Education Bookcast

Have a go at some of these: An athlete's best time to run a mile is 4 minutes and 10 seconds. How long would it take him to run 5 miles? It takes one orchestra one hour to play a symphony. How long would it take two orchestras to play a symphony? On a ship, there are 13 goats and 12 sheep. How old is the captain? Among schoolchildren, the most common answers to these questions are: 20 minutes and...

Dr Amanda Serenevy is a mathematician and mathematics educator, focussing on outreach through the medium of Math Circles, and on teacher training. This episode appears as number "27+" because the previous episode, Consider the Circle, was about how Amanda rescued a young girl from a terrible time with maths at school.  She is the founder and director of Riverbend Community Math Centre in South Ben...

A very short episode about an article written by a young girl concerning her experiences with maths. At school, she is faced daily with the same worksheet, always refusing to do it. Her teachers continue to give her the sheet every day for months, keeping her out of the normal classroom. She becomes resentful and angry at maths and at school, and continues her protest of inaction. When she discove...

What do you think of mathematics? Is it: a sterile tool for accounting? boring, mindless, and annoying stuff your teacher makes you do? an anarchic, psychedelic adventure? If you answered 1., mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart vehemently disagrees with you. If you answered 2., then Lockhart understands your plight. If you answered 3., then you really know what maths is. A Mathematician's Lame...

Over the past century, women have been gaining rights and prejudice against women has declined. Although many would argue that there's still a way to go, the progress is undeniable. Why, then, do men still outperform women in a number of intellectual domains? In this episode, we look at several articles that try to answer this question for one cognitive domain in particular: chess. Chess is a good...

I write a little blurb like this for every episode, but I feel that some books hardly need any introduction. This is one such example. Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most celebrated journalists and writers of the early 21st century, and his book Outliers caused a splash in people's thinking about success. Why? One answer is that it popularised the idea of the so-called "10,000 hour rule", initiall...

"Follow your passion" is bad advice. It seems an almost blasphemous thing to say. And yet in this book, Cal Newport argues that it is, indeed, generally a bad idea to try to base a career on a pre-existing passion. Firstly, as blunt and uninspiring as it may sound, most people don't *have* a passion to begin with. Hence the need to "find yourself" or figure out what you want to do with your life....

With The Talent Code, we have another perspective on the development of expertise. Daniel Coyle looks at "talent hotbeds" in music, sport, and academics in order to piece together a theory of how people get good at things. In the process, he discovers different types of teachers, necessary for different stages in the process of achieving mastery.

In Genius Explained, we saw how people considered "geniuses" build up their skills over many years prior to their production of great works. Although this training usually happens in childhood and adolescence, we saw at least one case - that of George Stephenson - where the key knowledge and expertise were built up in early adulthood. This prompts me to cover a book about adult development to supp...

Last episode, we got to see the lives of three exceptional individuals in depth: Charles Darwin, George Stephenson, and Michael Faraday. In today's episode, we take a look at how people have tried to bring up children to be prodigies, and to what extent they succeeded. We also look at genius writers so as to get a view of a more "artistic" kind of high achievement. Finally, Michael Howe explains e...

In Genius Explained, Michael Howe takes us through biographies of many people with great achievements, who we might consider to be "geniuses". It is an investigation into what makes geniuses so great, chiefly through looking at their upbringing. I'll refrain from sharing his conclusions in this brief description to keep up the suspense :). In this first part, we will look at Charles Darwin, George...

A continuation of last week's episode about Daisy Christodoulou's book.

This should be a controversial episode! I cover this book in the interests of looking at the cognitive science it refers to. However, this is also the sort of book that tries to undermine, or even overthrow, what might be interpreted as a failing ideology among many educators. It is therefore not possible for me to talk about it without at least paying some heed to a long-standing debate in educat...

We are now moving on to a series of episodes answering the question: How do people get good at things? In Bounce, Commonwealth champion and Olympian table-tennis player Matthew Syed shares his research into this topic.

The funny thing about Malcolm Gladwell is that everyone seems to enjoy reading him, but few remember many details of what he actually wrote. I had a conversation with a parent of one of my students not long ago about the overestimation of the importance of IQ, referencing some studies done by Lewis Terman. She listened with rapt attention and deep in thought. The information seemed new, original,...

A natural continuation from last week. Habit formation, and breaking habits, takes willpower. So how does willpower work? Like a muscle. Willpower gets tired. You have a limited "store" of it, and it gets drained over the course of a day. So, if you had a stressful day at work, then you are much more likely to cave in and have that chocolate cake / cigarette. (Sound familiar?) Willpower gets stron...

Up till now, we've had several episodes looking at the question of "why do people do what they do?". Most recently, we asked and answered that question from the perspective of persuasion, in a sense addressing the sub-question "why are people persuaded to do what they do?". Now we get a chance to look at it with the lens of habit: "why do people do the same things so often? How do these habits for...

So far in the podcast, among other things, we've looked at the topic of motivation. In the last few episodes, we've also started to look at human irrationalities and their consequences. In this episode, we look at a topic that combines "why people do things" with human irrationality: persuasion. Robert Cialdini spent most of his working life searching for the answer to one question: what is it tha...

Last week, we saw the destructive effects of a psychological phenomenon not many people would have heard of known as "stereotype threat". This week, we look at some ways of mitigating the effects of stereotype threat. How can we stop children and students from stereotyped groups from underperforming in exams because of their knowledge of their own backgrounds? David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen summ...

Ethnic minorities and women are disadvantaged enough as it is. When considering why members of some ethnic groups tend to do badly in school, and why girls tend to do worse than boys in mathematics, people present all kinds of arguments, including economic, cultural, and sometimes even (very controversially) genetic reasons. A contributing factor that one seldom hears about is the pernicious psych...

A classic book on people's irrationalities. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and cognitive scientist. Together with his late research partner Amos Tversky, he co-founded the field of cognitive heuristics and biases in psychology, and that of behavioural economics. This all stems from his investigations into the irrationalities of human thought.   In this book, he explains his...

What's the best kind of experience you have? When do you feel happiest? Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced me-HIGH CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH) shows us that the conditions for optimal experience are also those of when we have our greatest learning. Flow , a psychology term coined by the author, refers to the feeling of utter concentration and complete absorption in what one is doing, when it feels as tho...

Writing in the 1970s, Timothy Gallwey comes eerily close in The Inner Game of Tennis to what modern cognitive scientists have discovered about the nature of the mind. He reminds me of medieval Buddhists whose descriptions of certain mental processes, particularly those to do with meditation, have been confirmed to be highly accurate by modern neuroscience*. Forty years isn't a thousand years, but...

Psychological "urban myths" come in a few flavours. Some, such as the idea that high self-esteem leads to less violent behaviour, are so completely, hilariously, overwhelmingly, unambiguously wrong* that you'd be hard-pressed to make up something so deliciously ironic. Others, such as the idea of "motivating" people with contingent external rewards, are deeply flawed, though not utterly wrong unde...

So far, we have seen a several books with messages relating to the psychology of motivation, particularly to the conditions under which people have greater motivations to do difficult tasks ( Drive , Punished by Rewards ), as well as what kinds of attitudes lead to greater learning and improvement ( Mindset ). In The Practicing Mind, we get a look at the phenomenology of these conditions, i.e. wha...