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 - The State of "Blah"; High Schoolers Taking Caltech Math Courses; Bottom-Up vs Top-Down ML Education
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Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com. Here are 3 new posts:
And a new podcast: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Knowledge Graph - Math Academy Podcast #4, Part 1
What we covered:
– Why "problem solving" is often just a vague label people use when they haven't explicitly enumerated the underlying skills, and how those skills can in fact be exhaustively mapped in a knowledge graph.
– How to approach research problems: Alex's PhD journey, top-down familiarity vs bottom-up mastery.
– If you have natural talent, use it, but not as a crutch, otherwise you'll stunt your long-term development. Don't turn your blessing into a curse.
– The story behind building our SAT prep curriculum: realizing that the standard school curriculum leaves a massive "missing middle" unaddressed; identifying 115+ missing topics to bridge the gap between textbook math and the hardest SAT questions.
– Watching the manifold hypothesis play out in test prep: the SAT may appear to allow an astronomical space of possible problem types, but in reality the actual problems live on a compact, highly structured manifold that can be fully enumerated and scaffolded in a knowledge graph
Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro: "problem solving" is what you call it when you don't really know what it is (i.e. you haven't explicitly enumerated the skills)
00:04:11 - How to approach research problems: Alex's PhD journey, top-down familiarity vs bottom-up mastery
00:20:28 - If you have natural talent, don't use it as a crutch. Don't turn your blessing into a curse.
00:29:06 - SAT prep, iteration 1: Realizing that the standard school curriculum leaves a massive "missing middle" unaddressed
00:33:45 - SAT prep, iteration 2: Covering the "missing middle" problems
00:53:38 - SAT prep, iteration 3: Building the "missing middle" knowledge graph
01:08:11 - Watching the manifold hypothesis play out in SAT prep
01:16:42 - The unreasonable effectiveness of the knowledge graph
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.
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com.(If you've changed your mind, click here to unsubscribe, please avoid marking spam.) Here are 3 new posts: How and Why To Become the Smart Kid~100 words The Most Common Failure Mode of Stereotypically Smart People~300 words • If you don't really understand what you're automating/generalizing, you're doomed to fail. Investigate before you automate. Become wise, then generalize. How? By doing...
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com.(If you've changed your mind, click here to unsubscribe, please avoid marking spam.) Here are 3 new posts: What Happens When Middle School is Put to Good Use~3100 words • Typical honors students can learn all of high school math plus calculus *in middle school* if they are taught efficiently. They don't have to be geniuses, don't even have to spend more time on school. Just need to use time...
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com.(If you've changed your mind, click here to unsubscribe, please avoid marking spam.) I recently started a podcast with Jason Roberts, called The Math Academy Podcast. We have two episodes out so far! It's on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, and transcripts are available here. Here are our first 2 episodes: Teach Like Your Life Depends On It - Math Academy Podcast #22025 Nov, ~2.75h...