cahn

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has a tiered level of competitions that, in the US, is the gateway to participating in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). The first level is the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) 10/12 exams -- roughly speaking, you take 10 if you're in grade 10 or below, and 12 if you're in grade 11 or 12, though younger students can take the 12. This competition is multiple-choice and open to anyone who wants to take it; usually there are, idk, a couple dozen or more kids from E's school who take it, and I think most high schools around have it as a possibility. The second level, which you are invited to if you score above a certain threshold on the AMC, is the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME). Usually at E's school there are a couple to a few kids who qualify for that. (These two contests are open to international students.) The third level, dictated by a threshold that is a function of your AMC and AIME score, is the USA Junior Mathematics Olympiad (henceforth JMO, for the route via AMC 10) or the USA Mathematics Olympiad (AMO, via AMC 12), which unlike the first two levels is a proof-based competition. (There are a couple more levels after this that lead to the six kids who are the US team for the IMO, but I have no experience with them and they are not relevant to this rant, so I won't talk about them here except to note that they exist.)

I have spent way too much time this winter being angry at the MAA (*), and it hasn't even directly affected my kid. It may have affected a couple of her friends. (I can't even tell you how incandescent I would be if it had directly affected my kid, who really loves math competitions and has put a lot of energy into them, and we talk all the time about how it's really OK if she doesn't do well, but it's one thing not to do well after having made an honest effort at an honorable goal, but not to do well because the system has screwed you over is another thing again!)

The issue here is that the MAA competitions have become these things that kids perceive as very important for college, etc. And what that means is that there is a very large incentive to cheat. And in the last few years there have been quite a few more widespread ways to easily cheat. (Ironically, because of all the rampant cheating, the MAA competitions are now somewhat less taken into consideration by colleges than they used to be.)

( Cheating since 2023, with receipts (histogram figures) for the 2024/2025 AMC 12 )

( What appears to be their current proposed solution: lack of transparency, and index plus 2d20 )

(*) ETA: I mean -- on rereading my post it's pretty clear that a great deal of it is misplaced anger at the whole cheating culture, which is obviously not at ALL the MAA's fault, and unfortunately for them they are a convenient punching bag (sorry MAA). I still don't agree with a lot they've done, but it is just a general big mess that probably has no really good solutions.

3/5. I must grudgingly give this book a score of 3 because I agreed broadly... mostly... with what he is saying (extrinisic rewards don't really work that well as a motivator), and this is an important concept, if you haven't read any parenting books (and I can imagine there being rather less of an overlap with readers of this book and other parenting books than the last pop psych book I read), and there were some interesting studies I hadn't seen before, but just about every page I'd be all "Yes BUT..." and "Okay BUT...," in large part because Kohn is wildly annoying.

It starts with Kohn's grand pronouncement that our society runs on the central idea Do this, get that, which is, he says firmly, not the way the world works a priori, it's a philosophy.

Me: But... that is actually the way the world does work? If you throw a ball straight up, it will come right back down and hit you on the head. You do a thing, there are consequences to the thing.
Kohn: Yeah, well, but if you were asking me I would say that's perfectly all right if you want to reduce humans to physics, but humans are obviously MUCH MORE COOL than that because we have, like, consciousness and free will and stuff.
Me: I'm... not even going to get into that with you. But even putting that aside... physics is still a thing? And also there are consequences to human interactions too --
Kohn: I'm talking about rewards EXTRINISIC to the task it rewards, like gold stars and money bribes to get A's, not INTRINSIC motivations.
Me: Okay, but you never actually said that in the first couple of chapters, I just had to infer that from the specific sorts of rewards you decry and how you talk about how great intrinsic motivation is. Also some of the things you class under intrinsic motivations actually seem to be natural consequences, but you seem to have this thing against this straw man that you call natural consequences --
Kohn: But you got my point, right? (*)
Me: FINE.

So... yeah... I agree that extrinsic rewards are not great as a motivator and can backfire! And that intrinisic motivations and natural consequences (more about this in a bit) are way better in general! And I agree totally that the fact that often one has to keep the extrinisic rewards going is an indicator that it's not something that works so well in general. And that often it just devolves into rules lawyering about "well, did THAT count as doing the task and can I get the reward?" Yes, I've been there, done that. So yes, I agree that he makes a very good case that forcing a tight coupling between extrinisic rewards and tasks, especially with the express purpose of controlling the kid, is not great.

That being said, there were many, many things that annoyed me NO END about this book.

( There were a lot of things that annoyed me. )

( Kohn's chapter on praise gets its own cut: )

(*) It turns out that at least for E, being able to check things off on a checklist gives her the same sort of dopamine hit as a reward does. Would Kohn call that an extrinisic reward? I don't think he would, but then I don't really know what his definition is, except "extrinsic rewards are what they're called when I don't like them."

I have threatened for years now to rant about how excellent Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) is, and I guess now is the time, because E has just finished her first math class with them (Introduction to Counting and Probability), which she took over the summer. (She had previously taken their two python classes and I'd been super impressed, but I wasn't sure how representative those were.) And because her school has run out of math classes for her, she will be taking her math classes with them for... at least the next two years, and hopefully beyond that. I now kind of wish that she'd taken all her math classes ever with them (though for E in particular I greatly prioritized her socializing with other kids in person, and she's adored the math teacher she had for the last two years), and if I can possibly do so I will make this happen with A.

AoPS was started by math contest geeks, and provides math curriculum and online math classes from Prealgebra through Group Theory, which go more deeply into the curriculum and have more challenging problems than your run-of-the-mill math class, and have as a core philosophy trying to teach problem-solving skills in general rather than just how to do specific problems. (Beast Academy is their curriculum for the lower grades, which A. is enrolled in at the second/third grade level and which I've talked about before.)

( Cut for length. )

It's been *checks* a few months since I last complained about anything the kids are going through educationally, soooooo obviously it is time for me to complain about something else!

( tl;dr: Prodigy = bad, Beast Academy = v. v. good, Oregon Trail = neutral-to-very-slightly-good )

My life for the past couple of weeks has been basically the sequel to my previous reading-rant posts :P So in case you were wondering how those turned out, here is an update!

1) Sequel to my post on Lucy Calkins: Turns out that at Back-to-School Night the 1st grade teacher at the swank gifted school my kids go to revealed that they use Lucy Calkins for a reading curriculum in first grade, thus leading to one of the other parents panicking (she has heard of the evils of this curriculum from her reading specialist friend), a lot of evening texting, a meeting with this parent and her friend the aforementioned reading specialist, and now I'm trying to set up a meeting with this parent and the school curriculum director. It doesn't make a lot of difference to me viscerally speaking, because my kid knows how to read and did before even starting kindergarten, but man am I glad he knew how to read already. (The other parent's child mostly knows how to read, but is not fluent.) I mostly am just trying to make sure they don't use three-cueing because come on, that's completely ridiculous. I tried asking A. about it with very leading questions and he didn't seem to think that the teacher had ever said anything that was similar to three-cueing, so I guess that's a good sign. (Although I asked him about phonics in kindergarten -- which I now know his kindergarten teacher used, because the other kids have learned it -- and he had no idea about that either, so he might just be really poor at answering those kinds of questions. But also since he knew how to read, it's possible she did phonics with other kids but not him.)

(Interestingly, the reading specialist we talked to said that older teachers often do a decent job of teaching kids to read even with an awful curriculum, because they don't feel like they have to slavishly follow the curriculum, they just mix in phonics because they know it actually works. Their Kindergarten teacher is, in fact, on the older side -- not old, but she's definitely taught for a while, and I haven't heard any complaint about parents worrying this teacher didn't teach their kid how to read well (and let's just say I have heard many complaints from other parents about various subjects and teachers, so I kind of feel like I would have heard about it).

2) Sequel to the post where I mentioned my niece's reading: to recap briefly, my niece, my sister's oldest child O., who I think is reasonably bright, had not learned how to read at the end of 2019, the year before she entered kindergarten. Mostly legit, most kids don't know how to read when they enter kindergarten, right? But she'd been exposed to "whole-word" methods with maaaaaybe a small smattering of phonics, and I was a little concerned, not about the not reading yet, but because when I played word games with her that Christmas she was displaying a somewhat worrying tendency to guess the word, and I didn't like that. We all talked about this and my sister elected to wait and see how she did in kindergarten.

Then her kindergarten year, of course, turned out to be severely disrupted by the pandemic, and I'm not sure how much she learned about anything that year. But here's the thing! My sister, and apparently her kindergarten teacher as well, thought she was actually reading.

Now it is the fall of 2021 and O. is entering first grade, and she just turned 7. At this point, my sister has realized O. does not actually know how to read. That by itself I would be okay with (I know it's still pretty common not to know how to read in first grade), but the way in which she doesn't know how to read is still this thing where she goes "I'm going to look at the first two letters and then guess what the word is." And this is good enough that she seems to be fooling her teachers that she is reading. It is not good enough, as you can imagine, that she actually likes reading, and I worry that O. looks like she's doing well enough that the underlying deficits are not going to get addressed.

If I lived near them, I'd probably buy a phonics curriculum (conuly recommended me some on the previous post, and I've forwarded them to my sister) and go over it with O. I don't, and my sister doesn't have the spoons to do something like that (even though she's doing better these days with medication). But fortunately our parents agreed to pay for a tutor, and I spent a decent chunk of time this weekend and this week researching and phone-interviewing reading tutors. (This kind of thing is also very hard for my sister these days, which is definitely autoimmune-related because she was the queen of organization and logistics before she got sick... but also I have the pedagogical interest.)

The two tutors I'd really have liked to retain from their online description weren't able to do it, sadly. (I had a brief email exchange with one of them, and I just reeeeallly liked her and although I guess I can't say for sure because I haven't talked to her at length, my sense is that I would hire her in a hot second if she were available.) The three I've interviewed so far are all retired teachers.

The first seemed very nice and very personable, and I think O. would love her, and she kept bringing up sight words and how phonics were all very well and good but she taught to the whole child, and at one point she asked how O.'s comprehension was. "It's great when someone reads to her," I said. "Oh, okay, so she's an auditory learner!" Nooooo, I mean, maybe she is?? But the proximate reason she can comprehend being read to better than reading herself is because she doesn't know how to read properly!!

The second potential tutor sounds older and not nearly as much fun. She did also bring up sight words a time or two, but at least after I described O.'s problems she agreed that she thought a systematic phonics program would work well for her, and she at least threw around names that are consistent with an analytic phonics program.

The third runs one of those learning centers (Sylvan) which seems to have a reasonable phonics program, but she brought up sight words too. IDK I know I am working from one data point and a fairly bright data point at that, but I never did a single sight word with A. (of course we talked about words that don't quite follow the phonetic pattern as he was sounding out words) and he learned to read fine :P

I have recommended #2 to my sister and we'll see how it goes.

It's killing me, though, that there's a good chance O. will learn to read only because she's got an aunt who is interested in pedagogy and grandparents who are well-to-do enough to pay for tutoring. I think about all those other kids out there who don't have that and it makes me really sad. UGH.

We technically live on county land, right between two nearby incorporated areas, Larger City and Smaller City. We happen to be in Smaller City's school district (and right now it doesn't matter anyway as both kids are at least temporarily in private school), but Larger City is currently having a contested school board election. One of the school board challengers is campaigning against the current reading program.

Which is how I learned that the current reading program that both school districts use is the Lucy Calkins program, which upon further investigation I found is a well-known and widely-used program (something like the fifth most widely used in the nation??) that has a lot of nice things in it like encouraging kids to love reading. But. As far as I can tell, it does not emphasize phonics as a fundamental foundation for reading and does emphasize GUESSING. GUESSING THE WORD. FROM THINGS LIKE PICTURES. BECAUSE THIS SO WORKS WHEN YOU GET TO UPPER-LEVEL TEXTS THAT DON'T HAVE PICTURES.

(I want to append that this sort of guessing is distinct from figuring out what a word means from context where you didn't know the meaning of the word before. Of course everyone does that! This is guessing to figure out how to decode a word from letters. Like, if I wrote down the word "gwiferpoot" (which I made up, but which I now think ought to be a word), you would know how to decode how to say it in English even though it is a totally made up word! You would not be like "...well... cahn likes shiny things... and the word begins with "g"... so maybe that word is 'garnet.'" You might think that maybe it means garnet, but you would know that the actual word is "gwiferpoot" and be able to say to someone else, "what does 'gwiferpoot' mean or has cahn just gone off the deep end??")

IDK, I know I only have experience with one kid really (the other kid is an outlier nad should not be counted) and I've started realizing he is fairly bright so could be taken as not representative of a not-as-bright child (though even so I think he actually is a good example; my perception is that he may make academic connections a bit earlier than other kids but he makes them in essentially the same way as other kids I observe, whereas E's mind either works a little differently or presents the results differently), but watching him make the phonics connections has been the coolest thing ever and has made me permanently believe in phonics as a fundamental part of a reading program, and when I read about the horrifyingness of this guessing thing I'm like... have these teachers ever actually seen anyone learn how to read?? Have they ever actually thought about how they, themselves, read??

gahhhhh conuly you were right about everything and I'm so glad my kid has already learned to read. (Also, you will be totally unsurprised to learn that this school board challenger is dyslexic, and her daughter is dyslexic and this is why she feels so strongly about the ways in which the school district has failed her child.)

I should probably ask A's teacher (at his current private school) what system she uses -- since he already knows how to read, this wasn't a priority for me as we were sort of hastily figuring out his schooling this summer -- although when I was in his classroom recently I saw some whole words floating around, and even under heavy prompting A. does not say anything about phonics taking place in the classroom (whereas it was very clear phonics instruction was taking place in his preschool). It is supposed to be gifted kids, so I expect they won't have too many problems and most of them know how to read already, but gaaaaaah.

I think this candidate is not likely to win (I think she is the only candidate who doesn't have formal credentials in the area of education... which... also says something, perhaps), but I am going to vote for her! (It looks as though I can, which is odd to me as we are not in the district, but I'm not going to complain.)

(In other news, according to my mom as of our last week's phone conversation, my now-6-year-old niece O. still guesses words. Sigh.)

A. has learned to read, and it has just really interesting watching him learning how to read. (More interesting than watching his sister E, who I think was somewhat atypical in how she learned; a little more on that later.)

What was so interesting to me is that he had four separate epiphanies (over a number of months) as he was learning:

(1) learn how to pronounce letter phonemes, along with combination-of-letter phonemes (like "oo") (ETA: conuly informs me that the correct word is "phonogram")
(2) realize that the letter pronunciations can be done run-together to form an actual word. This was a separate epiphany that came literally months after he knew how to form individual phonemes. (Over a course of about a week. It was really cool to watch.) This was the most surprising to me, that it required a separate and discrete understanding from simply understanding how to reproduce individual phonemes.
(3) learn that many English words do not conform to (1) and (2) and memorize those pronunciations. This was also a separate epiphany that came several months after (2) -- for a while he would laboriously and triumphantly sound out a word and I would say gently, "Well, you sounded that out correctly and it really seems like it should be pronounced like that! But because English is funny it is actually pronounced [like this]." The interesting thing was for a while that I would have to do this several times for the same word over the course of a week or two before he picked it up -- but several months after (2), he suddenly was able to pick up the word after I did it once. This may be less of an "epiphany" than a "now I'm comfortable enough with reading to memorize things," but I did get a distinct sense at one point that he actually did have the thought, "Ohhhhh, I need to sound out words sometimes but sometimes I just need to take the pronunciation and learn it!"
(4) Words are recognizable as patterns of letters, e.g., "ing" is always pronounced the same way. This came at around the same time as (3), and I'm not totally sure whether I should class it as a different epiphany (in fact it might be part of how one gets to (3)), but I do think it's a subtly different point.

I should append that his preschool has a "literacy-and-math" class that they go to for 15 minutes every day, where they talk about letters and numbers, do games with them, etc., and he's done this since he turned 3. This makes me strongly believe that when these epiphanies happen is highly individual, as obviously all his classmates have been doing the same thing, and very few of them have made the jump to actually reading yet. Of course at home we have talked about letters and putting letters together to form words. One of his favorite games (and E's favorite as well when she was that age) involved magnetic letters that we had from when I was a kid. We didn't use the magnet part (we have a sadly non-magnetic refrigerator) but A. would arrange random sets of letters on the ground (really random: bfkdqopcskwn, that kind of thing, only longer) and I would pretend to be horrified at them and then sound them out. This meant that although he didn't understand (1) or (2) at the time, he knew that I understood them, and he also knew I was doing something that mapped from the letters to some silly and fantastical word which he had control over and was nonsense, didn't have to be an actual word! And I would make up small nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant words ("vib," "mip," things like that) and we'd sound them out together. And of course we'd constantly read books to him (he loves being read to), and often I'd sound out words for him while reading, especially if it was a book with simpler words. So anyway, the point is that I feel that (1) and (2) were a sort of natural progression for him, and of course once you're reading at the (2) level, (3) and (4) come pretty naturally when you're reading books with English words that defy simple phonetic analysis :) So it was all fun and games to him, there was no stress at all, and it has been amazing to see his delight as he mastered each of those steps and saw the world open up to him. Seriously, he is LOVING reading cereal boxes and road signs etc. and realizing he can get all this information he couldn't before!

(When I say E was atypical, I mean that I didn't observe her having these separate epiphanies, certainly not in the very obvious way it happened with A. I feel as if her learning (1) through (4) was rather compressed -- I have something of a sense that it all kind of came together at the same time, or (probably more likely) that she didn't say anything to us about it until she basically understood all those things. We did do the same kinds of things with her, though.)

His slightly older (very bright) cousin O. has not yet learned to read. Of course perhaps her brain hasn't made those particular jumps yet. There are... several other things going on here as well, mind you . Thing #1: my parents live close to her and are Super Invested in their grandchildren Learning to Read Early. Because she who reads early wins, I guess?? *throws up hands* Thing #2: My sister is emotionally-if-not-intellectually invested in her child Learning to Read Early, partially I expect because she wants to please our parents. So even before getting out the gate, poor O. was burdened by the weight of all these expectations. And I don't know that it was presented as a game, as something fun. (Well, actually I do know. It wasn't.) And my sister would get stressed when O. was not learning things quickly enough. So she has a HUGE incentive to "guess the answer," is what I'm saying, where A. (who also likes to guess the answer, mind you) had rather less of one. (O. also by nature tends to be a people pleaser as well as highly emotionally intelligent and would easily pick up on things like her mom getting stressed, whereas I'm not entirely sure A. would pick up on that if I were stressed.)

Then there was Thing #3: My parents signed O. up for a reading class, one of those "guaranteed to teach your kid to read in two months!" kinds of things.

I wondered how the class could guarantee that, as my experience with A. had been that he had had to have these epiphanies, which happened at wildly varying, unpredictable times.

Well, I'll tell you: This reading class did BASICALLY ALL "SIGHT WORDS." (This is, like, flashcards with whole words on it. The class did very little phonetics.)

(Cynthia Voigt was writing about the evils of whole-word learning in the 80's! My school taught phonetics in the 80's! WHAT IS THIS??)

My sister, who doesn't have as strong feelings about reading pedagogy as I do but who knows a bad thing when she sees it, pulled O. out after a couple of sessions (my parents are still salty about this: "we even PAID for the class so our grandchild could learn to read and your sister just pulled her out!") but I think the damage was done. I think, mind you, that there are some children who can jump directly from (1) to (3-4) (I think E. might have been one of them, honestly; I was one of them, as my mom taught me via sight words before school; mildred_of_midgard, this must be you) because they have a lot of strong pattern recognition skills. But I believe strongly that not all children should. I think A. would have had a really hard time doing that. I also think it hasn't been good for O's reading skills. The problem is that if you do (3) before the others, it's easy to think the answer is to memorize everything. And that doesn't work for words you haven't seen before, unless you've also internalized (4), which is harder to do if you haven't yet done (2). Not impossible! But a lot harder.

When we saw them over Christmas I did the letter game with O. and she enjoyed the part where I had to sound out words a lot; the part where I tried to get her to sound out small words she was willing to do, but I'd put something down like "bim" and she'd sound out "bb... ii... mm... baby??" Really guessing, that is, and not having made that jump from (1) to (2) yet, but trying to skip to (3) and not really being able to yet.

Anyway, I don't mean to say that this is a big deal at all. O. will go to kindergarten this year and I think schools still do phonetics, right?? and she'll learn to read just fine, and my sister has about a billion books in her house and O. will grow up surrounded by books and the odds are 99% that she'll be more of a reader than E., who learned how to read super early. It's not a big deal at all, I just... feel like O. is a little frustrated right now, and that could have been avoided, and also I have strong feelings about whole-word/sight-word learning and why it sucks and stress on kids, is all :P

This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post, mildred_of_midgard and selenak are talking about Frederick the Great (by way of Don Carlo, of course) and it is like this amazing virtuoso spontaneous thing and whoa

Things I knew about Frederick the Great before a year ago: he was king of... Prussia??

Additional things I knew about Frederick the Great before the last couple of days: selenak informed me last year that he and his dad may well have been at least somewhat the inspiration for Schiller's Don Carlos, and everything that goes with that: his dad (Friedrich Wilhelm, henceforth FW) was majorly awful, he had a boyfriend (Katte) who was horribly killed by his dad

Only a partial list of the additional things I now know about Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and associated historical figures due to mildred and selenak:
-Fritz and Katte's escape plan (which resulted in Katte's execution) was... really, really boneheaded. As boneheaded as opera plots! :P
-Katte was in the process of destroying 1,500 letters when he got caught (! puts all those letters in Don Carlos into perspective) (ETA: but also see mildred's comment below)
-Fritz wrote opera libretti and so did his sister
-Fritz decided to use himself as an experimental test subject to see if it was entirely possible to do without sleep via the application of coffee WITH PEPPERCORNS AND MUSTARD
-Fritz wrote a poem about orgasm that also reads as if he's never actually, like, had sex (although that was not in this post, it was in the comments to this one)
-FW apparently beat up George II when they were kids
-I am totally not even going to try to summarize the discussion about FW's "rationalized sadism" and sexual hangups and the reeeeeally bizarre Dresden interlude (go down a couple of comments for the really insane stuff)
-Fritz' sister Wilhemina wrote tell-all memoirs about her totally insane family which I am SUPER going to read now, watch this space

Also, there is apparently some subplot involving Russian fanboys that introduces an entirely new cast of people which I am dying to find out about

I have fifty other things that actually need to get done, and other posts I'm supposed to be making (I have two more posts still left on January meme, never mind that it's almost March), but I have to rant about this awful editorial on How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off. It's an editorial about how child prodigies don't necessarily grow up to be geniuses, and how perhaps one can in fact raise a creative child.

The thing is, I don't actually disagree with that first part of what he's saying. (I was a bit of a child prodigy, although I grew up in a small enough town that it didn't take much for other people to think so (I would probably not be a child prodigy by, oh, present-day New York City standards), and I became a reasonably competent though not particularly exceptional adult, so I am basically both a great example of and target audience for this kind of thing.) I just… think it's really poorly written. (And I actually strenuously disagree with the second part of his conclusions, but there, I'm getting ahead of myself.)

( Oh hey, I feel a rant coming on. )

So -- I'd been reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Which I actually like rather a lot! It ended around the same time A. was born, so it was pretty much perfect to read while I was nursing or otherwise occupied with mindless infant-rearing things.

The ending, though, bothered me, and I couldn't really articulate why until I read Sorcerer to the Crown, which superficially has a similar ending but -- but really, really doesn't.

( Cut mainly for rant. Major spoilers for HPMoR, none for SttC. )

Also, by the way, the author wants HPMoR to get a Hugo nomination. Although I appreciated a lot of the things he was doing, I vote no on this. Here are the reasons:
( Apparently I had a lot to say about this. Cut for length. No explicit spoilers (some implicit ones). )