Learning to Teach Yourself

I’ve always liked teaching others. I enjoy being able to connect with students, understand their struggles, and offer what I know as a way to help them make sense of a concept. My particular subjects of interest are mathematics and physics, but the real joy I get from teaching is simply being able to help others. Teaching has a fairly good reputation. It’s seen as a respectable profession. I don’t doubt that teachers do important…

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Glimpsing Connections

Learning a new subject in mathematics is always interesting. You learn new techniques to analyze problems and get to investigate the relationships between objects. Whether you’re learning about probability, algebra, geometry, or any other field, you will do these two things. The idea is to expand your toolbox to apply to various mathematical problems. That’s fine, but it’s not the reason that I enjoy mathematics. For me, it comes from a slightly different place. The…

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Defaults

Think about the actions that make up your day. It can be a bit terrifying to realize how little of it is conscious. A huge chunk of your daily actions are performed on autopilot. You don’t even think about them at all. For example, how many actions does it take in the morning before you do diverge from your daily defaults? My guess is that the number is shockingly high. That’s because our morning routine…

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Carrying

It’s tempting to think that the key to making amazing work is to focus on one thing forever, never deviating from the path. We see examples of this all the time: the athlete that practiced their particular sport for decades, the writer who improves their craft in a very specific area and becomes known for that type of writing, the artist who captures a certain niche of the market and remains with that work, or…

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