learning

Quality of to your education depends mainly on you, not that much on the school. There is this illusion that education is prepackaged consumer product that you passively take from the shelf which is wrong.

The best teachers I remember from school had three things in common:

1. They had high standards. Like three year olds testing their parents, students will test teachers to see if they can get away with low-quality work or bad behavior. They won’t respect the teachers who don’t call them on it.
2. They liked us. Like dogs, kids can tell very accurately whether or not someone wishes them well. I think a lot of our teachers either never liked kids much, or got burned out and started not to like them. It’s hard to be a good teacher once that happens. I can’t think of one teacher in all the schools I went to who managed to be good despite disliking students.
3. They were interested in the subject. Most of the public school teachers I had weren’t really interested in what they taught. Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom.

Whenever I teach little kids something, I'm always trying harder to teach the meta-lessons, like breaking down a problem into smaller parts, or that practice makes you better.

Most of making things is figuring out why they don't work.

Something I told my 11 yo recently: The apparently random collection of things you learn when you're young makes you into a sort of key. Then you have to find the lock it matches. But that's not as hard as it sounds, because the matching lock is usually nearby.

Installing Slackware and getting it to work with my modem and connect to the internet was an endeavour full of frustrations and annoyances but what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was building up a core understanding a UNIX environment and how to manipulate it.