Jessica Lahey

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm joined by my favorite expert, Monica Monsoon. Monica Monsoon. We decided something gross about Monica Monsoon.

Oh, yeah, what was it? That she reports on diarrhea. Oh, for intestinal monsoons. Oh, boy, we have a great expert on today.

Jessica Leahy, she is a teacher, a writer, and a mom. She writes about education, parenting, and child welfare for the Atlantic, Vermont Public Radio, and the New York Times. And she, most importantly, is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Gift of Failure, How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. This is one of our favorite themes.

Wendy Mogul has a very similar position. When I was editing back, I was really noting how many nuggets of wisdom she has. And they're profound and poignant. Also, we've never had a guest on that real-time sighted as well as she does.

Every single thing she knows, she remembers where she learned it and what volume. And it was amazing. Yeah, so without further ado, please enjoy Jessica Leahy. Where are you from, Jessica?

I am from Massachusetts, but I now live in Vermont. Right here in Burlington, kind of. A lot of stereotypes come to mind. Obviously, home of Ben & Jerry's, yeah?

Yeah, home of Ben & Jerry's. You can actually go to the factory. Well, not now, obviously. But you can go to the factory in Waterbury.

It's really quite lovely. In Killington? As a kid, I went on a couple trips to Killington to go skiing. Killington's pretty great.

I, myself, am a fan of Loon, because that's where I used to teach skiing a long time ago. We actually, I'm looking out my window right now at about five inches of snow. You taught skiing? I got to teach disabled skiing at Loon Mountain.

They have an adaptive ski program there. So I got to teach, you know, like, kids with Down syndrome. And the fun thing about them is they don't have any fear, really. So when you're on the ski slope with them, you have to ski in front of them, but backwards, so that they don't, like, shoot off in the woods and stuff.

I used to work with blind skiers and stuff like that. It was really fun. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it was great.

I have anxiety about passing on knowledge to my daughter, who appears to be able in most ways. I can't imagine compounding it with other challenges. You're a unique person. I just like teaching.

That's sort of where I've ended up with what I'm doing now, is I just really like teaching. Actually, I thought I really liked skiing, but it turns out I just really like teaching skiing. And that's sort of been the thread through the whole thing. Yeah, so you didn't even aim to be a teacher.

Is that accurate? You were in law school at Duke? Yeah, no, I was at UNC. Oh.

Oh, no. Well, but the first place you taught was Duke, so that's confusing. So keep coming to the slide. No, it's true.

I was positive. I was going to do juvenile law. I had it all figured out. And someone asked me to teach at this program at Duke called the Talent Identification Program, so I taught gifted middle school, high school kids about law in the democratic society.

And I just fell in love. The joke I make a lot is that I came home that first day after teaching, and my husband took one look at me, and he said, are you even going to finish law school? Because it was so obvious that I was completely sunk, and I was going to be a teacher. So I did, but I went straight into teaching and never looked back.

It's been great. Oh, a little over 20 years now. And when you had your fantasy of practicing juvenile law, what was it specifically you imagined you'd be doing? I had worked in the Duke University.

It was a program for kids who had possibly been sexually and physically abused. It's called the Duke Child Protection Team. And through my work there, I met this district attorney, Marsha Maury. She's amazing.

She's a judge now. And she became my mentor. And she was the assistant district attorney just in charge of juvenile court. And I got to shadow her and hang out with her at first just to find out what happened with the cases that we were working on for the child abuse.

And through that, just sort of got to hang out in juvenile court a lot. So the way Durham County's district juvenile court worked for kids is that there wasn't really a for and against. It was sort of in the best in service to the kids and in service to the community. And so that's what I envisioned, is that I was going to get to be a part of holding kids to the repercussions of what they'd done, but at the same time also be in the best interest of the kids and the best interest of society.

And I got to run a program there called Teen Court, where it was really fun. We would divert kids out of juvenile court, and then we would put them in front of a jury of other kids. Sometimes I got to pretend to be the judge and stuff. And the kids would decide what the punishment was.

And they were so creative. It was things like, you know, if you vandalized a used car parking lot, you were going to have to work for that guy that owned that lot. And you were going to have to work back the money that you caused him to have to spend to fix things. And of course, it led to all kinds of great things, because they ended up building a relationship and blah, blah, blah.

But the kids came up with the best, the best ramifications for the kids' actions. It was fantastic. Yeah, well, what's interesting about those solutions is they are actually amending the damaged cause as opposed to our system, which is a little abstract. It's a little like, you did this.

Well, and that's something that's increasing more in schools these days, too, is instead of saying, OK, well, we're going to take you out of class and put you in this rubber room over here so that you can't disrupt my learning, we're doing a little bit of sort of more trauma-informed teaching, like, why are you freaking out in my class? And is it because something's happening with you at home? But at the same time, helping them understand that when they act out in class or they do something to hurt someone else, that there's going to be not just punishment, but consequences that make sense. So I'm seeing more and more of that in education.

It's been great to see, too. Yeah, even in the preschool, my girls, if they hurt somebody, the first response is supposed to be, what do you need? And then they have to go get the ice or the band-aids or whatever it is. Like, they have to be active in solving this problem they created.

That's right. Yeah. So was it hard for you to go, I'm not going to practice law, or was it easy? Oh, that was easy.

It was. I mean, the problem was I was pregnant at the time with my kid who's now 21, and I was having nightmares about my, you know, amorphous imagined kid being in these horrible situations. Like, in juvenile court, we would have a situation where, you know, we couldn't send this kid back home because his house was under surveillance as a crack house, and so then we'd have to haul the parents in, and the parents would, you know, it was just, I was envisioning my kid in all those situations, and I had a pretty good sense that I was going to burn out pretty quickly. Also, you know, kids would show up in court, and the judge would look around and say, anyone here to represent this kid?

And at the last second, someone would raise their hand, and they're like, oh, I guess I'll do it. You know, it just didn't work at that time. I knew I was going to be coming up against, you know, that sort of constant beating my head against the wall feeling, whereas with teaching, I felt a little more in control of the situation. Yeah.

You know, it was my classroom, and I could focus on the learning instead of on some of the other crap that we have to deal with. Did you finish law school? I did. I absolutely did, yeah.

Yeah, but you could have explored teaching at the university level, I assume, if you had a desire to teach. Did you go to junior high first? No, I taught high school first, and I said, I would never, ever teach those middle school kids. Those kids are bonkers.

It would never happen. Why would anyone want to teach middle school? And then I got an offer, and they said, well, before you say no, because I think they certainly knew I might, come meet the kids. And see, that's the problem.

You go, and you meet them, and they're wonderful. And then I found out that middle school kids are my jam. I mean, they are, as far as I'm concerned, middle school is where it's at. It's where we have this incredible potential to reach kids that haven't completely shut themselves do all of these things, so let me help you come up with strategies.

And it's a pretty cool time. It's a really cool time for kids. Yeah, do you feel like high school is like, you're having access to them just way too far downstream, like the ship has pretty much sailed? Well, from the perspective of what I do, which is helping parents understand that they need to let their kids make mistakes and learn from them, as opposed to, oh, my kid can never make a mistake because the stakes are just too high.

I think in high school right now, it feels like this place where kids are simply not allowed to ever make a mistake ever. And at least in middle school, there's that little cushion where you feel like, okay, well, you're not to high school yet, so at least there's a little bit of room for kids to learn from their mistakes, as opposed to pretend they never happened or clearing the way for them. So yeah, there's that. And I don't know, middle school kids still have too, and that's pretty great.

Yeah, when I talk to people, they generally, if I had to say what section of their education they hated the most, it tends to be middle school. But for me, it is by far my favorite, period. Seventh grade for me, it'll never get better in my whole life if I could repeat one year of my life over and over again to be seventh grade. And so for me, while I was dyslexic, or I am dyslexic, and so first through fourth grade were just a disaster.

I couldn't read. I thought I was stupid. I had to go to the special ed class for an hour a day. And then I had a single teacher, Mr.

Wood, who pulled me aside and said, you're great at math. You're really, really good at math, and I want you to start teaching geometry to the other kids in class, which blew my mind. I didn't think I would ever have the capacity to help other kids learn, because I was struggling so much. And then that launched me into junior high, where in sixth grade I was on the math team, and then in seventh grade I had this great teacher, Larry Leclerc, who discovered I was good at writing, and then I was really interested in writing, and I got something published in the little junior high yearly literature magazine.

And so for me, it was like, oh, I'm not dumb. I can do this stuff. And then mixed with the increasing independence of being in junior high, where I was sleeping over at a friend's house every weekend. I had a moped, and I was mobile.

I was starting to get this huge sense of autonomy that I just loved, and I never got better. Well, you were lucky. Yeah, I had a great experience, too, and that's because it was the first time I made friendships that felt like intimate friendships, and real community was built. Elementary school, you're just learning how to be around people, I think.

But in middle school, you start to really develop those communal friendships that are lasting. For me, anyway, I also had a great experience. Same. I got my best friend in junior high, yeah.

That's actually really common. The nature of friendship changes from elementary school to middle school, mainly because in elementary school, it's a proximity thing. Like, oh, mom and dad are friends with so-and-so, and their kids are in the same, you know, that kind of thing. Whereas starting in middle school, it starts to be about trying out different identities, and, you know, okay, well, she has two ear piercings in one ear, and I don't know if I can ever do that, but she's kind of cool, and you try on elements of that person's identity and see what fits and what doesn't.

And that's why middle school friendships often come and go, which can feel really traumatic, but what it is is it's kids reaching out and saying, ooh, that's interesting. Do I want to be like that or do I not? It's a really great thing, actually, when they go through lots of different changes in friendships. Yeah, so your work is in line with some other folks we've talked to, like Wendy Mogul, but yours is on specifically the education side, and you kind of break your work into some key components, one of them being motivation, right?

This is very crucial for whether kids are going to learn or not learn or be creative, and also confidence versus competence. And could you just tell us, what is it like if you had to simmer it down to a single ingredient that you think makes a student want to learn or become interested in something, what is that single ingredient, or is it a few? Well, so what you're talking about is intrinsic motivation. Like, when you're on a motorbike, especially if you're on terrain that's slightly difficult, and you find you are so absorbed in the riding, because you have to be, because you have to be so focused.

It's just the right level of difficulty. You know how you get that feeling where, like, three hours could go by, and you hardly notice the passage of time, because you're so in sync with the thing. That's called flow. Mihai Cs, Mihai's flow.

So that intrinsic motivation happens when we have three things going on with kids. Number one, they have some autonomy, which means, and you were mentioning this about middle school, right? But one of the reasons middle school can be so great is that sometimes, which is why I said you were so lucky, sometimes kids get to start exercising that autonomy and feeling like, oh, I get to make actual decisions about my life. And the problem, of course, on the flip side is that lots of kids are not being given any autonomy, and so that's going wrong for them.

But autonomy, and then competence, which, as you mentioned, is not the same thing as confidence. Competence is, like, confidence based on actual experience, like, trying stuff out, seeing if it works, keeping the things that worked and getting rid of the stuff that doesn't, and learning how to do better next time, and then feeling like, oh, wait, I handled that thing. I can handle this new, even harder thing. And number three is connection.

And that's for teachers. It's like, do you have good relationships with your students? Are you making, you know, the material feel relevant to them? But as parents, I usually boil it down to two things, which is we have to love the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had, and we can't just love them based on their performance.

So when we have those three things, the autonomy, the competence, and that connection based on, like, who the kids actually are and really seeing them, that's how you get that intrinsic motivation going, and that's how you get kids who are like, oh, I actually am engaged with my learning. Those are all extrinsic motivations, and when we do that, essentially what we do is undermine their motivation. Like, the fastest way to make a kid not want to learn math is to pay them for their math grades, or give them math anxiety. But the fastest way, like, the surefire way to make them not want to learn math over the long term is, unfortunately, grading or paying them for their grades, or making it be all about that other thing, as opposed to the math itself.

I watched your South by Southwest talk. Yeah, so South by Southwest EDU runs the week, well, except for this year, sadly. South by Southwest EDU runs the week before South by Southwest proper, so it's like 10,000 teachers suddenly descend on Austin. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, and so when I was listening to that talk, I was just kind of charting my experience with education, and for me, it all mapped almost perfectly. So elementary was terrible, and then junior high was amazing, and then the thrill of being good at it kind of wore off by high school, and then in high school, it felt all extrinsic and results-oriented. And at a certain point, I read On the Road by Kerouac, and I was like, well, I'm not going to college, so all the extrinsic carrots have no bearing on my motivation, because I don't desire to go there. Well, then, lo and behold, I end up going to college, but I go there without any desire to get a certain degree, because I'm pursuing comedy and acting, and I'm just going to college so my mom will pay my rent.

And in that environment, where I literally was just picking classes I was interested in, I had no goal of having any certain GPA or achieving any certain degree. If you chart my grades, I was a good junior high student, an average high school student, and then a great college student, and I think it was so much about me doing it for the right motivation. I see that a lot, and when you give kids at a younger age a little more choice, a little more autonomy, you can make that happen sooner, too. When you let kids have a little more choice about not just what they're learning, you know, there's only so much you can do to give kids choice about what they're learning in high school and middle school, but the more autonomy, the more choice you give them about the how, the when, the why, all that sort of stuff, the more buy-in you can get kids.

But there are lots of kids that just are not going to bloom until they get to high school. I happen to have one of them. I think when he gets to college and he truly gets to choose what it is he wants to learn that, by the way, doesn't happen to be in these boxes of what they want him to learn in high school, you know, the English, the math, the science, all these things sort of siloed. I think he's more interested in integrating all that stuff, and so when he gets to choose in college, that's when I think that kid's going to really shine.

Yeah, and I want you to describe, first, the raising of the hands, and then I want you to tell us about the parents, because, man, could I relate, particularly now where I'm doing my kids' schoolwork with them, it is almost an irresistible pull to solve something for them when they're struggling, and this is with the awareness of Wendy Mogul and people like you, and my wife's very dialed into you, even with all that knowledge, it is physically painful to not help. Well, it's physically painful to see our kids frustrated, right? So at the very beginning of my book, The Gift of Failure, I talk about the fact that I was super pissed off at the parents of my students, really just livid, and full disclosure, like super high horse, I was all like, ooh, I am the teacher, and you people are getting in the way of the learning, and how dare you, but at the moment I was most pissed off, I found out that my own kid couldn't tie his own shoes. He was nine, and he couldn't tie his own shoes, and that was simply because it was so upsetting to see him frustrated and saying things like, I feel so stupid, I'm never going to do it, and so I would do it for him, because who wants to see their kid frustrated, and it's faster, frankly, if we do it ourselves, right?

Yeah, that's one of the big motivators, even like making them clean up, it's not that I don't have the willingness to be a jerk and make them clean up, it's just I don't have an hour to dedicate to getting them to clean up, you know, I just need the house clean in 15 minutes. Well, I have some advice for you in a minute on that, but the thing you were asking about the questions I ask kids, so I'm so lucky, my job is so much fun, I get to go travel around and speak at a lot of schools where I talk to the kids during the day, and then I talk to the teachers and do professional development in the afternoon, and then I talk to the parents in the evening, so when I talk to the kids, I get to do a couple of really cool things, first of all, I give them all my email, my personal email, and I say, look, I got three hours before I talk to your parents, so email me what you want me to tell them, and the emails I get are bonkers and amazing, I love them, but the thing you're talking about is, one of the things I do when I'm talking to a bunch of students is I have them all close their eyes, well, I have all the adults in the room first close their eyes. and i ask the kids to raise their hand number one if they're getting paid for grades and that tends to be somewhere between 15 and 20 although you know there are a couple schools here and there where it's like 70 like any affluent communities yeah there are a couple schools in your neighborhood as a matter of fact how dare you yeah in really affluent communities it sometimes is up to 70 and then number two who get stuff for their grades like a new phone or a new computer whatever you know you get a car if you stay on you know the honor roll the whole time you're in high school and that's somewhere between 20 and 25 percent is the average there and then i ask the kids to close their eyes too because they don't want anyone to be embarrassed by having to answer this question in the affirmative and i ask them think really really hard about this before you raise your hand but if you need raise your hand feel free raise your hand if you really truly believe that your parents love you more when you get high grades and less when you get low and the average i've done this with tens of thousands of students the average middle school is around 80 and the average in high school is somewhere between 85 and 90 which is not surprising because um there's research out of harvard's making care in common project that would back up similar results and the other thing that's really interesting is when i ask them that question you know here's my email address you know email me what you want me to tell your parents the thing they want me to tell their parents by far the most in various iterations is please tell my parents i am not my sister i am not my brother i'm not you when you were my age i'm not this hypothetical perfect kid you think you're raising i am me and i don't feel seen or known or heard or loved for myself so it's not really surprising when i get those kinds of numbers and you know the kids reiterate that to me when they hang out and talk to me afterwards as well so that comes back to that love the kid you have not the kid you wish you had because it makes an incredible difference because kids know when you see and hear and know about the things that are important to them as opposed to what we think they should be thinking is important now i want to ask something kind of provocative which is what you're suggesting and i think what i would love to see happen is it potentially paradigm shattering because the notion that if you tell your kids to stay on the honor roll for the whole year and they'll get a car in a lot of ways makes a ton of sense logically because that's ultimately what you will do in life you will go to some job that you probably don't want to execute and you'll do that so you can own a home and it feels like it's perfectly conditioning them to suck it up and get the job done so that they can have this life but i do think more and more as people are questioning what defines success and what defines fulfillment that maybe as an entire society we're evolving away from that notion and we're starting to value the emotional component of life and the fulfillment component and is it a comprehensive thing we need to look at lifelong you know it's funny you say you know this is how it works you know i write this book so in the end someone will pay me some money or i you know do this thing so that someone will give me a paycheck and that's how life works right well the interesting thing though is we have 40 years almost 50 years of really solid research and the research we have is also this stuff called metadata which is when we actually take the research and say wait a second is this quality research oh yes it is look it's quality research 50 years of really good research showing unequivocally that extrinsic motivators whether they're positive or negative and positive are things like grades points scores money for grades things like that or love in exchange for performance which is what i was talking about before or the negative stuff like you know sweetie if you don't keep a b minor so better you're going to be grounded or i'm just going to surveil you on your phone and make sure you get to where you're supposed to be at the right time or i'm going to and you'll find out about this soon enough that's which is portals if your kids are in many school systems i right now could get on my computer log on and find out every grade my kid has gotten for the entire school year and i can do that 24 7 and if i want i could hit refresh on that program and get up to date up to the minute you know where my kid is from a great perspective all of those things are called extrinsic motivators that last thing i talked about is surveillance and all of those things positive or negative undermine our motivation not just kids motivation but everyone's motivation and the problem is as dan pink has pointed out as edward dc in his book why we do what we do the science of self motivation as people have pointed out that yes this is how our economy runs but when you look at people that really do their jobs well and are really in their jobs like super invested like the reason my husband is in the basement right now and about to head off to the hospital and put on you know head to toe personal protective equipment is not because he's going to be getting a paycheck it's because he loves what he does and he's intrinsically motivated to do it so i would be a writer whether i was getting paid or not my husband i hope would continue to do what he's doing whether he gets paid or not and once we understand that some of the things we do to motivate kids like the grades the points of scores or paying them for their grades point scores is actually undermining their motivation it might change the way we think about carrots and sticks and i don't think we're ever gonna get rid of it i mean this is where we are right now grades and you know short-term bonuses and things like that but it undermines their motivation so once we understand that we can at least at home change things up a little bit like you know when it comes to paying kids for grades or paying kids for household duties all of that stuff we can maybe feed into their intrinsic motivation a little bit better well you pointed out in your talk that for anyone who's at home going like well it does work you can see that it does work in short term there are times when it works beautifully actually so for example sticker charts and all of these programs we use in schools to try to manipulate kids behavior to increase the likelihood kids will do what we want them to do so we give them little stickers or we give them points or we give them coupons or whatever those things seem to work because they do work in the short term they work great to boost motivation in the short term but over the long term they stop working so the problem is they're tricky they look like they work they look like they work great and what's interesting about sticker charts is that there's an exception to the general rule that sticker charts don't work one of the times they do work is for potty training because potty training and not having to wear a diaper is actually part of the motivation so it's like a little reward in and of itself so if you can help kids find the personal reward separate from the sticker because if you think about what a sticker chart does like if you give kids stickers for good behavior it teaches kids to only do the right thing when we're watching right like why would you ever do the right thing when no one's watching you don't get a sticker for that so there's a bunch of different reasons that they're tricky and they fool us well i'll just be adversarial for the sake of it don't you think someone could argue that behavior becomes habitual and that if they're doing it in your presence that actually i just know like in a we have a thing which is like you just do this action repeatedly and it ends up changing your mindset you can't think your way into acting different but you can act your way into thinking different so if you're setting up maybe these habitual patterns then you hope that in your absence they just continue out of habit yeah first off sad we're not the same room so i can't fist bump you by seven years coming up oh yeah i was curious why you work with kids in a treatment center that was going to come up later yeah so for the past five years i was teaching kids in an inpatient drug and alcohol rehab setting teaching teenagers because my home group my home 12-step group does service out at this particular rehab and they have a women's wing a men's wing and they had an adolescent wing and so i went there to speak one night and i looked around one day and i said hold on if these kids are here 24 7 someone's got to be teaching them something so it turns out they did the department of education of vermont sort of oversaw the program so i very quickly talked my way into a teaching job there and taught there for five years and sadly as tends to be the case they were not making any money off of those adolescents so they converted the adolescent wing where i used to teach into another adult wing so now if you live in the state of vermont and your adolescent needs inpatient treatment there's nowhere there's one place that does dual diagnosis but there's no longer a place for kids to go for inpatient treatment they have a trip to minnesota in their future probably yeah you know frankly if they end up there with dr lee i'd be just totally thrilled but yeah it's tough right now for kids stay tuned for more farm chair if you dare but you're absolutely right it turns out that with kids the duration question you bring up is really good because there's a fantastic book called how to be a happier parent with kj delantonia and she did this research into how do we get kids to do the stuff we want them to do like for example household duties and it turns out that getting kids to do something for about a season or three months seems to be the secret sauce so you know instead of having those rotating chore charts where you're like okay tonight you have clean the dishes and then tomorrow you have unload the dishwasher if you give kids the same task for three months it does exactly what you're talking about which is help develop a habit and whether you're talking to charles doohig and his book about habits or you're talking to lots of other people who are sort of into the whole habit forming thing they'll say the same thing it takes about a season to create a habit and you're talking about a you're totally right but fake it till you make it you know that can work and i'm not saying we can't use extrinsic motivators i think it's a combination of the two that are going to be our sweet spot which is if you can start a kid doing something the right way because you give them a sticker or a lollipop or whatever and then you model it for them and they see you doing it and they see the people around them doing it then they will start doing it for the right reasons as opposed to for the sticker so it's a combination of those things like i said i'm definitely not in the business of telling people that you can never use extrinsic motivators that's bonkers i would never say that would you say that i don't think this is a good motivator but it's definitely a motivator and what category would you put it in approval from others i assume that's an extrinsic motivator but it seems to work it seems to have worked for me my whole life and i see it working in other people too like once you get a taste of what it feels like from authority or someone above you to give you approval that can last a long time absolutely and i want to piggyback on that question when i heard the concept of rye parenting i was like oh yeah that makes sense to me i want my kids to be motivated to make themselves happy and proud of themselves and i was in and in but then the anthropologist and he was like well hold on a second we are social animals we are supposed to be learning from our group we are supposed to be shamed by our group but this is how we are good members of a group is that we do take on outside approval and disapproval and we amend our behavior to be in concert with those people so i'm like conflicted i mean i think conceptually it's good but i think it kind of denies who we are here we go though you don't need to be conflicted what if for example with your kids you were to set really clear big expectations about behavior about you know what they're expected to do around the house but then you let them have some control over the details of how to get there one of the things whenever i get interviewed about you know parenting stuff i get this question of like how are you parented because that will be some secret insight what i can tell you about the way i was parented is that my parents you know i know they had expectations for me but more than anything else i knew they trusted me to make good decisions and i wanted to live up to that yeah and the problem is i've also been a total approval or my whole in fact i tell the story to kids a lot when i was in law school in my very first semester in law school and it came exam time and there were these they give practice exams because law school exams are so different from any other exam you've ever taken so they give you practice exams but i didn't take them because i didn't want anyone to think that i couldn't do it i don't know it seemed to me like remedial help or extra help and i never had to go to extra help so i probably don't have to go to extra help for this so i got my first law school exam back for civil procedure and i had gotten a grade so low i didn't know if it was a d or nf because i'd never gotten 68 before and my first instinct my first instinct was to quit law school not go talk to the professor like if i quit now i can tell people this just wasn't for me and no one will know yeah savior your ego exactly and you know this is also ties into carol dweck and her work on mindset and like my belief about my own abilities i was like well hell this clearly isn't for me i suck at this but luckily i had a friend who stopped me and she said sure sure you could quit you could quit i'll even walk with you to do it but how about we talk to your professor first and see what went wrong and so she went with me to his office we talked about it i made like four really obvious glaring mistakes and he's like so yeah don't do that next time you'll be totally cool and i i learned from that experience but the the problem is more and more what i'm seeing from my own students especially is this just isn't for me the classic is i'm just not a math person right yeah all of a sudden you get to a certain place it starts to get harder because p.s math gets hard for everyone eventually every single person i'm reading the oppenheimer book and oppenheimer was humiliated by his lack of mathematical brilliance and this guy's one of the smartest people to ever live yeah steve strogatz is a math professor at cornell and wrote two brilliant books that i just adore one of them is called the joy of x and another one is called infinite powers about calculus like the fact that i the total math idiot the person who was quote not good at math read a book about calculus you know says a lot about what i learned from mindset in fact when i was in my 40s i'm just about to turn 50 when i was in my early 40s i actually read carol dweck's mindset and i got so pissed off at that math teacher in seventh grade who told me that i was not talented at math but i went back with my older kid and my students and during my one prep period i took algebra one again and i am good at math i really am and it was fun and it was interesting it just got hard for me when i was 12 or 13 or whatever that was and i didn't understand that this didn't make me stupid this made me a normal human being because some stuff is going to be harder than others the more we communicate that to kids which is why the word yet is so incredibly powerful when a kid says to you i can't do this i can't do it if we say to them well of course you can't do this yet you just learned this today at school yet is this like magic growth mindset carol dweck word for yeah stuff gets hard for people and that's how we learn perfect time for you to talk about desirable difficulties because what it sounds like to me is that you haven't been embracing difficulties and i similarly by the way i actually i was on the math team in junior high and then i got into 10th grade and there's a if you're on course to do ap calc you have to take two math classes in one year and i got to that point and i was like similar to you i was like i'm not going to do good in this and my identity is that i'm great at math and i just can't take that hit to my identity that i'm not great at math so i'm going to claim to no longer be interested in math that is absolutely classic i see that over and over and over again desirable difficulties have been around for a while it's a concept it's been around for a while but there was a great book that came out about six years ago called make it stick out of harvard university press it has three authors in that book they talk about desirable difficulties which are one of the most powerful teaching tools i have and backing up for just a second there's this researcher named wendy grolnick who looked at different types of parenting and how it affects kids thinking and motivation to continue to do things that are difficult for them and she did this cool experiment where she had parents and kids go in a room together and she had created a task for the kids that was challenging it was supposed to be a little bit hard for them and the instructions to the parents were be there with your child while you complete this task and then she watched the parents to see how they handled their kids dealing with this frustrating task and some of the parents sort of sat back and were reassuring and helped redirect the kids and those were termed autonomy supportive parents and some of the parents were like you know the minute their kid got frustrated either took over or told the kid exactly what to do in what order which is termed directive parenting or controlling but you know directive yeah let's use a nicer word and so then then she took the parents out of the room because she wanted to see how the kids would handle it by themselves and the kids are the autonomy supportive parents almost all of them completed this difficult task whereas almost none of the kids of the really directive or controlling parents were able to complete the task on their own because they got frustrated and gave up now if desirable difficulties are this really magic teaching tool which they are where i give kids something that is a little bit more challenging for them to parse just a little more difficult for them to understand either going in or during the process like for example if i say you know here's the quadratic formula and for one group of kids i give them all the instructions like first do this then do this next do this no no don't ask any questions just do it the way i say and you know just just accept it whereas for another group of kids i give them all the parts and kind of let them go at it and figure it out and sort of take the thing apart and understand from the inside how it works the kids who have to work a little harder to get that information into their head they're going to understand it more more durably over the long term and more deeply in the short term it's because desirable difficulties cause your brain to do this thing called encoding a little faster or a little more efficiently and more quickly or instead of putting stuff into short-term memory like you know the place where we store like the pizza guy's phone number we only need to remember it for a few seconds before we can let it go it encodes that stuff into long-term memory so when something is a little more difficult for you to figure out when you have to work a little harder to figure it out that's kind of good because you're getting it into your long-term memory instead of just stuffing it and sort of the holding place in your brain so if you look back some of your experiences learning things like the stuff that you had to sort of work pretty hard to take apart and figure out on your own is inevitably going to be the stuff you remember for the longest and in the most detail well you were saying that i just thought of the most trivial and anecdotal example that which is we have a couple different times had group parties at these escape rooms and i have spent you know two hour chunks with the same group of people at 10 000 times but those experiences in these escape rooms i remember almost every single puzzle we had to solve to get closer to the exit which to me would prove that it's like when we really had to apply ourselves uh those are really cemented in there well if someone had given you the the way to get out of the escape room and giving you a list of the things you had to do to get out of the escape room but you also would not have a great memory for how to get out of that escape room it just would not have stuck in the same way because you wouldn't have encoded the information in your brain so yeah that's the cool thing if you think about it though is that like in order for me to take advantage of that kids have to be able to sit with frustration so that's the way in is how do we help kids stick with things long enough to benefit from the magic of learning it that way and could you quantify that at all for us like what is the ideal amount of frustration like you don't want your kid in their room for two and a half hours trying to figure something out do you or as long as they're engaged let them at it or what's a ballpark at what point do you step in clearly you must at some time it's called desirable difficulties and productive struggle so i like to think of it as our job with little kids is to redirect their attention so for example if your daughter is working on school work at home with you your job is to not answer the question for them of course the worst case scenario is you're like oh let me reteach all of math for you now and give you the answer or even more let me do it for you there's a colleague of mine that used to teach middle school math in fact the teacher i went back into algebra from she said you know it's so curious i get this homework back from my student that has a math professor father and it's solved with trigonometry we've never learned trigonometry so taking over that kind of stuff obviously not the right move but if you can do stuff for your kids like i always try to bring it back to you focus on the process and less on the product in fact it's perfectly okay if your kid can't answer that problem in the end because your job is to help them get to a place where either you're at a place where they realize no they really don't have the knowledge or the skills to figure this out and then a great idea is to use the space on the paper where they didn't finish that to write a note to their teacher to explain what they didn't understand but what you can do is you can say okay well maybe read the instructions again sweetie why don't you tell me what you think you're supposed to answer here or look at number four look what you did over here on number four what did you do differently in number two that you didn't do in number four all of those things will not only increase their ability to sit with their frustration as opposed to you running in and rescuing them right away in which case they don't have to develop that at all and it also helps them do a little bit more of learning from those desirable difficulties because you're helping them parse through the stuff that's more difficult for them and that's how you as a parent can sort of instead of jumping and giving the answer sort of focus on that process a little bit more yeah help them put their aim on a certain aspect maybe exactly the cool thing about focusing on process and less on end product is that a it helps them believe us when we say what we really care about is the learning because right now they really don't they know that the harvard making common project survey that they did a couple years ago they asked students what do you care about more your academic performance or being a good kind caring person and overwhelmingly the students said my academic performance and then they said to the kids well what do your parents care about more that you're a good kind caring person or that you do well in school you know your academic performance and they said overwhelmingly their parents cared more that they did well in school so when we say what we care about is the learning but then we show them that what we really care about is that end result like oh you brought me an A I'm so happy you know that kind of stuff and they don't really believe us but if we're focusing more on the process and a little bit less on that end product then they really will believe us the other cool thing about it is that for kids who are really struggling with anxiety and perfection issues pulling away a little bit from the end product and focusing more on the process can diffuse some of that anxiety and help them understand that not all stress is bad some of it is really productive like the stress I have of the edits being due for my next book by the end of this week is really productive stress for me that's not bad that actually pushes me forward and plus Monica I want my editor to think good things about me I want the teacher to like me well yeah at the end of time they'll like me more we have this debate Dax and I often about do you need some level of anxiety to be productive and I often think yes and I don't think it's a bad thing to have some amount of anxiety and he thinks I think the aspiration the utopia would be that you do all things because you love doing them and the challenge could be fun and that it's just how you frame it is the challenge homework or is the challenge an opportunity for you to demonstrate the thing you're great at it's very tiny semantic stuff but I think it carries an emotional weight well I think that whole process over product thing can pay off dividends in so many ways and especially when you're modeling for them the very behavior you want to see in them so Dax like if you're trying something new that you've never tried before especially for example the cool thing about you is that you grew up with dyslexia and you are an incredible reader and that just letting your kids see you read especially when you're talking about the fact that you had issues reading when you were a kid is one of the most powerful things you can do to help your kids say oh you know maybe I should try something that's tough for me one of the things that we do around here is every once in a while like every season or so we set three goals for ourselves all my kids myself my husband we write down like three goals and one of them has to be scary like a little bit hard something we've not been able to do before for me this year it's been learning Spanish and I hate feeling stupid I hate feeling like I can't articulate something smoothly so this is really challenging for me and so I talk about that with my kids I'm like look I'm a writer I communicate in English and that's my strength and so to suddenly make language be my weakness is really scary for me and so as I achieve these things that they know are frightening for me it teaches them I am modeling for them that I want to see the same thing in them and that they're in a safe place to do that well I'm glad you bring up modeling because the two other things I love that I want to shine a light on is one was a student's parent asking you how to get them interested in reading oh it's so sad it's so sad because people ask me to give them advice on things like this one mom she said my kids don't read for pleasure anymore and by the way her kids were just at the end of middle school beginning of high school and that's actually a very common time for kids to drift away from reading yes we won't protect that but it happens so she said okay so my kids don't read for pleasure anymore and can you make me a list of really challenging books but that they'll be really excited to read and now I will tell you my superpower is matching kids with books so I'm happy to help with that in fact I have some books sitting right here I have one for you that's I think it's gonna be a perfect fit I'll pick a car for you that's my superpower but I said to that mom I said well you know that's kind of a magic list but we'll talk about in a minute but do they see you read for pleasure and she admitted no she said well you know I work really long hours and I don't really have time and I said well there's nothing I can say there's no magic wand I can wave to make your kids value reading if they don't see you reading right that's sort of a starting place and p.s that means that like if you're reading on a tablet or something you need to make it really clear that that's what you're doing because kids it's easier for them to understand you're reading if they see you reading an actual physical book to her other point I said so let's talk about this list when your kids do read for pleasure what do they like and this is horrifying she said well they really like those diary of a wimpy kid books but those books are stupid so I threw them away oh I know I know so when I tell teachers that story there's like they go like shock totally because the thing that we know is obviously like oh my gosh graphic novels you know diary of a wimpy kid books are those Jeff Kinney's wonderful books yeah have cartoon you know and if a kid is seeing himself or herself or whoever in that character and frankly the character in diary of a wimpy kid is a great kid to identify with because he's constantly working through these insecurities and this perceived hurdles and all this other stuff and so anyway I made her go I happen to know she could afford it so I made her go get those books and apologize to her children well I always say that Bukowski deserves way more praise in the literary community because he turns on so many young adult males myself included I wanted to read about shitting fucking and getting drunk and what a great gateway to discover the pleasure of right immersing my brain into someone else's world and then it led to all these other you know hoity-toity things but it started there well also Bukowski's all about joy language I mean you know Stephen King talks about this a lot that it isn't until you read something where you go oh my gosh that moved me in some way or you read something that's really bad and you say oh my gosh I can do better yeah sure that you get that amazing moment where you think oh my gosh language is for me too it's not like this thing that gets assigned to me and I have to somehow you know make my way through but it's this thing that is joyful and wonderful and if Bukowski gave you that thank god he's not my bag but yeah he was very misogynistic well for me it was something else but thank goodness I found it I'm so grateful that's why for me especially teaching in the rehab where I often had kids who were you know 16 17 18 who still read at like a fifth grade level or would come to me say I don't read like that's just not my thing and you know it was this wonderful challenge where often non-fiction can be the way in if you talk to them about the things they're really interested in I had this one kid who said I'm not interested in like anything and so we've got to talking got to talking turns out what he loved more than anything was his dog which was a pit bull that he had recently adopted and was training and there's a wonderful book and her author's name this will be for fact check I guess slips my mind at the moment but there's a wonderful book called pit bull and it's about the pit bull breed and this kid was enchanted with this book and so finding a way in to help kids love reading means we have to know the kid yeah you can't just say here take this book but I do wonder because you said you know he's not your bag and then dex said well of course not he's misogynistic so if you know that your kid is identifying or loving a book that is maybe teaching them or having them idolize something that we know is maybe toxic yeah what do you do about that oh my gosh you have you know we burn the books monica we outlaw them and burn them this is really personal for me right now because I happen to be going through this I have a kid who believes some stuff that I don't necessarily believe and is loves loves number one loves to press my buttons about it but number two loves to learn about it and so for me the absolute worst thing I could do is say no you cannot read those books and my next book is about preventing substance abuse in kids it's specifically from the perspective of you know my kids are genetically loaded up to you know encounter that so how do I as a parent and as a teacher to kids who are struggling with substance abuse how do I know what I can control and what I can't control and all that sort of stuff so anyway one of my kids is completely off his rocker fascinated by hallucinogens everything from you know he loves to watch Rogan talk he read Michael Pollan's book change your mind all that stuff and he's into it like let me explain how DMT works and I'm like oh my god but at the same time the fastest way for me to number one is to alienate myself and to exclude myself from that conversation is to say we will not talk about that or you will not read about that or no you cannot watch you know Hamilton's Pharmacopeia that kind of stuff so the way Ian is to say teach me teach me about that thing that you find so interesting you know for a while there one of my kids was into some stuff that I really couldn't have cared less about and he thought was really really stupid but the fastest way for me to tell him that I think he is stupid is to say you know this thing that you love is stupid so instead the thing that you can do is you can say your kids you know teach me about this thing so one of the things actually here in the office with me is my first library card and I started reading really young and I got my first library card it's like a treasure to me and the librarian started restricting my ability to go into the adult section they wanted me to stay in the kids section my mom said my daughter is allowed to read any book in this library you will not keep her from reading stuff and you know this is like our bodies ourselves and I wanted to see the pictures of you know the reproductive organs in the book in the you know and that was the greatest gift I was ever given I will never ever tell my child they can't read a book but what I will do is have a conversation about it afterwards and you know that's why I'm so grateful for you know Peggy Ornstein's books about boys and sex and how you open that conversation girls and sex and how you open those conversations because shutting down those conversations is the fastest way to shut down the communication with our kids about the things that they may find important I totally agree because on the surface yes Bukowski was a misogynist and he even hit his girlfriend in the documentary it's deplorable but you would miss the thing boys identify with if you just looked at those headlines you'd actually miss that boys feel excluded from society as Bukowski was the ultimate misfit and an excommunicated member of our society and he said fuck you to all the norms and he took back power he was ugly and felt ugly and brutish and what we're identifying with wasn't I want to use women for sex it was oh this guy found a way to empower himself and reject all these things that were hurting him so it's like you would miss the real conversation of why so many young boys like Bukowski and you get hung up on these particulars that aren't really the emotional truth that we're connecting truth stay tuned for more if you dare one more thing I'm modeling I just want I want you to talk about I thought it was brilliant is you know kids you have to ease them into constructive criticism or something you call formative assessment the one thing that I really loved and you're talking about that was as a parent letting them give you some criticism and modeling that modeling that you could do better modeling that you're not nailing it modeling that you're open to suggestion open to change I think a lot of us parents have this knee-jerk thought that we have to present a perfect human so that the things we're telling them to do will result in this thing us that's perfect and look at this example and that's why I'm telling you do this but then in doing that you're making them impervious to constructive criticism first of all they know we're not perfect this is not going to come as like any surprise we're not like opening the pandora's box by letting them know that we're not perfect and again it comes back to modeling the very thing you know if we want our kids to learn how to take information about their failures and use that information to do better next time they have to see us doing it so like by far the one of the biggest questions I get when I do talks with parents is okay well I've been screwing this up and I've been doing too much for my kids and I've been rendering my kids incompetent and so how do I fix that and whether your kids are older or younger you can go to them and you can say you know what I've been doing my best here but I learned some really cool stuff and I think I've been underestimating you I think you're capable of doing more than I gave you credit for and I learned this stuff and I want to do better and so for older kids it can work great because you're modeling for them this ability to say you know I thought I was doing great but I messed this up or I had imperfect information and I really want to do better and I'm going to give you more control and that can lead to a greater conversation but with little kids they find it just delightful when you admit to them that you get stuff wrong and I do it in my classroom all the time I will often come into the classroom and say you know what I told you this thing the other day and it just wasn't sitting right for me so I went home and I did some more research and I realized I totally messed that up and I gave you the wrong information so let me explain how I you know or if a student comes to me and says you know what I'm dropping your class because I just don't feel like I'm learning a ton in here that half an hour that I sit down with that student they explain to me what it is they want from me as a teacher is some of the most valuable information I can get plus it teaches the student that can be her response as well when someone gives them feedback you mentioned in the formative assessment which for anyone who's not heard of it it's also in the book make it stick this is another big thing they talk about that book which is instead of giving kids like big tests at the end of a unit if we give them lots of lower stakes quizzes along the way and help them help us know where they are on a day-to-day basis with their knowledge it won't ever come as a surprise when we give them a big test we'll know exactly where they are all the time and that requires kids to be able to hear feedback about how they're doing with their writing or how they're doing with their math and kids who don't tend to hear a lot of constructive feedback aren't very good at that I was talking outside of New York a little while ago and I was talking to sixth graders and this kid raised his hand at the end of my talk I called him and he said yeah so um my parents say I'm perfect at everything and I just don't think that can be true and he was not this is not him trying to be funny this is not him being sarcastic this is truly this kid's parents have told him he's perfect at everything and he suddenly had this glimmer of like oh wait a second I don't I don't think I can be good at everything and that formative assessment helps us as teachers understand what our kids need from us or as parents and helps the kids understand where they are with their learning because as humans we're really bad at this thing called metacognition which is knowing what we do and don't know and so anytime we can help kids sort of have to exercise that muscle it's always a good thing you know you know when we used to go into like the French test and we're like I'm gonna nail this I know all the French and then you get your test back and it's like at 68 you're like oh my gosh i thought i knew everything that's a failure of metacognition right is there anything in the gift of failure how the best parents learn to let go so their children can succeed is there anything i know my wife when she's trying to tell people to read your book she always brings up that example of don't bring your fucking kids homework in sixth grade like at what point do you got to cut the bullshit and let them fail and own their stuff is that around the age well so from a very early age you help them build strategies even like kindergartners you help them like you know if you're having trouble getting out of the house in the morning because mornings frankly suck helping your kids come up with strategies for how they remember their stuff for kids your age it could be like a little chart they draw with pictures of like their backpack and a picture of their book and a picture you know that kind of so we're constantly trying to help them create strategies and i'm not saying you can never deliver your kids homework to school but from my perspective if i'm trying to help a kid come up with strategies as their teacher for how to do better next time how am i going to not forget the homework next time you know the story christmas referring to is my kid had been really he just he was the most disorganized human being i've ever seen in my life and he was just learning how to remember stuff to take to school and he forgot his math homework and he was doing terribly math and things were falling apart and so my temptation was to take it to him but in that moment you have to realize that you're either going to deliver the homework and save him in that moment or have the opportunity to help him become the kind of kid who's going to remember it next time luckily i didn't take it and his teacher this wonderful man named mr dano mr dano kept him in from recess which by the way is something we have to stop doing because it's the kids who get kept in from recess that need recess the most so you gotta stop doing that but it was an incredible opportunity as mr dano said you know this has been going on long enough and you get to stay in until you come up with a strategy that will allow you to help remember your homework next time and the strategy my kid came up that day in fourth grade is a strategy he uses to this day to remember his stuff every day which is a checklist had i been recommending checklists to him like ad nauseum every single day yeah i had but it wasn't until he thought it was his idea he came up with it as a strategy that worked for him that he used it every year he makes a new one and i save them all i steal them off the refrigerator when i'm done with them and i have all these checklists he's made for himself every year since then he's now in high school and he still uses them so it's not that he can't take the homework ever it's just that we have to think do i want to make myself feel good right now in this moment or do i want to have a kid maybe six months from now who feels good about himself because he's remembering the homework on his own the thing i find myself saying out loud a lot is like all right well am i going to follow them to their workplace when they're older and do this for them like at what point you know at some point you're going to bail out you know unless you're going to join them their whole life i get to do these talks at colleges during parents weekend often for like parents of freshmen who are freaking out about the number of things that all of a sudden they can't do for their kids anymore long distance and i try to give them ways to sort of manage their anxiety about that but you can either start early or you can have this cliff eventually where all of a sudden you realize wait a second when your kid goes to college by the way if they don't check off this very particular box on one of the forms they fill out you have no legal right to ever look at their grades so you could fall off that precipitous cliff whether that's in you know middle school or first year of high school or college or you can start when the kids are really really little to teach them to self-advocate to teach them to tell people what they need and when to ask for help because you know that's as a 12-step person you know that one of the hardest things we do is ask people for help and it's one of the most important things that we do so yeah calling people using those numbers is super hard yeah you have a similar thought on intervening in your kids social interactions too right like if they're in a fight or something instead of like running up and trying to solve the problem you allow them to kind of try to at least figure it out on their own yeah i mean you know it depends on how old the kid is and what you're doing in the context but in the book i talk a little bit about you know those first moments where one kid throws sand and another kid in the sandbox if we pull those two kids away from each other we have a moment where neither kid gets to look into the eyes of the other kid and see how that kid feels and we have incredible moment where we could either start to teach kids about normal social cues and empathy and the kid who threw the sand gets to see the tears of the kid who had the sand thrown at her and the kid who had the sand thrown at her gets to say to the kid who throws the sand don't treat me like that that moment is taken away when we pull the situation apart and i talk to high school kids all the time whose parents intervene on behalf of their kids in friendships and there is almost no worse thing that we could do than attempt to engineer our kids social lives because it has all kinds of horrible emotional and social pitfalls because your kid will get even more alienated if you try to step in for them but i think at the very seed of this whole like how we stop bullying from happening it's allowing that sandbox interaction to happen because if you don't that kid who's in the sand is going to end up in my classroom someday not understanding why he does not understand social cues it's painful for a kid to feel like they don't understand social cues and if we make it so they don't get a chance to learn them that's our fault now i remember watching this great michael moore documentary um who to invade next i don't know if you've seen that but they he goes i want to say with sweden it's one of these great scandinavian countries but they're regularly in the top three globally of all testing right and they have no homework yes okay so generally speaking when we're talking about scandinavian countries in school we're talking about finland okay yes it's great there's so many things that finland do really really well you know there's a lot more play especially in the early years behind me there's all these books and there's a whole section over there that's all about free play and the importance of free play and why it's essential to learning and why it's essential to everything not just learning but like you know there's a book over there by someone who realized that she was getting more and more kids preferred out for occupational therapy because all they ever did was run around on perfectly flat surfaces with no obstacles and they didn't have a good perception and good core strength to be able to like you know balance on stuff so that stuff they do really well but the other thing is at a certain level we're comparing apples and oranges so taking finland as an example and saying we should all do exactly what finland is doing is just not gonna work i mean finland has a homogenous society finland has way more investment in teacher preparation and support teachers are paid well teachers are trained better all kinds of infrastructure they're not worried about they're paying for their health care there's all kinds of stuff that's behind that but is finland doing a lot of really smart things in terms of less cumulative or summative standardized testing which has nothing to do with learning by the way summative or cumulative assessments are really great snapshots of learning but when it comes to what works for learning it's a formative assessment is what works for learning summative and cumulative assessment help teachers sort of know where kids are at one moment and that's even if those tests work well which often they don't so um yeah there's all kinds of problems with that and there's lots that we could do to emulate finland and i would be thrilled to death if we were to do that but it's folly to say we need to be like finland and adopt everything about their system because we just we have a much more diverse population with lots of different needs and it's just a little different but i'm a huge fan of finland's educational system okay so the other thing is and we've just had a tiniest sliver of this being talked about on here obviously the impact of technology is such that there's a lot of things that we used to do that are clearly outmoded now right so memorization of historical facts and it really has no place unless we want to ignore the fact that we have the answer to everything in the world in our hand how is education evolving is evolving to be more conceptual which to me feels good like less about the memorizing and more about understanding complicated concepts and i believe now math the way they're teaching math is evolved too could you just tell us a little bit about what's changing so again i'm going to urge balance so there are a lot of things that are happening that are really great so as parents are have been realizing the past couple years the way we teach math has changed and that's fantastic because we're looking more at number sense and less about carrying the one and procedure there's a really great website called ucubed.org y-o-u-c-u-b-e-d.org by joe bowler b-o-a-l-e-r she runs a math education program out of stanford and she has fantastic research on her site about why this math it seems to make no sense to us actually does promote number sense and that the way we teach math has been problematic for a long time what is number sense number sense is more like so your kids after getting into like addition you're going to start seeing them doing things like instead of adding 67 and 33 you'll see them add 60 and 30 and then seven and three right so that's more about being able to like clump numbers to be able to understand numbers on a more conceptual level and be able to apply our number sense in lots of different contexts as opposed to me like if i need to add those numbers like i just had a panic attack coming up with that example so in fact i can't do math unless i have a pen and pencil so i can carry the one and do all that stuff whereas the way my kids have learned how to do math is much more oh well i would just take the 60 and the 30 and then of course i just do it and that's easy and it works much better that's how i'm doing all my fast math just so you know and i think it was a workaround for dyslexia well interesting you just said the word fast math and i just want to point out one really important concept joe baller on youtube.org has research around the fact that we should never be timing kids on their math facts timing kids on their math facts is one of the fastest ways to create math anxiety and speed and mastery are not the same thing in fact when you look at kids and their reaction to competition i could be perfectly proficient with certain math concepts and then you say and now i'm gonna time you yeah i'm gonna fall apart it's all going to fall apart for me and that's not the case for all kids some kids love it i have one kid that like he's like oh yeah time me at everything else right how great i am um and he's great under pressure and it's just a different way of expressing what you know there's an amazing revisionist history episode malcolm gladwell's podcast about that the lsat and what are you really measuring and the time component and what on earth does it accomplish and then all this data saying right that there's zero correlation between lsat scores and achievement within law yeah yeah it's pretty funny i do want to talk really quickly about you mentioned history and dates and things like that i think the problem with saying oh but i can just google it which is absolutely true the problem is is that then you don't create a larger framework one of the things we know about learning is that the more context i have if you come to me and you say so and so said this in this particular year and i have a big framework for how that falls in relationship to maybe the french revolution and the american revolution i can say oh that's interesting all these three things were happening at around the same time so i can see how they may have influenced each other one thing we know also is that the bigger your web sort of in your brain bad metaphor but on picture like a spider web the more places our knowledge cross the more places we have to hang new knowledge so for someone who's first learning american history for example learning dates can be really challenging because you don't have a context to put them in but once you know a few dates here and there and you can say oh that happened kind of within a couple years of when brown versus board of education happened so i can imagine that that has something to do with that situation and then there's this thing called cultural literacy and now we're getting into something that edie hirsch a core knowledge proponent a guy who came up with this concept called core knowledge one of the things we know is that the classic example is this how to understand how baseball is scored and you have never seen baseball you are going to have a much more difficult time reading and understanding those instructions about how baseball is scored than a person who's watched a baseball game before so that's called cultural literacy and it's not just about understanding that the line first kill all the lawyers it comes from shakespeare it has to do with the fact that if i have a baseline understanding of mythology maybe even the bible not as a religious thing but as something that influences literature i can understand a new concept within the context of that and it actually helps me become a better reader kids who have some cultural literacy around the context of the thing it is they're reading will understand that reading more deeply which is another problem with testing because if we give a kid who has never ever seen i don't know let's pick something super hoity-toity like a polo game and you give him a reading about polo and he's never seen he doesn't even know that polo is played with horses then how on earth is he going to test well on a passage around polo the kid who has played polo or has been to a polo match or at least understands that it's played with horses is going to do much better on a test when it comes to that passage around polo so that stuff is called cultural literacy and that's really important so i don't think we're in a place where we can say oh we don't need to learn facts and figures because we can just google them because we have to have a framework on which to place new knowledge yeah the more you know the more you're capable of learning is sort of the way that teachers talk about it you know i was a latin teacher for six years i was gonna bring that up so for me learning latin was really more about understanding where english and other languages come from so for example the word calculus that we used for kind of math actually means a little pebble a little stone which if i have to just memorize that i may or may not remember it but if i know that in the roman markets they use these little pebbles to do addition and subtraction to calculate how much people owed for something then it makes perfect sense for me i can understand that oh calculate calculus calculus calculus calculus is a stone because i use it to calculate and that's where the word calculus and calculate come from yeah and this is probably a dyslexic complaint but that's part of my frustration is when these words were coined in greece and in rome they were quite literal and easy to understand but because we're using this bygone nomenclature even you know anthropology anthro man apology study literally if i were speaking greek it would just be study man i majored in study man that's so easy but we've complicated all this stuff with all this vestigial verbiage and i find that actually counterproductive to learning concepts and timelines and synthesizing info but if you take kids for example one of the activities i had worked every freaking time with my rehab kids in talking about risk for substance abuse one of the big the biggies in childhood are academic failure social ostracism aggression towards other kids and of course all those things tend to compound each other so many of my students who've ended up just people who abuse substances started because they had academic failure social ostracism blah blah blah so a lot of students in my class had learning issues and a lot of them for example many of them i usually had at least one dyslexic and definitely a couple of kids with adhd in my classroom the thing that they loved was this game i made called etymology jeopardy it was a game where i would give them the roots for the words and help them realize how that word led to a word that we use in english so like what household word in italy means sky cielo and then they would be like a household word cielo ceiling that's where we get the word ceiling because cielo means sky in italian which is derived from other places so and in a way that then helps them with their spelling it helps them with their understanding of language and it helps them own language a little bit more because for kids the best way to get them learning is to help them feel like they own it it's mine now so i totally get that it would be nice if we had words that meant exactly what they are and it was super simplified but that's not what we have so understanding where words come from helps us own our language a little bit more i think yeah i would love to play trivial pursuit with you just i know i will never get a sports question so we have to have my older son play be a team well listen jessica we love talking to you and i love what your book is about and i think it's so important that we continue to question how we're doing this and we continue to try to better it i'm just ultimately grateful that you're still trying your hardest to make this go as good as it can thank you and i owe you guys a huge i owe kristen in particular huge debt of gratitude because one morning this summer when i was trying i had my internet off because i was trying to finish my manuscript for the new book and finally my landline rang and like no one has my landline number so i don't use it it was my sister and she's like turn your phone on and she said that was the day that kristen had instagrammed herself in my book and um that was a really fun day for me so i am very very grateful for all your support of the book once again i reap the rewards of my wife's hard work uh so jessica thank you so much i hope we can talk to you again you're so welcome all right bye bye and now my favorite part of the show the fact check with my soulmate monica batman hi hi hi oh my god what do we keep doing this show until we're in our hundreds what did i get wrong what did i get wrong what did i get wrong what was it oh do you're at bernie when you're 100 do you think that bernie's penis is enormous yes i know you think that well i think that photo guy that photo's not doctored i'm so blown away holy log oh my god i couldn't find it the other day i wanted to show someone else and i couldn't locate it you sent it from your ipad oh so maybe somewhere in my ipad yeah okay i don't want to lose it no it's important yeah but do you think the voice that happens with older people does it happen gradually or all of a sudden their voice box kind of like just a t like you know i think gradually right it just gets rusty in there oh this whole new thing we gotta get someone on we should try to track on an expert can talk about this the ones that are erasing the epigenome with all the errors and reading your dna and reversing aging in mice for me has the same excitement level as crisper did when we learned about crisper does it have do you like the idea of self-driving cars or do you hate it no i don't like it yeah yeah and do you not like it because you like driving well on a personal fear level my fear is that if it gets widely prevalent at some point they'll make it illegal to drive cars because if it's you know they'll have that i'm sure computers are so much better than humans driving cars and if they're like no it's just too fucking dangerous the notion that i wouldn't be able to drive someday is really a nightmare scenario for me i guess i'm just gonna have to like buy 10 000 acres in the middle of new mexico or something so i can have an area where i can still operate machinery even if it's not permitted on the public roads yeah self-driving cars are tuned but i bet removing the right to drive is a lot will be like a good decade of it where it'll be classist the poor people won't be able to afford the self-driving cars like they'll have whatever car they own a decade probably more than that i hope so yeah i want to be driving well into my hundreds quickly too i feel so sad for lincoln and delta who are they're gonna be the ones to take away your keys and you're probably gonna punch them in the face i'm gonna start swinging but it won't hurt anyone it won't because you're just bullish at that point my handle shatter as soon as it makes contact oh your littlest daughter my soulmate was doing a workout with me she was so strong oh my goodness she's so good at the workout that's not three cutest things i've ever witnessed in my life it was so cute when she was doing planks with you and she was she did a good job she her form was really good yeah and she's strong she got that like eight pack on top of your belly it's so awesome you were talking about her yesterday with a friend via zoom about how she's one of those people that when she gives you attention shines a light on you it feels really intense and special yeah and then when she doesn't it really hurts yeah yeah yes high highs and low lows people have that ability yeah she has it you know my boyfriend ben jennifer garner did an interview post-divorce and she actually let me just look up real quick the way she said it was so heartbreaking and powerful correct yeah she said he's the love of my life what am i going to do about that he's the most brilliant person in any room the most charismatic the most generous he's just a complicated guy i always say when his sun shines on you you feel it but when the sun is shining elsewhere it's cold he can cast quite a shadow that's pretty well stated it is that's generous of her to just say still smart is charismatic yeah yeah it's very honest it's just like sad life is sad it has a lot of sadness and happiness too but delta's like that oh hold on she's not banging any of the workers no but i'm saying we don't know what you do well you're right we don't know the depths but but she you know she's my soulmate and she's also really close to our new assistant and i get jealous of that and it reminds me of ben affleck in the shadow sure sure how could it not but some people have that power not everyone has it right yes dicey getting involved with someone who has that because anyone who has that's aware that they have that on some level and they obviously enjoy giving that attention to people and the result of it and they i think have a hard time not doing that yeah yeah yeah i know exactly where your head goes when you read that what your head goes like fuck even when i get them it's gonna be hard it's gonna be hard to keep them and that's heartbreaking is that what it goes on it's like i still get them but i just don't know if i keep them no i don't think that you love him so much so do you feel bad for him somehow in that whole scenario well well everyone's complicated yeah so i'm more than others some more than others yeah but i i like complicated people yeah so it doesn't scare me that he's complicated it you're up with the challenge yeah it just makes me sad for her yeah that's really all it does when i read that it doesn't make me feel horny for him it doesn't make me think about people in general who are like that and i mean my general gripe with everyone which is how sincere are they how real is it and i can imagine if i were her and he was shining lights on other people she would feel like oh whatever he would be he just needed a high he needed approval or validation and i was the person on receiving end for that time doesn't mean i was special in any way right i just have this back and forth struggle with i think we should feel special and i think we shouldn't feel special uh-huh it is funny because there's these guys right these legendary guys uh i guess like um a rod or you know there's some infamous bachelors uh-huh who've been like with every single person yeah and you have to imagine that these women are meeting this person going i'm not falling for this like i already know the track record i know it's a new megastar every seven months but then the power of it has to be so intense that even knowing all that you still either go i'll be the one that breaks this cycle or you just don't give a flame fuck because it feels great you're like all right well i'm gonna enjoy it while the sun's out and when it's gone it's not but it is just interesting that these guys can kind of operate like one after another very high profile i just imagine if i was a woman i met someone like a rod or someone at a party i'd be like oh here it comes which by the way i think is kind of one of his magic moves is he doesn't hit on anyone so like expecting this sexual predator and they meet a sexual bambi oh wow yeah some people have moves moves people have moves so jesse didn't have any facts she didn't have any moves she had tons of moves well she had facts but she cited them all so this is what you know read her citing exactly there's no need to check the only thing that i did need to check was who wrote the book pitbull bronwyn dickey bronwyn dickey bronwyn dickey wrote great name that book it's called pitbull the battle over an american icon by bronwyn dickey pitbulls are a very polarizing topic they are that's really true yeah the people that love them feel very defensive of them people tweaking all the time like you know if i just say the word pitbull and i don't mention that they're great family dogs you're perpetuating this thing i'm afraid of pitbulls i don't know what to tell people i'll be hiking and someone's got an off-leash 100 pound pitbull with balls and i'm fucking scared so all i can tell you is that i know i know people feel very protective over pitbulls and i think it's because a lot of them have been put down because people are scared they breed them for fighting and then these rings get broken up and then they flood the you know pound and people think they're you know yeah we're afraid of the lobby the pitbull lobby i'm just mad that those lobbies are effective like i don't want to talk about vaccinations which is insane because 99% of people vaccinate and believe in them and i'm terrified of the fucking they don't want to deal with it it's inescapable in this current world of social media that there's always going to be a lobby at least a one person lobby about anything 10 person lobby posing as a thousand i think that's pretty common too each one has like 100 accounts it's okay to have your own personal opinion that you aren't a fan of diabetes that i hate diabetics that you it is my right as an american to hate diabetics that you wouldn't have a pitbull right you wouldn't feel comfortable having one and that's okay but the lobby the pitbull lobby equates it almost to like racism yep yep almost you're like a racist when you say yeah you're afraid of pitbull you're a breedist yeah i know i said i hate pimples not pimples we're not allowed to hate pimples either because pimples are racist because they try to spell the whiteness from your body they concentrate little droplets of whiteness and they spell it from your body right yeah exactly because you're brown but your pimples are still white right fortunately yeah yeah um same white blood cells yeah i'm reading a great book on immunology i'm excited for you to download me on that book i don't want to sit through the whole thing but i want you to condense it in eight greatest points and relay them to me i will i am very much enjoying it it is breaking it all down into a very digestible way of understanding the immune system it's called an elegant defense the extraordinary new science of the immune system a tale in four lives by matt rickdell and he matt rickdell is a pulitzer prize winner oh i love pulitzer i know it's kind of a unifile situation pit pulitzer prize winners anyway it's fantastic you follow the lives of these four people and their specific immune story and it's really good i recommend can we get off topic jessica she said currently in vermont there's not a treatment center for kids oh okay and um i'm gonna trust her on that because i don't think she'd say it unless she knew for sure but i did go to the health vermont.gov site and there is a bunch of stuff about substance abuse treatment options but not inpatient maybe maybe and i don't see anything specifically for children i like that well a i'm always grateful when someone feels comfortable enough to share that they're a recovering addict yeah but additionally i like when someone like her does because i think there still is this pervasive archetype for an addict which is someone with no willpower or that's lazy and all this stuff and she clearly is a very type a fucking overachiever responsible tons of willpower yeah and addiction don't give a fuck it does not where'd you graduate from oh cool suck this dick does not discriminate no no okay that's all for jessica you know she checked her own facts she came correct she really did i liked her me too i bet i think a lot of people i hope will enjoy that episode of children because i don't know i i feel for you guys yeah well it's not unlike diet and there's a lot of conflicting beliefs yes and you can't really study people i'm sorry i say this a lot in here humans are impossible to study so even though you majored in anthropology which if anything proved to me that they can't be studied but you know what are you gonna monitor these kids and these kids did right and these kids did this and then we're gonna check in with them in 20 years and see how they turn out bullshit there's also gonna be 10 trillion other things that happen besides the parenting so we're almost impossible to conclude anything about that's what's frustrating about us that's what we need to have humans that live in a lab okay i'm sorry we need a class of citizens who are born in labs live their whole lives in labs and we study them we figure we have to do it for like two generations we answer all the questions and then we'll burn those labs to the ground and we'll have all the answers i'm sure a lobby will contact us probably the burn building to the ground lobby all right i love you thank you you