(2023-11-13) Hendrickson Towers And Kids Brains And Bears Oh My

Brandon Hendrickson: Towers, and kids' brains, and bears, oh my! I’m guessing that you know who Barbara Oakley is because (1) she’s a rock star of education,1 and (2) she just gave us a major shout-out on her newsletter, which reaches something like three orders of magnitude more people than our homely substack!

What you probably don’t know is that Barb changed my life nine years ago.

I was thirty-two, and struggling to figure out how to focus the effect I wanted to have in the world. I saw two roads.

The first road was cognitive psychology

I was ticked off when I’d walk into bookstores. Why?

in the education section, there’d be lame books by hucksters on “study tips” — re-heatings of the same tasteless, nutrition-less leftovers I had had as a kid.

This gap needed to be bridged. And someone needed to bridge it

I suspected that I could do that

That’s the first road. The second road was Kieran Egan’s — to popularize what I was learning by devouring Kieran Egan’s work, meeting with his team, experimenting in my humanities classrooms

And I suspected I could do that, too… but not both.

Then I found Barb’s 2014 book A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even if You Flunked Algebra), and I thought: thank God, someone’s said it better than I could, now I can do the other thing. Barb’s work (then and since) gathers all the great stuff that’s been coming out cognitive psychology in the last thirty years and positively weaponizes it for students and teachers.

Education is confusing, because humans are an unusually convoluted, multilayered creature. The better we understand each layer, the better education can become.

It feels like everyone who has something important to say about education is fixated on some particular level.

I.I.: Which of those levels is right?
They’re all right

Maybe I can explain this better by comparing us to bears.

We can talk about a bear’s cognition. (How long can it remember where the choicest raspberry bush was?

We can talk about a bear’s evolved nature. We can even talk about whether bears have culture

And bear-trainers can swap tricks for dealing with this or that particular bear.

There’s a difference between humans and every other mammal — every other organism — and it’s remade us into a fundamentally new kind of creature.

In the last few million years, natural selection has taken us down what seems to be a novel path. Our cavemen ancestors were able to store and communicate meaningful information to a degree no other organism ever could; this made us able to work together in teams that acted like their own organisms.

Then the forces of Darwinian selection worked on those teams; cultures competed, mutated, and were pruned. Our brains evolved to better take advantage of the cultures that made it.

You can’t understand what we do without understanding all four levels: evolution, culture, cognition, and the quirks of each individual kid in a classroom.

Why do so many of our educational theories crash and burn the moment they enter the classroom? Because they’re not based on the big history perspective of what we are.

Egan’s framework isn’t enough. Bringing his vision into being doesn’t mean rejecting other approaches. Our task is to draw from many different educational perspectives

Egan provides a framework strong enough to bear that load. And Barb’s insights help us fill in one layer of the structure.

Barb explains cognitive things like attention, memory, and thinking; Kieran explain affective things like meaning, motivation, and excitement