A friend in one of the chats I’m in revived the practice of sharing wordle scores. I joined in because I’m playing the NYT games again thanks to my kids. The 7-year-old comes into my bed every morning to do the cycle: wordle, mini, connections, letterboxed and tiles. In that order. Kids + routine are like pb & j.
Anyway, one of the younger members in the chat goes “sometimes i feel like it would be nice to have a kid just so i can teach them everything i know.”
Very cute. But then a dad injected reality:
nah, they don’t want to learn anything from their parents
Ding, ding ding.
Here’s my impression. Kids learn from you by osmosis. Modeling, not direct instruction.
I think it has something to do with your lessons being a “you” thing. They don’t feel like the knowledge is theirs. Like they can smell your desperation in wanting them to learn no matter how chill you are about it.
It seems like a brand of what David McRaney calls reactance.
This is a concept that has been studied extensively in the context of clinical therapy.
They would come to the therapist and the therapist would say, ‘Well, you know what’s your real problem is. You should be doing this.’ Or, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you don’t do this very much. You should do this.’..All that feels pretty good. They now call that in psychology the “writing reflex”. And, we’ve all felt that whereas someone is saying something and you’re like, ‘Oh, I have the advice for them. I know what to tell that person.’
But, you also have also experienced this other thing that happens, and this seems to be something that’s universal to human beings across all cultures. It’s just something that the brain that we’re issued at birth, it’s something that’s a feature of human thinking, rationality, psychology. Human brains do this. It’s called reactance. In the psychological parlance, they’ll say something along the lines of, you feel motivationally aroused to remove the influence of the attitude object, which just means: ‘You made me feel a feeling I don’t like and I want it to go away. So, I’m going to push you away,’ or ‘I’m going to disengage.’
What is the feeling that’s causing the motivational arousal? It’s the sense that your agency is under threat–your autonomy is under threat. It’s the ‘Unhand me, you fools,’ feeling. You’ve all felt this. If you’ve ever been a teenager or you’ve ever spoken to a teenager, you know what I’m talking about…”You shouldn’t do this. You should study more.”‘ This is good advice that the person when they’re 35 will go, ‘Man, my parents were right about that.’
But, in that moment it’s just the fact that you’re saying, ‘I have a thing in my head that should be in your head and I want it to be in your head.’
And, oddly enough, it’s the want that creates the reactance. The person’s feeling that you have approached them in some way and said, ‘I want you to think, feel, or believe, or act in a certain way that you’re not doing right now,’ and it feels coercive. It feels like they’d come at you and they’re threatening you. They’ve got a knife in their hand, and they’re saying, ‘Walk this way.’ That’s what it feels like.
We just, at a visceral level, will react by saying ‘no thanks’ to that, and we’ll push against it.
Back to the wise dad in the chat. He goes on to say:
you’re better off teaching someone else’s kid
Despite the reactance thing, this also seems true. My kids’ friends are around a lot or I’m shuttling them somewhere so there’s always an interesting spot to drop a fun riddle or word problem into a dull moment especially if the kid is, I don’t know, a “solver” for lack of a better term. (Some kids have the “ugh, I have to use my brain” reflex. Tread lightly…most kids are solvers at some level but you might need to hide the pill in the peanut butter.)
[My 10-year-old likes to needle me by announcing to his friends “Imagine having to live with this all the time” but I’m getting better at dialing in the dose. I think.]
Meanwhile, some kids are just thirsting for enrichment. I have one friend who asked me to point them to resources for their precocious son (the kid is an alien — genius, super athlete, and socially adept…I wish I could share some of the stories). I figured I could teach them about something I know about or just point them to things that might align with their interests. That might be a more productive frame. Just shepherd them towards sources of intellectual nourishment.
I sent this particular kid Ed Thorp’s bio not just because the action arc will provoke but because Ed’s own childhood will be relatable to a boy who sees through his or her surroundings like an x-ray. The Founders’ podcast is also an effective way to introduce a powerful mind to its greatest lever — the belief that the rules are all just made up. The world is malleable. See The Podcast I Listen To With My 9-Year-Old.
While today’s musing is mostly an off-the-cuff reaction to the wordle chat, I also had a related exchange this week with a college student who DM’d me on Twitter. I got permission to share it here. The first part conveniently flatters Moontower so you’ll have to sit through that for a scrubby second. (I added the hyperlinks for this reprint).
Original DM: Hey Kris, Hope you’re well. I’m a junior at [Ivy] and will be interning at SIG (Bala Cynwyd) this summer. I’ve been reading your posts for over a year now, and they really helped me gain intuition around options (and also other math concepts – like thinking in log space and Jensen’s inequality). I recently joined this mentoring program called Big Brothers Big Sisters, and I got matched with a Little from a middle school in [city]. He really enjoys sports and board games. Today, we played some games from the book Math Games with Bad Drawings (which I found from your blog) – it was really fun! I was wondering if you had any recommendations for fun 2-person activities, which could also teach useful concepts like decision-making and strategic thinking
My response: First glad the site has been useful for you. Cool that you are doing that program. My general recommendation is to just find interesting scenarios to analyze in whatever the kid is interested in. Tree (ie binomial) thinking can be applied anywhere in decision land. For example, whether to punt or go for it if it’s a football fan.
I recently taught some kids about the idea of volatility but in a light way. We were talking about daylight savings time and I told them it actually causes accidents. And I just socratically asked them why that might be true…(people rushing to work, sleeping in, not sleeping enough, etc). But I asked them how they would know that DST was the culprit? And where I’m leading them to is “What does it mean for there to be a number of accidents that exceeds the norm by an amount that isn’t noise”…ie statistical significance.
But I don’t burden them with these words. I just have them propose a guess for the number of typical accidents in a day in say their county or state. Then I make up a fake data set and have them compute the mean and the mean absolute deviation. This is basically what our minds do automatically when deciding if something is abnormal but here we just lay the thinking out step by step. And then maybe on our fake data, they compute some MAD of like 50 accidents a day and then we see that there’s 150 on DST day. That’s how you know DST is the culprit.
Generally, I look for learning moments in everyday stuff or their interests. Better to be socratic not pedantic so they can discover the lessons themselves. Then they “own” them.
And then I attached some resources.
This is one I just published and I will add to over time:
A Collection of Math Riddles/Puzzles (Moontower)
which can be found in this wider portal:
And here’s a nice thing about helping kids that aren’t your own. They appreciate it. Got this in the mail:
Just a reminder. Do stuff. If you can make it cool that’s a bonus. But even corny with enough persistence eventually endears because it’s authentic. It’s all better than apathy.
Try. The world vibrates back.