Trying to take photos like Dino Kuznik

Despite being an eternal optimist, this week I've felt the fear of redundancy, manifesting itself in an intense desire to immediately line up "what's next". Humans, myself included, crave certainty. The excellent friends I have seen this week, new and old, have reminded me that this is a golden opportunity to relax and hang out with the kids. An opportunity that is far more certain than any future gigs. So, it's been more olympics. A bike size upgrade for the three year old (his third in less than a year!). The eldest learned to swim. We've been playing piano together and learning about music and instruments.

This last bit did send me down a rabbit hole about forms of education and the two sigma problem: 1:1 tutored students outperform 98% of students taught in traditional classroom style. But obviously that is not a scalable model and it is not an equitable model. Though some argue that there are fewer geniuses these days because of classroom based learning. This argument is based on the evidence that many "geniuses" were tutored 1:1 as children. Tutoring here refers to all education being delivered through 1:1 tutoring, not just hiring a tutor to help prep for exams.

There is an argument that GenerativeAI could be used to scale 1:1 tutoring and, because Meta is always listening, some start ups have started appearing in my ads purporting to do just that. Personally, I just want my kids to like learning. I'm pretty sure that's half the battle. But here's a quote from Einstein(!) that sums up how traditional learning might derail that:

The coercion [for examinations] had such a deterring effect that after I had passed the final examination I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

So, parents, any experiences with tutoring in-person or online or through technology? Or generally of just balancing the demands of school and exams with learning for learning's sake?