Grant Sanderson: belief

Transcript context

…Then should we think of educators more as motivational speakers? As in the actual job of getting the content in your head is maybe for the textbooks or for Youtube but why we have college classes or high school classes is that we have somebody who approximates Tony Robbins to get you to do the thing. That would be a subset of it but there's more than just motivational speech that goes into it. There's um facilitation of projects or even coming up with what the projects are or recognizing what a student is interested in so that you can try to tailor a question to their specific set of interests or you can maybe act as the curator. Where, “Hey, there's a lot of online explanations for what a Poisson distribution is. Which of these is the right one that I could serve?” and based on knowing you as a particular student what might resonate. You might be in a better position to do that. All of that goes beyond being a Tony Robbins saying, “Be the best person that you can be.” and all of that. One thing I might say is that anytime that I'll chat with mathematicians and try to get a sense for how they got into it and what got them started, so often they start by saying there was this one teacher and that teacher did something very small — like they pulled them aside and just said, “Hey. You're really good at this. Have you considered studying more?” or they give them an interesting problem. And the thing that takes at most 30 minutes of the teacher's time, maybe even 30 seconds, has these completely monumental rippling effects for the life of the student they were talking to that then sets them on this whole different trajectory. Two examples of this come to mind. One is this woman who was saying she had this moment when she got pulled aside by the teacher and he just said, “Hey, I think you're really good at math. You should consider being a math major.” which had been completely outside of her purview at that time. That changed the way she thought about it. And then later she said she learned that he did that for a large number of people. He just pulled them and was like, “Hey, you're really good at math.” So that's a level of impact that you can have as a figure in their lives in a way that you can't over screen. Another one which was very funny. I was asking this guy why he went into the specific field that he did. It was a seemingly arbitrary thing in my mind but I guess all pure math seems to be. He said that in his first year of grad school he was sitting in this seminar and at the end of the seminar the professor, who was this old professor who he had never met him before, they didn't have any kind of connection. He seeks this guy out and comes up and he says, “You. I have a problem for you. A good research problem that I think I think might be a good place for you to start in the next couple months” and this guy was like “Oh, okay” and he gets this research problem and he spends some months thinking about it and he comes back and then it later came to light that the professor mistook him for someone else that was someone he was supposed to be mentoring. problem and he spends some months thinking about it and he comes back and then it later came to light that the professor mistook him for someone else that was someone he was supposed to be mentoring. He was just the stereotypical image of like a doddering old math professor who's not very in tune with the people in his life that was the actual situation but nevertheless that moment of accidentally giving someone a problem completely shifted the research path for him, which if nothing else, shows you the sensitivity to initial conditions that takes place when you are a student and how the educator is is right on that nexus of sensitivity who can completely swing the fences one way or another for what you do. For every one of those stories there's going to be an unfortunate counter balancing story about people who are demotivated from math. I think this was seventh grade. There was this math class that I was in and I was one of the people who was good at math and enjoyed it and would often help the people in the class understand it. I had enough ego built up to have a strong shell around things. For context, I also really liked music and there was this concert that had happened where I had a certain solo or something earlier in that week. There was a substitute teacher one day who didn't have any of the context and she gave some lesson and had us spend the second half of the class going over the homework for it. All of the other students in the class were very confused and I think I remember like they would come to me and I would try to offer to help them and the substitute was going around the class in these circles and basically marking off a little star for how far down the homework people were just to get a sense are they progressing. That was kind of her way of measuring how far they were. When she got to me I had done none of them because I was spending my whole time trying to help all of the others and after having written a little star next to the same problem like three different times she said to me like, “Sometimes music people just aren't math people.” and then keeps walking on. I was in the best possible circumstance to not let that hit hard because one, I had the moral high ground of “Hey, I've just been helping all these people. I understand it and I've been doing your job for you.” This was my little egotistical seventh grade brain. I knew that I knew the stuff. Even with all of the armor that was put up, I remember it was just this shock to my system, she says this thing and it just made me strangely teary-eyed or something. I can only imagine if you're in a position where you're not confident in math and the thing that you know deep in your heart is actually you are kind of struggling with it, just a little throwaway comment like that could completely derail the whole system in terms of your relationship with the subject. So it's another example to illustrate the sensitivity to initial conditions. I was in a robust position and wasn't as sensitive.…

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