In this episode, we will look at the article Seeing the Glass Half Full: A Review of the Causes and Consequences of Optimism by Mary Forgeard and Martin Seligman. (The name of the article was so long that I thought it might be better to give the episode a to-the-point, minimalistic title.) Since we just looked at self-esteem and at self-compassion, I thought it might be good to take a look at another concept within the same general psychological area: optimism. Is optimism good for you? What cau...
Sep 22, 2017•21 min
We've seen in the previous episode how trying to increase one's self-esteem is a dangerous proposition, and how having high self-esteem is not necessarily a good thing. Now it's time to look at another approach to the self which is a lot more promising. Self-compassion is an idea taken originally from traditional buddhist psychology, but now studied fairly extensively with the scientific method. In a word, it's being nice to yourself. It is trying to be your own "best friend" by thinking about h...
Sep 22, 2017•1 hr 6 min
Self-esteem is a psychological concept that has penetrated everyday language. In many Western countries, it is generally understood that high self-esteem is essential to health, happiness, and success. Is this really the case? And how did this idea spread? So much was the excitement about self-esteem in the early 90's that the California state legislature set up a Task Force to Promote Self Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, with an annual budget of over $700,000. All it took was som...
Sep 20, 2017•54 min
I spent a month in summer in Lithuania on a language course. Some events while I was there prompted me to realise something about education that I had heard before, but never quite understood. The music played in this episode is Lietuvos istorijos repas by Šventinis bunkuchenas. Enjoy the episode.
Sep 20, 2017•54 min
It reduces productivity, prevents learning, reduces effective IQ, disrupts relationships, undermines creative thinking, and saps self-control. It increases the risk of depression, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and ADHD. What is it? Lack of sleep. Sleep is essential for learning. We spend around a third of our lives in this state, and yet we take up much less than one third of our time thinking about how to make it better. In Night School, not only can we learn all about ...
Jun 25, 2017•1 hr 21 min
Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk Do Schools Kill Creativity is the most popular TED talk ever given, with just under 45 million views at the time of my writing this. It is so influential that Robinson has a page on his website devoted to feedback forms about how the talk changed people's lives. It is also nonsense. And yet, somehow, I was also convinced by it when I first heard it. The weakness of Robinson's arguments combined with the powerful effect he seems to have on people are testament to his i...
May 05, 2017•1 hr 40 min
I thought it was about time to cover something about books on this book-related podcast! Keith Stanovich and Annie Cunningham are two researchers who have spent their careers working together to understand the effects of reading on knowledge. Their research aims to answer a few questions in particular: 1. How much does reading matter in increasing people's knowledge? Is amount of reading irrelevant, since amount of information absorbed depends so much more strongly on innate intelligence than it...
Apr 13, 2017•1 hr 21 min
11% of children and 4% of adults in the US are said to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Dr Richard Saul has been a specialist in attention and learning problems in children and adults since the 1970's. He says that there is no such thing as ADHD. What, then, are all these children and adults suffering from? Dr Saul answers this question very thoroughly. It could be any of the following: Vision problems Sleep disturbance Substance abuse Mood disorders (bipolar disorder, depre...
Apr 08, 2017•38 min
This continues the episode about The Geography of Thought, looking at more ways in which the cultural differences manifest themselves in differing psychologies of people from different parts of the world. Themes include: Visual perception; Descriptions and understandings of the self; Attitudes to choice; "Fitting in" versus uniqueness; Attitudes to the law and contractual agreements; Factors affecting motivation; Preference for different types of reasoning; and Approaches to blame and causality....
Apr 08, 2017•1 hr 13 min
Unlike many books that I cover, this is one that I read recently and felt an urgent need to share its contents even before I got to the appropriate theme in a series of episodes. It hit me right where it hurts - in my fundamental assumptions about human nature. As I research the field of education and produce this podcast, I have been generally assuming that people are more or less the same everywhere in their fundamental modes of thinking and feeling. I presumed that the topic of motivation, fo...
Mar 05, 2017•1 hr 16 min
I've received a lot of messages from listeners (as well as from an author!) in the past few days. Several of these messages are things that I would like to share, and there are two in particular that I would like to talk about since I imagine there may be many listeners who have the same questions. Firstly, I talk about my interactions with the folks at Reacting to the Past, and in particular with Mark Carnes, who emailed me within a day of the release of the episode about his book (Minds on Fir...
Feb 19, 2017•1 hr 3 min
The words "theory" and "fun" in such close proximity may make you suspicious. Or, they may make you curious. "Fun" is one of those ideas that is so natural and intuitive, and yet for that very reason is so hard to pin down. Raph Koster has a somewhat peculiar view of what fun is: "Fun is just another word for learning." As the head of Sony Online Entertainment, I'm inclined to believe him. If fun is learning, how do we ensure everyone in education gets more of it - and the right kind? This book ...
Feb 19, 2017•54 min
In recent episodes, we have been discussing games and play, and their relevance to education, as well as to an improved understanding of human psychology. In this episode, I approach some central questions of the field: What is a game? What is a toy? What is play? What is fun? It is by their very naturalness that play, fun, and games are hard to define. We can sense what they are, and that's exactly what makes them hard to put them into words. Jesse Schell surveys the literature and puts togethe...
Feb 17, 2017•52 min
This is a continuation of the episode on Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes. The main idea of this part of the episode is the effects that Reacting to the Past, and role-play in general, have on the "self", i.e. the psychological construct of our selves. Enjoy the episode.
Feb 17, 2017•1 hr 14 min
Last episode, we looked at the various ways in which games can both improve our theoretical understanding of human psychology and of learning, and also at how they can be used practically to improve people's lives. In this episode, I want to discuss a particular practical application of games, and that is in so-called Reacting to the Past. Reacting to the Past is a type of live role-playing game where each participant plays a character from a particular historical time and place. For example, th...
Feb 16, 2017•1 hr 27 min
This episode serves two purposes. On the one hand, I want to go over some more ideas from Jane McGonigal's book, as it is so rich in fresh and original ideas (they're fresh to me, anyway). On the other hand, I would like to go through a pointed criticism of the book entitled Jane McGonigal's Mind is Broken written by Edward Champion. Given how much I got from her book, I am surprised that there are people who are so strongly against it. I think it is good to go through it in the name of balance,...
Jan 02, 2017•1 hr 30 min
Jane McGonigal is a game designer who believes that, in many ways, games bring out the best in people. The reason for their popularity, she claims, is that they satisfy fundamental human needs. This leads, for example, to the highly insightful and completely counterintuitive notion that a big reason for people playing games is that it makes them feel productive . She peppers her book with reality "fixes" - comparisons of games with reality, where games come out on top, and lead the way to a bett...
Jan 02, 2017•1 hr 32 min
Malke Rosenfeld is the creator of Math in your Feet, a program to teach students mathematical concepts through the medium of dance. (Really!) She does school workshops and teacher trainings, and now has a new book, Math on the Move, describing her approach and the theory behind it. We talk about interdisciplinary learning, embodied learning, liking vs. hating maths, and attitudes to "alternative" teaching methods. Malke herself, like many people, never really "got" maths while she was at school....
Jan 02, 2017•1 hr
Today we have an interview with Sargy Letuchy, a public school teacher from Chicago, who has produced some materials to help other teachers with standards-based learning. The Visual Edge is a workbook of graphic organisers for K-12 teachers in the United States. Along the way, we also discuss some other pertinent education topics. Enjoy the episode.
Jan 02, 2017•54 min
Depending on what counts as knowing a language, I speak anything between 7 and 12 languages, namely: English, Polish, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, and Persian well; Hungarian to a lesser extent; and Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian, and Tibetan in the past, now mostly forgotten. Besides this, I have some knowledge of classical languages (Latin, classical Chinese, and ancient Greek); one constructed language (Esperanto); and there are a couple more languages that I've had a smaller a...
Jan 02, 2017•1 hr 15 min
In this episode, I review a paper from the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) about language learning and teaching. The key insights are eleven: Mature adults can learn a foreign language well enough through intensive language study to do things in the language (almost) as well as native speakers. "Language-learning aptitude" varies among individuals and affects their classroom learning success (but at least some aspects of aptitude can be learned). There is no "one right way" to teach (or learn) l...
Dec 20, 2016•1 hr 16 min
I wanted to share some things I learned from my trip to the US this summer, and what my own experience of running maths circles has been like so far. This episode includes: Discussion of the Summer Math Circle Institute; Tips and techniques learned from the Institute; My own experiences of running maths circles; Potatoes with added sugar; What you should and shouldn't assume about students; Why Math Circles (sometimes) work; Why Bloom's Taxonomy is upside-down; and The role of the teacher in hav...
Dec 20, 2016•1 hr 39 min
Interview with Robert Kaplan, co-author of Out of the Labyrinth (the book we looked at in the previous episode), co-founder of The Math Circle, and the man behind the Summer Math Circle Institute course (which I attended this summer). Robert Kaplan tells of his colourful background, his experiences starting and running The Math Circle, and the recent explosion of interest and growth in maths circles in the favelas of Brazil. Enjoy the episode.
Nov 12, 2016•44 min
This is a book that I have more of a connection with than many of the others I cover on the podcast. I first bought a book by these authors when I was 17, and didn't read it until literally ten years later. It was a fascinating recreational maths book. I then discovered that they were involved in alternative maths education, and that they had even set up an organisation for this called The Math Circle. This book relates their experiences of running Math Circles, their philosophy and approach to ...
Nov 12, 2016•1 hr 9 min
Have a go at some of these: An athlete's best time to run a mile is 4 minutes and 10 seconds. How long would it take him to run 5 miles? It takes one orchestra one hour to play a symphony. How long would it take two orchestras to play a symphony? On a ship, there are 13 goats and 12 sheep. How old is the captain? Among schoolchildren, the most common answers to these questions are: 20 minutes and 50 seconds; half an hour; and 25 years old. Hence the title: where are these thoughtless, silly answ...
Oct 26, 2016•1 hr 6 min
Dr Amanda Serenevy is a mathematician and mathematics educator, focussing on outreach through the medium of Math Circles, and on teacher training. This episode appears as number "27+" because the previous episode, Consider the Circle, was about how Amanda rescued a young girl from a terrible time with maths at school. She is the founder and director of Riverbend Community Math Centre in South Bend, Indiana, which works to improve mathematics education within the local community. She runs teacher...
Oct 24, 2016•41 min
A very short episode about an article written by a young girl concerning her experiences with maths. At school, she is faced daily with the same worksheet, always refusing to do it. Her teachers continue to give her the sheet every day for months, keeping her out of the normal classroom. She becomes resentful and angry at maths and at school, and continues her protest of inaction. When she discovers Math Circles, a different approach to maths education, then she stops feeling neglected and start...
Oct 24, 2016•16 min
What do you think of mathematics? Is it: a sterile tool for accounting? boring, mindless, and annoying stuff your teacher makes you do? an anarchic, psychedelic adventure? If you answered 1., mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart vehemently disagrees with you. If you answered 2., then Lockhart understands your plight. If you answered 3., then you really know what maths is. A Mathematician's Lament is a short book all about misconceptions, and how the system propagates them into an insurmountab...
Sep 05, 2016•2 hr 19 min
Over the past century, women have been gaining rights and prejudice against women has declined. Although many would argue that there's still a way to go, the progress is undeniable. Why, then, do men still outperform women in a number of intellectual domains? In this episode, we look at several articles that try to answer this question for one cognitive domain in particular: chess. Chess is a good domain to test for a number of reasons: There is little subjectivity or ambiguity in deciding who i...
Aug 29, 2016•38 min
I write a little blurb like this for every episode, but I feel that some books hardly need any introduction. This is one such example. Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most celebrated journalists and writers of the early 21st century, and his book Outliers caused a splash in people's thinking about success. Why? One answer is that it popularised the idea of the so-called "10,000 hour rule", initially discovered by K. Anders Ericsson, concerning how much "deliberate practice" it takes to become a w...
Aug 15, 2016•1 hr 48 min
