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Casa Blanca was a boring movie without a lot of action, but Star Wars, man did that have some great light saber fights. I’m speaking here, of course, as a kid: to see how children understand language, you need look no further than your own memory, specifically, your memory of movies and video games from [...]

There are great teachers out there, but there are also lousy ones. Practically every kid who goes through the school system eventually experiences being Smarter Than The Teacher. In high school, I once got a calculus textbook confiscated because the principal felt it was a distraction during algebra class. It can feel frustrating, especially in [...]

I was interested in a lot of crazy stuff as a child. There was a time when I was obsessed with locks and keys, another when I was passionately interested in piano. For years I worshiped Super Mario, even though the family didn’t have a Nintendo– I guess if we’d had one I would’ve grown [...]

Writers of math books should realize: no matter how many irrelevant pictures you plaster on every page, people are still going to think your math textbook is an arcane tome of black magic. You might as well make it look like a tome of spells, at least that way it’s cool. No, I don’t need [...]

If your goal is to become a sculptor, it’s worth your while to try chiseling a wheel out of stone. Just for practice, you know. Reinventing the wheel isn’t always a bad thing. It gives you a lot of insight and skill in an area you’re starting out in. I believe that for an Autodidact, [...]

To an adult language learner, the first language is always the hardest. It makes a lot of sense to pick an easy language from the start. That’s absolutely fine if you’re interested in learning, say, Spanish. But maybe you don’t wanna study Spanish for a year. Maybe you want to learn Japanese, Russian, or Mandarin. [...]

When mastering any discipline, you’re bound to run into the Plateau Effect from time to time. For awhile, your mastery increases steadily through training or studying, but then you begin to experience diminishing returns. The slope of mastery versus time evens out, until you reach the plateau point, when it seems like further investment just [...]

When people ask me, “What math should I study so I can (fill in the blank)”, the answer I give them isn’t quite what they expect. The best answer to this question is: whichever mathematics you think is the most fun and interesting. This answer doesn’t depend at all on what (blank) is. It doesn’t [...]

In order to improve the blog, I’m gonna teach myself JavaScript tonight. The main thing I’m looking at is setting it up so the AdSense advertisements don’t show up for regular readers, just for visitors from search engines. In WordPress, there’s a plugin to do this, but my attempt to convert to WordPress wasn’t as [...]

Once in sixth grade mathclass, I misplaced a graded quiz on fractions. Mrs. Locatelli called me to her desk while we were doing work on our own, and started discussing what we were gonna do, because by sheer misfortune, she had managed to delete the grade as well. The situation looked difficult, until I reminded [...]