Justin Skycak
@justinskycak • 35,189 subscribers
Chief Quant, Dir Analytics @_MathAcademy_ I do our sci/algo-heavy infra: AI expert system, knowledge graph… ✍️ serious upskilling 🔊 Sky-zack
Videos
Why Can’t College Students Do Middle School Math? New Math Academy podcast episode with Jason Roberts – posted here and everywhere else (see comment) 0:00 - Introduction 2:11 - Freshmen math collapse: 1 in 12 UCSD freshmen don't know middle school math 6:45 - Remedial remedial math: UCSD created remediation for remedial math 8:40 - Inflated grades: 25% of remedial-remedial students had perfect GPA in HS math 10:06 - Test-optional admissions removed the last objective metric 12:13 - Pandemic inflation: GPAs skyrocketed 14:37 - Removing tests pressures teachers to inflate grades 16:52 - Grade-grubbing: endless negotiating, complaining, accusations 19:01 - Then vs. now: parents, tests, accountability 27:38 - Crisis opportunism: “Never let an emergency go to waste” 29:33 - No tests = no knowledge requirements 33:28 - Elite collapse: Harvard has the same problem 36:31 - No enforcement means no standards 37:40 - LLM cheating is trivially easy 38:25 - Catching a cheater and turning him around 48:46 - Cheating is like taking mob money. Now you’re in, you’re never out. 50:41 - Assessments must be done in person 55:06 - LLM cheating is often obvious yet hard to prove 57:17 - How to prevent cheating on long papers 58:28 - Start hardcore, then lighten up gradually 1:01:37 - Good teachers play bad cop when needed
Justin Skycak600,088 views • 8 months ago
"If you don't struggle in practice you're never going to get better. If you were to watch me train I'd look as tired as they were. Because that's what you're supposed to be. When you're running 17s, you're running sprints, you're not supposed to feel great. You're supposed to feel tired, like, exhausted. That's the point. That's what practice is." --Kobe
Justin Skycak98,670 views • 8 months ago
TEACH LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT Full episode of the 2nd Math Academy podcast with Jason Roberts: 0:00 - What Would a Tutor Do, If Their Life Depended On It? (Part 1) 5:47 - Find Your North Star: Why Justin Quit His Data Science Job to do Math Tutoring Full Time 11:23 - Getting "Inside the Trade" 19:31 - What Would a Tutor Do, If Their Life Depended On It? (Part 2) 27:28 - Efficient Learning Techniques are Obvious if You Think About Athletics 33:45 - Enjoyment is a Second-Order Optimization 39:50 - We Need to Stay Hardcore, But Become Less Harsh 51:14 - Math Academy is Like "Yuri's Gym" 59:06 - Vision for the Future of Math Academy 1:14:23 - Goal Setting/Advising and Communicating Progress 1:24:58 - If All You Show Up With is AP Calculus, You're Probably Outgunned 1:51:08 - The Meta-Skills that Kids Need to Work Effectively on Math Academy 2:08:54 - How to Help Students Maintain Successful Learning Habits While Working Independently 2:32:29 - Overhelping: A Common Failure Mode of Well-Intentioned Parents/Tutors
Justin Skycak69,760 views • 10 months ago
Full episode of the first-ever Math Academy podcast with Jason Roberts: 0:00 - Introduction 4:00 - Applying the MA Way to X Growth 7:40 - Status of the ML Course and its Kick-Ass Coding Projects (Part 1) 25:50 - Jason's Near-Infinite List of Important Things 34:20 - The ML Course Has Been a Massive Undertaking 42:10 - Breadth-First Development 44:30 - Status of the ML Course and its Kick-Ass Coding Projects (Part 2) 50:15 - Why Math Academy Needs To Do a CS Course 56:45 - The Never-Ending Stream of Confusion 1:00:30 - The Story of Eurisko, the Most Advanced Math/CS Track in the USA 1:24:20 - Intuition Through Repetition: Machine Learning Edition 1:29:40 - The Importance of Spaced Review 1:43:30 - Upcoming Course Roadmap 1:47:40 - Spaced Repetition 2.0: Accounting For and Discouraging Reference Reliance 1:54:45 - Overhelping: A Pathology of the Over-Involved Parent/Tutor 1:59:21 - Yes, You Need to be Automatic on Math Facts (and Yes, Rapid-Fire Training is Coming) 2:04:55 - What Happens When Students Don't Know Their Math Facts 2:05:50 - The Horror of Attempting to Teach a Class When Students Have Multi-Year Deficits in Fundamental Skills 2:11:30 - Integrating Coding Into the Math Curriculum 2:18:00 - Combining Math and Coding is the Closest Thing to a Real-Life Superpower 2:18:55 - Creating a Full Math Degree and Getting Full College Credit 2:22:15 - The Power of Pre-Learning: The Greatest Educational Life Hack
Justin Skycak66,588 views • 10 months ago
First clip from the first ever Math Academy Q&A: Jason Roberts’s philosophy of breadth-first development. 1. Ask yourself: “If we could clone ourselves and do everything in parallel, what’s all the stuff we’d be working on?” 2. Start doing as many of those things as you can possibly juggle 3. Put up with short-term pain, everything is hard, visible progress is slow, people doubt you 4. Come out with the correct generalizations so you’re not stuck in a bad situation when the concrete sets. “If you go too far down the line and you have lots of customers using stuff, you can't break things and go back. It's hardened. That's where you put the road, that's where the road is. It's too late to say, ‘we're going to create a new highway through this subdivision.’” It’s hard to overstate how painful breadth-first development is in the short term, but it’s equally hard to overstate how beneficial building the correct generalizations is for the long term.
Justin Skycak25,181 views • 11 months ago
Yes, you need to be automatic on math facts. Not just arithmetic, but also exponent/logarithm rules, trig identities, derivative/integral rules, etc., all the way up the ladder of math. Why? Because solving problems feels smooth when you're automatic on the components – it’s like moving puzzle pieces around, and you just need to identify how they fit together. But without automaticity on the components, each puzzle piece is a heavy weight. You struggle to move them at all, much less figure out where they’re supposed to go. And this deficit compounds like a high-interest debt. To develop automaticity, it's critical to engage in proper retrieval practice, doing your best to retrieve information from memory. Always try your best to recall formulas and approaches without looking back at reference material. Use the reference material when you absolutely need to, but no more than you absolutely need to. If you can't retrieve a piece of info from memory despite trying your hardest, then okay, peek back at the reference – just a little bit, just the tiniest bit of priming, just that specific piece of info that you were trying to remember, nothing else – and then close the reference, re-pull the info from memory, and try to recall the rest and proceed forward as far as possible without peeking back at the reference again. Your brain is lifting a weight and the reference material is your spotter – it’s there as a last resort to help you get the weight up, only when you absolutely can’t get it up yourself, and the amount of help should be kept to the bare minimum. The goal is to wean yourself off of reference material, using it as sparsely as possible, until you don’t need it at all. That said, in addition to working problems with minimal reliance on reference material and frequently taking closed-book timed quizzes, there are plenty of instances where it's possible to efficiently speed up the development of automaticity *even further* by engaging in rapid-fire flashcard-style retrieval practice. Rapid-fire flashcard-style automaticity training is absolutely critical for multiplication tables and it also works great for trig identities, derivative/integral rules, etc. It's pretty high on my and Jason Roberts's to-do list.
Justin Skycak10,421 views • 10 months ago
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