# The Talent Code

Instead, the teachers and coaches I met were quiet, even reserved. They were mostly older; many had been teaching thirty or forty years. They possessed the same sort of gaze: steady, deep, unblinking. They listened far more than they talked. They seemed allergic to giving pep talks or inspiring speeches; they spent most of their time offering small, targeted, highly specific adjustments. They had an extraordinary sensitivity to the person they were teaching, customizing each message to each student’s personality.

On John Wooden: Gallimore and Tharp recorded and coded 2,326 discrete acts of teaching. Of them, a mere 6.9 percent were compliments. Only 6.6 percent were expressions of displeasure. But 75 percent were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when to intensify an activity.

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# Online teaching vs. Classroom teaching

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• If teachers were to teach as Salman Khan teaches in his videos they would be down rated. The math teacher who shows her class several very clear examples followed by some practice problems will be rated developing on the basis that she was too teacher centered, not engaging, and too focused on procedures.
• Where was the student engagement? Why weren’t they sitting in groups? Where was your differentiation? Where was your student-centered instruction? Why no discovery based learning?

# Learning Myths

• Quizzing yourself on something you’ve just read is a great example of active learning, the best way to learn.
• Research shows that deep subject matter expertise is a key element in helping teachers excel.
• What is helpful is that [the feedback] comes close to when you perform the task, and that it requires you to generate an answer
• Re-reading and highlighting are particularly ineffective. They’re just passive, and you are just kind of skimming that material.   If you’re preparing for a meeting, you’d be much better off just putting the material away and just asking yourself questions.
• I think there’s so much stuff out there now that’s like, “Learning’s supposed to be easy, learning’s supposed to be fun!”
• People underestimate how much they forget, and people who are able to revisit their learning at a regular rate end up learning a lot more.

# The 10,000-hour rule is wrong and perpetuates a cruel myth

•  For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times as much deliberate practice as another player to become a master.
•  Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. For example, deliberate practice explained 26% of the variation for games such as chess, 21% for music, and 18% for sports.
• Researchers found that there was a stronger correspondence in drawing ability for the identical twins than for the fraternal twins. In other words, if one identical twin was good at drawing, it was quite likely that his or her identical sibling was, too.
• But it does imply that there are limits on the transformative power of practice. As Mosing and her colleagues concluded, practice does not make perfect.
•  Jesse Owens, Marion Jones, and Usain Bolt, and found that, in all cases, they were exceptional compared with their competitors from the very start of their sprinting careers — before they had accumulated much more practice than their peers.

# Investment Returns and Geometric Mean

What if an investment returned 5%, 20%, and 50% over three years?
Year 1:  $100 * .05 =$105
Year 2:  $105 * .20 =$126
Year 3:  $126 * .50 =$189

What was the annual return?  Can you just average the percentages?
Let’s try it.  The average of 5%, 20%, and 50% is 25%
Did you average 25% a year?

Year 1:  $100 * .25 =$125
Year 2:  $125 * .25 =$156.25
Year 3:  $156.25 * .25 =$195.31

No, 25% for 3 years gets you a different amount!

You calculate the average annual return via the geometric mean (not the arithmetic mean)

$\sqrt[3]{1.05 * 1.20 * 1.50} -1 = .236$

Your annual return was actually 23.6%

Year 1:  $100 * .236 =$123.6
Year 2:  $123.6 * .236 =$152.77
Year 3:  $152.77 * .236 =$188.82

# PRACTICE DOESN’T MAKE PERFECT

• How much did practice actually explain? A 2014 meta-analysis looked specifically at the relationship between deliberate practice and performance in music, games like chess, sports, education, and other professions.
• For some things, like games, practice explained about a quarter of variance in expertise.
• For music and sports, the explanatory power accounted for about a fifth.
• But for education and professions like computer science, military-aircraft piloting, and sales, the effect ranged from small to tiny. For all of these professions, you obviously need to practice, but natural abilities matter more.

# Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension

• The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.
• The benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”
• The amount of verbatim overlap was associated with worse performance on conceptual items.

What You Miss When You Take Notes on Your Laptop

• Mueller and Oppenheimer predicted that the decrease in retention appeared to be due to “verbatim transcription.”
• And again, though the laptop note takers recorded a larger amount of notes, the longhand note takers performed better on conceptual, and this time factual, questions.

A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop

• Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material

# Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away

•  For questions that asked students to simply remember facts, like dates, both groups did equally well.
• But for “conceptual-application” questions, such as, “How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?” the laptop users did “significantly worse.”
• “The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.”

# SHOULD AIRPLANES BE FLYING THEMSELVES?

Fascinating account of the risks of automation when manual rote baseline skills are overlooked, neglected, and deficient.  This applies to much more than flying.

# Different kinds of Infinity

Which set is larger?  The set of all positive integers {1,2,3,4,…} or the set of positive even integers {2,4,6,8,…}  ?

# Can Students Have Too Much Tech?

• “Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” the economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.
•  What’s worse, the weaker students (boys, African-Americans) were more adversely affected than the rest. When their computers arrived, their reading scores fell off a cliff.
•  With no adults to supervise them, many kids used their networked devices not for schoolwork, but to play games, troll social media and download entertainment. (And why not? Given their druthers, most adults would do the same.)
• Technology does have a role in education. But as Randy Yerrick, a professor of education at the University at Buffalo, told me, it is worth the investment only when it’s perfectly suited to the task, in science simulations, for example, or to teach students with learning disabilities.

Can Students Have Too Much Tech?