No parent wants their kids to fail.

But if you REALLY want them to succeed.

You have to do the opposite.

5 (easy to implement) ways to raise kids with grit:

🪡 Our education system rewards those who don’t fail and subtly humiliates those who fail.

This creates a fear of failure in the subconscious.

Failure becomes an invisible disability.

5 videos that are so profound they will change the way you think about education: No Such Thing As An Average Student | Todd Rose

The average represents nobody.

Life lessons from watching a busker.

What I shared with my kids: While vacationing in Sitges, my kids and I came across two young buskers playing Gipsy Kings covers.

I stopped, the kids stopped, and we just stood there listening, dropping change in the tips box afterwards.

"When I was a child in the 1950s my friends and I played in mixed-aged neighbourhood groups almost every day after school until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long." - Peter Gray

Unfortunately, kids today don't have time to play.

Why unstructured play matters.

🪡 "We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to be bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to day dream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics." - Peter Gray

Some parents feel the need to watch over their child's every step, explaining how every obstacle can be overcome.

I prefer to let the kids figure things out on their own.

Use the imagination and creativity they have in spades.

🪡 Parents who helicopter over their kids will tell them this is a tunnel. Go under. Crawl through it.

Sienna and Quinn looked at it and figured it's easier to go over than under.

One benefit of not giving kids instructions is that life does not come with instructions either.

Norman Borlaug saved one billion lives.

The world almost lost his contribution because he failed a standardised test and couldn't get into college.

🪡 American agronomist Norman Borlaug invented drought resistant weed that saved a billion people from starving to death.

But he was rejected by a college after failing an entrance exam.

Got into a junior college by the skin of his teeth.

I am a product of the Singapore education system.

We are damn good at math.

I hated math at school.

I'll take that over the no man's land that is K12 math in the United States.

🪡 Florida recently rejected dozens of math textbooks because of “unsolicited addition of S.E.L.”.

First of all, good teachers incorporate S.E.L. in their classroom, whether or not it’s spelt out in textbooks.

More importantly, this seems like the wrong battle to fight.

7 things I'd tell my 8 year old that I wish I knew when I was 18:

🪡 1/ Learn about yourself.

To make your way in the world, you need to first understand yourself.

What are you good at?

What are you not good at (and have no interest in getting better at)?

What makes you tick?

If we can make kids intrinsically motivated to learn, most of the problems we face as parents and educators will go away.

Here's how we can make kids see learning as an opportunity to explore and actualise their potential: Self-determination theory grew out of the work of psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.

They developed a theory of motivation which suggested that people tend to be driven by a need to grow and gain fulfilment.

amazon.com/Intrinsic-Moti…

Founder -> Idea
Employee -> Role
Creator -> Content
Learner -> ?

If we zoom out a little, this idea of X being a perfect match for Y applies to learners too.

A step-by-step guide to help kids discover what's 'perfect' for them.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1505887769998077953

1/ Acknowledge that school's far from perfect.

30 kids. One classroom. Same textbook. Same pace.

You get the drift.

Most parents don't realise how imperfect the industrial model of education is for today's learners.

Start by realising that.

9 David Foster Wallace quotes about math and life.

How anyone can write about math with such wit is beyond me.

🪡 1/ “Entire careers are spent noodling over Aristotle’s definitions.”

Kids who count with their fingers 🖐🏻 score higher 📈 on math tests 📄 .

🪡 1/ When kids count with their fingers, they turn an abstract concept - math - into something tangible they can touch and feel.

Neurobiologists believe our brain is hardwired to “see” a representation of our fingers even when we aren’t literally counting with them.

Keeping that fire for learning alive is one of the most impactful things we can do for a child.

Here are 7 strategies.

🪡 1/ Focus and self-control

Help kids learn to
- pay attention (focus)
- remember (working memory)
- think flexibly (cognitive flexibility)

Play games like 'I Spy' and 'Red Light Green Light'.

Let kids take over sometimes.

Give them permission to make mistakes.

Life skills are the 'how we learn'.

In a world where information changes rapidly, it's the ongoing learners who will thrive.

Simple strategies to promote life skills in ourselves and our children.

🪡 1/ Focus and self-control

All life skills are based around setting goals.

To achieve our goals, we need to pay attention.

Avoid going on automatic.

Remember all the things we need to know, do what we need to do, in order to achieve our goals.

Read: Deep Work by Cal Newport

My two great passions are education and natural wine.

In his final public speech, Sir Ken Robinson explained how humanity made the same mistakes with education systems and industrial systems .

What authentic learning and natural winemaking have in common.

🪡 1/ The industrial revolution ran through agriculture.

Brought about mechanisation that made it possible to create massive monocultures.

Crop diversity was greatly reduced.

Is learning engineering the missing piece to reinvent education?

🪡 A learning engineer is a creative professional who:
- helps build bridges between fields of education
- develops additional infrastructure to help teachers teach and students learn

Sits at the confluence of:
- learning science
- learning technology
- instructional design

How do we help kids embrace uncertainty?

🪡 Kids regurgitate without realising the knowledge they have been taught may be incomplete.

Or that new knowledge is created all the time.

Complacency and conceit sets in when kids believe they know everything there is to know about a subject.

Can critical thinking be taught?

🪡 First, what's critical thinking?

- seeing both sides of an issue
- being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas
- reasoning dispassionately
- demanding that claims be backed by evidence
- deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts
- solving problems

The learning ecosystem is expanding.

New forms of “school” are proliferating.

New educator roles will be invented in order to create learner-centered ecosystems.

Possible new roles for the catch all term 'teacher'.

🪡 1/ Learning Pathway Designer

Curator of learning journeys.

Works with students, parents, and learning journey mentors to
- set learning goals
- track students’ progress and pacing
- model activities that support learning experiences aligned with competencies

Thoughts for 21st century kids to memorise and live by

🪡 1/ I am, first, a member of the human race, and a citizen of the world - before my many identities.

Princeton economist William J. Baumol famously questioned the concept of improving productivity for a Beethoven string quartet.

Drop the second violin?

Ask the musicians to play twice as fast?

Let's explore what happens when we turn this analysis to education.

🪡 1/ The number of musicians needed to play a Beethoven string quartet hasn’t changed in centuries, yet today’s musicians make more than Beethoven-era wages.

Baumol argued that the quartet needed to raise wages to keep its cellist from going into a better-paying job instead.