Justin Skycak

The #1 way to break out of the cycle of brainrot: Replace it with technical upskilling.

Pursue a domain you love.

Imagine a gym where everyone lifts according to birth year.

You have to understand.

Lots of students think math is confusing because it’s abstract.

Question When’s X happening?

Many people think that calculus is the end of the road for math.

Calculators can become an intellectual drug.

Be a cognitive weightlifter.

One thing that many highly capable people have in common: A serious math arc.

Learning happens through memory and active practice (13) Active practice, not passive exposure, builds skill. (5) The most hard-hitting two sentences in all talent development research: Deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable.

How a person directs a life over time (30) Default forces and inertia choose the direction unless you actively steer. (4) If you don’t actively steer your life, comfort and normalcy will make the decisions for you.

How a person directs a life over time (29) Default forces and inertia choose the direction unless you actively steer. (4) If you don’t actively steer your life, comfort and normalcy will make the decisions for you.

You ask a 10th grader to factor something… nothing crazy, just like x squared plus 11x plus 28, and before they even get to the algebra, they’re stuck on the multiplication!

A lot of people realize later who go into software engineering maybe at first they don’t really care about math in school but eventually they build up their foundations of coding, and then they realize that if they just had taken it seriously and learned…

One of my friends tutored Calculus 1 students at WashU last year, and during one of their review sessions, they realized that instead of doing the regularly scheduled calculus work, they had to do a remedial math session.

The rule should not be, “Hey, you’re in eighth grade, so you’re gonna do eighth grade math.”

In a lot of classroom group projects, the strongest student does everything.

People confuse difficulty with rigor.

If you’re having to do algebra and think about basic arithmetic, if every problem makes you recompute multiplication from scratch, doing strategies or repeated multiplication or God forbid, finger counting.

One of my friends tutored Calculus 1 students at WashU last year, and there’s so many crazy stories of educational dysfunction.

Everyone tells you not to memorize, but that’s backwards.

Abstract math is not the problem.

Think of motivation as something you earn.

Never trust what your brain tells you about how unenjoyable a physical or cognitive workout will be.

The science of learning has identified many cognitive learning strategies that can be used to help people learn better and faster.

Learning math is like trying to cross a wide river.

A lot of people ask, “Don’t kids need to struggle for a while to train their general problem-solving ability?”

A kid first learns to count with physical objects like beads or marbles, blocks.

Differential equations is one of the worst-taught math courses.

People often say that kids should learn the concept before they do the procedure.

If you walked into a college math class, you might see a room full of students bent over their notebooks, furiously copying down whatever the professor is writing on the board.

A lot of people think that calculus is the end of math.

Calculators can become an intellectual drug.

If a student needs five different explanations before one finally “clicks,” the problem may not be the explanations.

Getting an A on the test doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve mastered the material.