Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
New on JustinMath.com - Spaced repetition is like weight training for memory. You might even call it wait training.
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Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com. Here are the 3 top posts from the past week: __________ #1So much of your future is shaped by what you do when nobody is making you do anything.Sometimes you have to behave like a parent to yourself.
Not a tyrant.
Not a motivational speaker.
A parent.
The part of you that can see beyond the next ten minutes has to sit down with the part of you that wants comfort right now and say:
“Listen kid, I know you do not feel like doing this, but I care about you, so we are doing it anyway.”
A lot of people treat every internal resistance signal as sacred.
I do not feel motivated.
I am tired.
I am not in the right headspace.
I deserve a break.
Sometimes those signals matter.
But sometimes they are just the inner child trying to avoid vegetables, bedtime, homework, and practice.
__________ #2Spaced repetition is like weight training for memory. You might even call it wait training.Spaced repetition is so similar to weight training that you might as well call it wait training. You are lifting a memory off the floor of long-term memory and raising it into working memory. The wait creates the weight.
If you just saw the information five seconds ago, the rep is light. Of course you can remember it. It is still warm in your head. The information has momentum. You are doing the cognitive equivalent of kipping.
But when time passes, and forgetting sets in, the memory gets fuzzier. Retrieval gets harder. Now the rep has weight. You have to strain a little. You don’t have momentum from the surrounding context. You have to reconstruct the information from scratch.
It’s progressive overload. As the memory gets stronger, you increase the interval. The goal is to make the next rep hard enough to force adaptation.
But just as weights can be too heavy, intervals can be too long. The goal is difficult yet successful retrieval, not complete failure.
__________ #3Mediocrity does not need a villain. It only needs sustained inattention.Every system eventually decays into mediocrity unless someone fights to keep the standards high.
That includes your school, your company, your project, your team, your body, your habits, your attention, your skill development, and your life.
Decay is the default. Standards do not preserve themselves. Entropy is always recruiting.
“I used to be disciplined” does not matter.
“I used to be sharp” does not matter.
“I used to care” does not matter.
If the standard is not being actively maintained today, it is already slipping.
Mediocrity does not need a villain. It just needs you to stop paying attention. If nobody is intentionally keeping the standard alive, the standard is already dying.
__________ The rest are available here! Best, |
Justin Skycak
Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
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