Friday Mindset #194

Happy Friday!

We hope you’ve had a wonderful summer.

And just like that… holidays are over and we’re back to the classroom. We’ve been reading lots over the break, and we’ve been running a number of interesting projects throughout August with the early-back-to-work FE and Sixth Form crews, so we’ve plenty to share with you all, and a whole bunch of developing obsessions to bore you with too.

We’ve been collecting eye-catching/thought-provoking quotes as well. Quite like this one.

Yeah. Neat. (We’ve seen quite a bit of evidence, by the way, that kids are beginning to turn their backs on AI/social media/algorithmically-driven short-form video… just the first shoots of change. It’s tentative, but it’s there.)

Anyway. Let’s go. For the very first time in this, our seventh year of the newsletter, let’s dive in.

Something we're reading...

One of the people we stumbled across online this summer is Neel Nanda. Nanda’s a Cambridge Maths graduate who now works in the field of AI Safety at Google DeepMind. His blog is a rich and fascinating account of his thinking. A number of his pieces have impressed us, but the one we wanted to start the year with was his reflections on the feeling of helplessness when faced with a certain type of problem.

Many of our students feel exactly the same - a kind of paralysis when faced with a study problem. “I am aware there are problems,” Nanda admits of his own life, “I maybe vaguely intend to do something one day, but I don’t actually do anything about it.”

Thankfully, he goes on to explain what he’s done to tackle some of these big problems. The ideas about ‘gaining surface area’ about the problem were really useful ones, we thought. The full article is here:

But, as ever, we’ve taken the opportunity to create a quick tutorial read of it, so you’ve also got a significantly edited version of it as a pdf here too:

Enjoy!

Something to try...

Subscribers! Welcome back! We’re going to focus on academic resilience for a little bit - maybe this and another two issues - and share with you some short powerpoints and videos too, so you’ve got a growing bank of resources to use.

So many schools and colleges talk about the need for greater resilience… but what does that mean, exactly? How do we develop it? We’ve done a great deal of reading on the subject and, as ever, have tried to turn our discoveries into practical resources and approaches for you…

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