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when i was a kid reading encyclopedias and astrophysics books for educated amateurs (βcause thatβs what i wanted to readβ¦) i arrived in kindergarten where we were literally learning letters from the alphabet one by one it was kafkaesque torture & my teacher called me a smartass https://t.co/3HYognDwhk
i think it was my parents who insisted they test me, and through whatever test they did which if i remember properly included analogies, geometry stuff with blocks, and like, make a story out of pictures as well as some math, they were like, ok you tested into the 11th grade
but talented and gifted programs were eliminated then. every class from what was then second grade and up had a gifted stream. none of the kindergarten and first grade classes did. they stuck me in first gradeβ¦
ultimately iβm grateful for the friends i made in the class I ended up in. there were still bright kids in class who it was really fun to hang out with, and a statistically unusual number of my classmates have gotten phds or gone on to pretty deep researchβ¦
and probably (surely??) just plunking me directly into the 11th grade would have been hilariously suboptimal. can you imagine? it has been done though, i guess. school was fine as long as i could do whatever i wanted, so long as the work got done. iβd be reading or drawingβ¦
or talking, quietly, with one of my friends, one of the cleverer or funnier people in class. at one point i was drawing up, kind of, machine geometries for imagined fusion reactors. there was a spelling test and they were like βspelling testβ and i said βcanβt you see iβm busyβ
they let me get away with it. and the class kept going in jr high, it was not good. the social scene blew up / collapsed as people moved away and new schools merged, and i had a punitive teacher who really hated being corrected or asked questions. she kept giving me detentionβ¦
actually it wasnβt just me. she had tenure, and she was infamous. she would give so much detention that the detention population would exceed her home room population. she would give detention to people in the hallway walking to class.
anyway, after the nth time this happened, i was like, this is bullshit, iβm locked in here, but i wonder if the doors are actually physically unlocked. so i waited till she was distracted and then slipped out, and checked the doors. they were unlocked! i bolted, hid behind a tree
and then walked home. my parents, ex world traveling hippies, did not send me back. they decided i didnβt have to, i was ahead a year anyway, and that i was just going to school for recess (for friends, essentially), anyway, a function it no longer provided
at some point we found out that the tests they had been hiding from a couple weeks before i quit said i was in the 99.97th percentile as scored for uni entrants, or whatever, so we were like, huh, maybe i should just go to university i was too young for the GED, but not the SAT!
i canβt imagine the level of checked out i would be if i had to suffer through 7-12 at the traditional pace. it is almost unimaginable. like a prison type experience, maybe. this is literally the time you have maximum neurons and are pruning them, and synapses. use it or lose it
the brain damage inflicted on young people who are forced to waste their talents on doing the exact same thing as their age peers at the same rate is unimaginable. it is maybe the costliest thing that we do to human capital. and the fact is everyone has talents & interests
remote school *could have been* and should have been an opening up of education into a lifelong process of pursuing oneβs interests, refining oneβs skills, and learning about the world around you instead, zoom and ai enabled cameras monopolized your attention & gaze. even worse!
we had a pandemic before, you know, the schooling solution was books, and outdoor classes when the weather abided. (and sweaters!) i honestly fucking weep for this generation. they have all of this technology and it is being put to use melting their brains.
the quicker people build lifelong education into a parallel system you can seriously opt-in to in lieu of the mainline k-12-college-grad school legible education, the better. i am starting to feel like it is pretty mission critical; like education is getting profoundly bad
people complaining this thread is boring, Sorry! it was not intended to go viral. just thought it would be a good time to talk about something i had experienced. i am sensitive to when learning resources are shut down, but maybe things are still ok (?) in the NYC schoolsystemπ€·π»ββοΈ
@DanielleFong π in 2nd grade my teacher got sick of me "helping" everyone with their math, started sending me to the hallway during math lessons to "work at my own pace".. quickly finished the workbook, teacher was out of curriculum, it became my private unsupervised 2nd recess every day
similar vibe i'm realizing https://t.co/9uAiJBlPCK
make fun of me all you want; here's terry tao and paul erdΕs https://t.co/W0ul0iZt3N https://t.co/p6u57Q2rkP
gosh, was not expecting this to go viral beyond my little happy corner of twitter, but the attitude has shifted pretty markedly to bullying and cynicism. worth pondering for real, if someone let *your* kids avoid that kind of negativity, wouldnβt you open the door?
this is a good thread on important details. https://t.co/n9vX3bdXPQ
π€·π»ββοΈπ€¦π»ββοΈ did not expect this much engagement on this rambly post. thanks algorithm, thanksβ¦ a lot https://t.co/fKmGrE32k9
worth considering https://t.co/oDDjwf6KfV
ππ»ββοΈ https://t.co/JFUQouXdcH
re: "she's still probably full of shit" https://t.co/2tWvDoNIJb anyway everything i wrote is true, shit happens
@ctjlewis @Doc_BadVibes @eigenrobot there were copies of Hawkingβs Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell, spammed all over the place at that time, for example. My parents were nice enough to take me to the library. There are cool pictures on / in the books. See how this could happen?
re: LightSail https://t.co/C6TCsfiGNz https://t.co/u5silRtXXm
@The_Equationist @eigenrobot just think about it; how they heck would i do that? there were 2 main ideas, water spray based near isothermal compression expansion to improve efficiency & energy density, and carbon fiber overwrapped tanks, because the cost of usable strength of carbon dropped well below steel
getting a lot of post-hoc validation for fleeing the bullies, as you can see. https://t.co/qdY7Jh9bzW
@DanielleFong People don't like those different from themselves. It inspires insecurity. This was a reiterated point in my poli sci curriculum, Oakeshott addressed it, as did Ortega y Gasset. It's about being made uncomfortable about who one's self is.Pretty absurd hatred, yeah?
@DanielleFong They don't even know you."These people should be provided with the same things as everyone else. If they have other needs and voice them, they're weak, or wrong, or insufferable."An issue with the kind of mass liberalism we've undertaken is the genuine sense that "anyone CAN-
@DanielleFong be anything, so everyone SHOULD be EVERYTHING. If I've been limited from these roles, it's an injustice, and if someone else is inhabiting them naturally, that's an injustice. Injustice should be punished, and I'm the party with injury."There's an overnormalization of humans.
@DanielleFong It's tragic because it punishes all involved parties.This, though, is good for a type of tribal coherence, I bet. Probably an evolved response. I don't know if this is the kind of thing that can be trained out of people.
just gonna leave this here https://t.co/nJiW0zGHUu
ππ»ββοΈ https://t.co/OWpEs2roZp
some people seem to think i'm saying that I didn't like being around other kids, but that's absolutely not true, I liked almost all of the kids -- though were some mean kids. mostly I enjoyed my time with lots of friends. it was just one grade ahead https://t.co/1QqIa7BT26
https://t.co/1YtCUy4VbM https://t.co/I0FR60eZsU
when i was a kid reading encyclopedias and astrophysics books for educated amateurs (βcause thatβs what i wanted to readβ¦) i arrived in kindergarten where we were literally learning letters from the alphabet one by one it was kafkaesque torture & my teacher called me a smartass https://t.co/3HYognDwhk
π€¦π»ββοΈ https://t.co/wYv9tryP6g
oh god https://t.co/wSwL1Suj1J
a loooot of qtβs like this yeah self awareness in really limited quantities these days, lmao https://t.co/x9k9etvIXK
lol, guess iβm a conclusive failure π man fuck some of these people, completely toxic attitude towards trying anything, god https://t.co/B5fFADkouM
someday, i will write a long post about lightsail, about what we did, what we learned, how to use and not use venture capital, how to use and not use and not trust the media, and what really went down. lots of technical achievements, lots of lessons, but the story isnβt over. https://t.co/4K829OBbgk
there are many reasons i havenβt wanted to engage with an essentially parasitic, cynical media operation. when the media drops you it drops hard, and frankly i was ambivalent to being in the public eye in the first place. the time to talk about it, to me, has always beenβ¦
β¦when iβm actually in a place to definitely solve the challenge i set out to solve; cost effective energy storage. I havenβt been ready to talk about how iβm tackling this, but I will be soon, as the first experimental results confirm (or fail to confirm) the working principle
until then, be warned, anybody butthurt about the existence of someone doing hard stuff at an accelerated pace and seeking out an obvious hitjob for petty accusations (π) will feel only temporary relief for their bruised egos. literally wasting seeking lies to sooth vanity
lmao still at it apparently, quoting comments from a hit piece as fact. wowza https://t.co/bAfwZpxhzk
officially my biggest tweet π π¬π glad to bring people together π https://t.co/BMFBvhhOBw
previous record https://t.co/S317qCKmbN https://t.co/ThAw1zXUqE
Itβs not like a flu; itβs more contagious and more deadly. It canβt be contained like SARS; it evades screening and tests. Itβs not like 1918; we fly everywhere π«π Itβs not βsafe outside π¨π³β 27 days to kill Li Wenliang; itβs a timebomb π£ Itβs #2019-nCoV & itβs wrecking 2020
just more and more reasons to take your kids away from schoolβ¦. https://t.co/CBllS7E3QS
In my alternate universe, any child that reads books under the desk at school is given a full scholarship to do whatever they want. If they want, they get to skip regular school and hang out in the library with all the other self-directed nerds. Some elder nerds loosely supervise
@DanielleFong wow. are we kinda relatives? the first three years at school made me hate learning most subjects until after several years after graduation https://t.co/PqB5R2mAWD
these kind of diagrams have gotten a lot better but they were some of my favourites, for what it's worth https://t.co/iSUkuFonRD
good take https://t.co/rLSlVp12RU
thread on how this might close doors for poor, smart kids to private school too. not sure i agree 100%, but interesting points https://t.co/6sWMc5fZ2g
