with in your hands without looking, like Silly Putty, are useful options.
This doesn’t always help, but trying to figure out why you feel a certain way can dampen some emotions. When I’m really angry at someone, but I don’t want to be, sometimes telling myself “my body is having an anger reaction, but that doesn’t mean I have to be upset at that person” is useful, as is directing feelings of aggression to an inanimate object. (Don’t actually attack the object, just replace any images you have of you hurting someone with you hitting (for example) a drum set.)
If you realize that you have no good reason you can think of for having an emotion, you may want to treat it as a physical problem. If I’m sad, but not due to actual external phenomena, then sometimes just reading something nice for half an hour works.
I don’t know how well this generalizes, and there may be some negative costs to playing with Silly Putty in class, so take this with a grain of salt.
Hello. My name is Alex. I am the 10-year-old son of LessWrong user James_Miller.
I am very good at math for my age. I have read several of the books on rationality that my dad owns, and he convinced me to join this community. I like the idea of everyone in a community being honest because I often get into trouble at school for saying honest things that people don’t like and talking back to adults(which seems like it’s defined as not doing exactly what you’re told.)
My favorite subject in school is math. At home, my interests are playing the video game Minecraft and doing origami, but I also like to read and play soccer.
I have much to learn in the art of rationality, such as finding more ways to be in flow. My dad tells me that there are a lot of people on this site who were like me as children, and I would love advice on how to be less bored in school, controlling my emotions, and finding ways to improve myself in general.
My name is Avi, and I’m 19.
I was similiar in some aspects to you when I was a kid, in particular being good at math (did calculus and programming at 12-13), getting in trouble, being bored in school, reading a lot, having trouble with emotions.
I hadn’t had an explicitly rational upbringing, and only recently (9 months or so) got into it after a chance encounter with HPMOR.
I’ll try to give advice on the things you asked. Bear in mind that I didn’t actually try any of this when I was in school, it’s mostly what I would advise my younger self if I had to do it over.
So, you mention being bored in school. There are at least three possible scenarios for that, which should be solved differently:
You have trouble concentrating or generating the will to concentrate on material that you don’t know, but think is important.
You think the material being taught is unimportant and therefore don’t care about paying attention.
You already know all or some of the material that is being taught.
I don’t really have anything for 1 aside from the standard “force yourself to pay attention”, maybe others can help.
For 3, you could consider asking (or having your parents ask) to be skipped a class, or ask to be allowed off, if you really know everything that is being taught. (I haven’t taken any real math classes since sometime around 7th grade. I’d take out books from the library and just go through them. Also someone gave me a bunch of old Martin Gardner books about math, which are quite interesting if you can find them.)
If you absolutely must be in a class where you already know what’s being taught, try finding math questions to think about that you can memorize, so you can work on them without looking like you’re doing something else. Try http://brilliant.org/ , and find your level. You should be able to easily memorize a few questions each day, and work them out mentally throughout the day, perhaps writing down the answers during recess or something. I’ve done this myself sometimes, when I had to wait for a bus and it would be awkward to read something while waiting.
For 2, you should carefully consider how likely it is that you already know, at 10, what kinds of things are likely to be important, better than whoever planned your curriculum. If you really feel that way, respond and I’ll come up with something for that, but I do think it’s unlikely.
Thanks! I’m the 3rd scenario in my case, and I joined that Brilliant website. It seems to be helpful so far. I do have to participate in classes where I know everything, so what I’ll end up doing most of the time is having my dad send me to school with special math worksheets that are at my level that I can do during math class.
I already have some Martin Gardener books, and will be ordering more, as you are not the only person who recommended him.
.
Hey Alex!
When I think back to when I was your age, I really wished I had gotten more involved in math competitions. Does your school have any programs like MATHCOUNTS, AMC8, etc.? I didn’t compete in any academic competitions until high school, and I really wished that I had known about them earlier on. It makes getting ahead in math so much fun and it helps lay some really important foundations for the more complicated stuff.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
Also anything by Martin Gardner, because his books are so much fun and help to spark your imagination.
At a young age one of the most important thing to develop is a habit of perseverance and not giving up when trying to solve a problem and avoiding developing areas of learned blankness. You should develop an unfaltering confidence to use your own head when trying to solve the problems. Sharpening mental capabilities and developing good mental habits and attitudes seems to be more important than learning more things (for example, the author of many AoPS books, Richard Rusczyk, thinks that it is better for kids to sharpen their minds solving olympiad problems than learn calculus), although desire to learn more, to build your own understanding, is also important. And it is not necessary that the problems are mathematical in nature. For example, if you read Richard Feynman’s “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, you would notice that as a young boy he loved to fix things and everybody brought their broken radios to him. He would then fix them, seeing it as a challenge, as a problem to solve. He had to find a way to fix it, no matter how non-obvious the problem was. I think this helped him to sharpen his mind and instilled a good habit to see interesting problems everywhere. If you have to think for yourself, you lessen the risk of developing learned blankness. Try to think for yourself, even if it takes much more time than simply finding solution on the internet. In the long run, developing good mental habits is probably the most important thing.
Also check out the Art of Problem Solving books. They’ve also got some interesting resources on their website.
Also Journey through Genius by William Dunham and The Art and Craft of Problem Solving by Paul Zeitz.
I’m 29 now, but I was a lot like you at age 10. I think you’ll like it here—you might find some material too advanced, but then I still do sometimes, so don’t be too worried. You’ll pick it up as you go along.
I can tell you stories of what I was doing at your age, but frankly I don’t think it’d help much(since I did a lot of things wrong myself). The one piece of advice I’ll give you that I think might actually help is this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html—more than anything else, it’s what I wish I’d been able to read when I was your age. It does get better, and more quickly than you might expect.
Also, to a lesser extent, the ever-interesting Yvain posted this bit on his blog, which might help explain why what teachers do bugs you so much:
My elementary school (I’m 28 by they way, so this is some two decades ago) actually had a program for students like that; one day a week , you would be pulled out of normal class for an alternative class where the material was taught through projects and discussions, logic was explicitly both encouraged in thinking and taught as a skill, and there was basically no rote memorization. We learned games like chess and Magic: the Gathering (I had no idea how huge that game would go on to become; I wonder if the teacher still has those first-edition decks?) during our breaks from “actual” instruction, and there were basically no tests.
It was a ton of fun, but I only stayed in it for one year; the other four days a week were still boring me out of my skull. After the year in that pull-out program, I transferred to another school that had a fully accelerated / “gifted” curriculum. That was less boring—the material and pacing were both better, but I was still the top math student in the class and frequently bored there waiting for others to catch up, for example—but I missed the one-day-a-week program from the old school.
As for what I did during the mind-numbing classes, I read. Fiction mostly, but some non-fiction—I really loved “The Way Things Work” books when I was about Alex’s age—and I usually tried to make it not-entirely-obvious what I was doing. The teachers knew, of course, but as long as I didn’t flaunt what I was doing and kept my scores up, they didn’t generally care. I was bad at the participation / stupid games stuff in those classes, but I learned to read stuff way “above my level” and got way more benefit out of it that I would have from listening to the teacher drone on about how to do long division or whatever.
My school board did similar—I did the full-time gifted class, my brother did the one day a week.
I also got accelerated to a rather extreme degree—I skipped 3 grades, and started highschool at age 10. It was a mixed blessing, frankly—it got me past the “kids are pure evil” years, and turned me from the obnoxiously nerdy kid into a curiousity, which got me picked on a lot less. The material didn’t get much more interesting—once you catch up, it’s being taught at the same pace. And on the downside, it made me a lot more awkward in highschool years than I probably would have been otherwise, because the age gap meant that the usual diversions of dating and drinking didn’t open up for me until years after they had for everyone else(and when everyone else is years more experienced than you, self-consciousness sets in with dating, and slows you down even further—I didn’t even ask a girl out until I was about 18-19).
Hi, Alex!
I pretend to be named Ilzolende, and I’m 16, which puts me closer to you in age than the majority of commenters here. I’d suggest learning about common cognitive biases for general self-improvement. In terms of academic boredom, it may help to find a secondary activity that you can perform that does not interfere with your ability to absorb spoken information. Small, quiet things for you to play with in your hands without looking, like Silly Putty, are useful options.
This doesn’t always help, but trying to figure out why you feel a certain way can dampen some emotions. When I’m really angry at someone, but I don’t want to be, sometimes telling myself “my body is having an anger reaction, but that doesn’t mean I have to be upset at that person” is useful, as is directing feelings of aggression to an inanimate object. (Don’t actually attack the object, just replace any images you have of you hurting someone with you hitting (for example) a drum set.)
If you realize that you have no good reason you can think of for having an emotion, you may want to treat it as a physical problem. If I’m sad, but not due to actual external phenomena, then sometimes just reading something nice for half an hour works.
I don’t know how well this generalizes, and there may be some negative costs to playing with Silly Putty in class, so take this with a grain of salt.