On Noticing

“Wait, stop! Freeze!” Shane shouts. I’m thinking the same thing.

Shane’s older than me by decades, but you wouldn’t know it from the enthusiasm he has for basketball. Despite being a little sick and there only being four girls who showed up for our off-season basketball clinic, Shane’s love of basketball shines through. It shows up in how he doesn’t miss an opportunity to shoot the basketball even though he’s the coach, it shows up in how he volunteers to coach year after year, and it shows up his deep knowledge of the sport.

The Educator's Tax

What is the work we do as educators?

“Transfer information” may be the instinctual response, but I want to argue this is wrong, and we’re past the stage where this could have been enough.

The short reason is that there are simply too many high quality resources available for learners. From textbooks, blogs, online courses, videos, and essays, learners can find much of what they want for free, engage with the material at their own pace, and skip through a lot of the administrative hoops that our education system requires. If a learner wants information, going to an educator may be an unnecessary hassle. Technology for custom delivery of information is also improving, which further exerts pressure on the purpose of educators.

I believe educators are just as important as ever. But the point of an educator isn’t to transfer information. Instead, the point of an educator is to pay a cognitive tax on behalf of the learner.

Daily Anchor

If you’re like me, you have a lot of projects going on. I currently have multiple research projects for my PhD, my webcomic Handwaving, my monthly essays here, and some other personal projects in the works.

ComSciCon

One of the truly sad parts about academia and science is that as you go deeper and deeper into a subject, the circle of people who speak your default language shrinks. Academic siloes are real, and they prevent many scientists from taking a broader perspective of their work and communicating to those without a research background.

I’ve always wanted to push back against this. As you probably know from this site, I prefer plain language. I’ll use technical details when necessary, but we can go a long way to convey scientific ideas without them. Much like you can enjoy the emotional pull of a piece of music without knowing the intricacies in creating the piece, you can enjoy science without being an expert.

That’s why I applied to ComSciCon.

People

I think one of the main mistakes I’ve made in the past is discounting the role of people in how much I will enjoy an experience. Whether I was trying a new activity, thinking about work I wanted to do, or pondering which topic I should study, I would focus on the thing itself, and less on the conditions surrounding it. In particular, I would make my choices purely by if I was going to get anything out of the activity.

During my Master’s degree at Perimeter Institute, I changed my thinking for the better. Instead of focusing only on if an activity interested me, I started asking a new question: Who will I meet and interact with?

This question changed how I viewed life. It helped highlight how much potential enjoyment I was missing out on by not factoring in the interactions I would have with others.

For example, because I pushed myself to spend time with the others in my Master’s program, I developed friendships that I will have for the rest of my life. In the moment, I may have thought that going out with friends was pulling me away from the “real” reason I was in this program (to learn theoretical physics). However, I see now that the friendships I formed during the program were the point. They are more valuable than the physics I learned. This might not be true for every student, but it was for me.

I notice this now in my life quite a bit. As an introvert, I often discount or neglect the value of interacting with other people. I may instinctively only question if the activity is enjoyable. But once I remember the value of friendships and human interaction, I find myself saying yes to a lot more activities.

The friends you make and the people you meet, they are worth so much that it’s probably worth having a bias towards doing activities (particularly new ones) just to kickstart friend formation.