That’s Not Crazy, That’s History!

Building Hard Skills: Work Like a Careful Carpenter

- Talent tip number eight: Work like a careful carpenter to build reliable hard skills. -

Emphasizes being slow, careful, and attentive to errors.

- Example: Suzuki music method teaches holding the violin bow correctly with repetition.

- Example: Tom Brady carried a list of fundamental throwing techniques in his wallet for precision.

- Neurologists compare learning new skills to sledding on fresh snow; first reps set future pathways.

- Importance of mastering fundamentals through precise and measured repetition.

- Anecdote: Teaching a son to count correctly and say "Toy Story" instead of "Soy Tori".

- Focus: Addressing mistakes immediately to build the right neural pathways.

 Introduction to Building Hard Skills

00:37 The Suzuki Method: Precision in Music

01:43 Tom Brady's Fundamental Techniques

03:01 The Sled on a Snowy Hill Phenomenon

04:24 Personal Anecdotes on Learning

05:27 The Importance of Correcting Mistakes Early

08:16 Conclusion: Work Like a Careful Carpenter

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

We used Google's NotebookLM to turn our study guide into a podcast episode. Would content like this be helpful in studying for a quiz in your classes?

We discuss information about the causes and key aspects of World War I.

They highlight the M.A.I.N. causes of the war, which include Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism. The documents also explain the significance of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the "spark" that ignited the conflict. They delve into the key alliances formed, the development of new weapons, and the impact of trench warfare on the war. Additionally, the second document explores the role of propaganda and the significance of the United States' entry into the war, ultimately signaling to Germany that they could not win the conflict.

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

As a history teacher, I've embraced that my role isn't about guarding facts. Admitting when I'm wrong in front of the class is second nature to me. But this week, Snapchat AI outsmarted me—something I didn’t see coming!

I’m all about experimenting with my students. I observe their actions & knowledge in order to inform future lessons. While some teachers like to plan everything ahead, I believe in watching how students naturally approach tasks first. Here is an example of why: in the first week of class I give my students a simple task. Research factual information about the League of Nations using any means they choose. 

Before I get up and instruct on research methods, shouldn’t I first watch them do it organically in my classroom? As students start the task of finding names, dates, and historical examples I observe HOW they are looking these up.

For years, the routine was predictable: open a new tab in Chrome, hit Google, and paste the exact question.

That may well be the most popular method, but fewer and fewer young people use Google Search. Heck, fewer even use a web browser or search engine at all!

What other ways are students researching? I knew some would use AI tools like Chat GPT, which a handful chose. But the most common platform my students use AI tools on is…Snapchat! 

To my surprise, an anonymous survey showed that Snapchat's AI was the most popular AI tool among my students—and Chat GPT was third.

As my students were struggling with a specific question, one asked me: “Are you sure there were 48 founding member states in the League of Nations, NOT 42?”

To which I confidently replied: “Yes, I’m sure.”

Credit to this student, because he challenged me (respectfully), to which all history teachers know what happens next: I’ll show you my source, you show me yours!

Mine: Wikipedia (as long as it cites a reliable source, yes, I’m a fan)

His: Snap AI. -Say what?

We decided to use my favorite research tool to moderate our disagreement: Perplexity.ai

We prompted it with context around our topic, the question, and how my source said 48 states, while Snap AI was saying 42.

Perplexity bluntly answered with: “42 is broadly recognized as the correct number.” Ouch, but why was I getting 48 from Wikipedia? We prompted it to explain how and why I was wrong. It had a great explanation: 42 members founded the League in January of 1920, but the number of members grew to 48 by the END of 1920. That actually made perfect sense, and upon re-reading my source, Perplexity was right!

Does this mean Snapchat’s AI is a good research tool? Should we have trusted an AI search engine like Perplexity to fact check our disagreement? Should students still be using search engines like Google in 2024?

I’m less sure than ever that I know the answer to any of these questions, but I’m excited to explore them with my students this school year!

What is clear to me at this point: fewer of us will be using traditional search engines. I have already switched my default browser search to Perplexity, which I prefer over Google. I see a huge benefit to being able to prompt an AI search tool with context, ask specific questions, follow up, and provide it with sources. Google search seems to “only” provide a list of links with a short preview of each. After using tools like Perplexity, this is difficult to accept.

It’s also important to meet students where they are. If they are using AI tools for research, I view my role as a social studies teacher requiring me to help them learn the skills of source evaluation in a way that translates across platforms. Even if their platform of choice is Snap AI!

If you are curious about bringing AI tools into your classroom or are you interested in learning how to use AI for your own studies 👉  I create resources around student-facing AI tools. 

🔗 Check out the projects on my website: https://aaronmakelky.com

📺 Subscribe to my channel: Aaron Makelky on YouTube
🎥 Here is the video of the lesson from class that day

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

Don't do drills. Instead, play small, addictive games. This tip is about the way you think about your practice. The term drill evokes a sense of drudgery and meaninglessness. It's mechanical, repetitive, and boring. As the saying goes, drill and kill. Games, on the other hand, are precisely the opposite.

They mean fun, connectedness, and passion. And because of that, skills improve faster when they're looked at this way.

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

Talent Tip #13: Find the Sweet Spot

Talent tip number 13. Find the sweet spot. There is a place right on the edge of your ability where you learn best and fastest. It's called the sweet spot. Here's how to find it. The comfort zone feels like ease, effortlessness, you're working, but you're not reaching or struggling, and your percentage of successful attempts is 80 percent and above.

So that might be an easy math worksheet, or A drill and practice that at least four, four times out of five, you get right. That's called the comfort zone. Here's the sweet spot. It feels like frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You are fully engaged in an intense struggle as if you're stretching with all your might for a nearly unreachable goal, brushing it with your fingertips and then reaching again.

Your percentage of successful attempts in the sweet spot. is 50 to 80 percent, but there's a place beyond the sweet spot and beyond the sweet, uh, the comfort zone. It's called the survival zone. Sensations in the survival zone are confusion, desperation. You are overmatched, scrambling, thrashing, and guessing.

That's a math test you didn't study for and skipped class all week. You guess right sometimes, but it's mostly luck. And your percentage of successful attempts is below 50%. That's the survival zone. So think of it like a gauge. Comfort zone. Easy. Sweet spot. Frustrating. 50 to 80 percent correct. Challenging.

But past that's like the red zone. I'm just trying to survive. To understand the importance of the sweet spot, consider Clarissa, a freckle faced 13 year old clarinet player, who was part of a study by two Australian music psychologists. Yes. There's an interesting job for you. Music psychologist. You study how people learn music.

Clarissa was an average musician in every sense of the word. She had average ability, average practice habits, average motivation. But one morning, a remarkable thing happened. Clarissa accomplished a month's worth of practice in five minutes. Your brain has to be going, how is it possible to get a month's worth of practice done in five minutes?

Here's what it looked like. Clarissa played a few notes. Then she made a mistake and immediately froze, as if the clarinet became electrified. She peered closely at the sheet music, reading the notes. She hummed the notes to herself. She fingered the keys in a fast, silent rehearsal. Then she started again, got a bit further, made another mistake, stopped, went back to the start.

In this fashion, working instinctively, she learned the song. The music psychologist calculated that Clarissa learned more in a span of five minutes than she would have learned in an entire month practicing her normal way, in which she played songs straight through, ignoring any mistakes. Why? Picture the wires of Clarissa's brain during those five minutes.

Each time she made a mistake, she was, one, sensing it. She knew she messed up. Two, she was fixing it right away, welding the right connections in her brain. Each time she repeated the passage, she was strengthening those connections and linking them together. She was not just practicing, she was building her brain.

She was in the sweet spot. Locating your sweet spot requires some creativity. For instance, some golfers work on their swings like this. This slows them down so they can sense and fix the mistakes in their swing. Some musicians play songs backwards, which helps them better sense the relationship between notes.

If you think you know the alphabet, try saying it backwards. You only know it one way. These are different methods, but the underlying pattern is the same. Seek out ways to stretch yourself. Play on the edges of your competence. As Albert Einstein said, One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts.

The word that's important there is barely. Ask yourself, if you tried your absolute hardest, what could you almost do? Mark the boundary of your current ability and aim a little bit beyond that. That is your sweet spot. Talent tip number 13, find the sweet spot. Now, how does this apply to you as a student?

I want you to think of how much time you've spent in school from kindergarten until wherever you are right now. You've done a lot of math worksheets, written a lot of essays, listened to teachers talk. What percent of your time in school have you spent in the sweet spot? 50 to 80 percent of the time you got the problem right, you were frustrated, you were challenged, you were keenly attuned to errors.

If you are like most students, you have spent very little time in the sweet spot. You are mostly in one of the other two zones, and a lot of you, it's the comfort zone. This is easy. Here's a worksheet. First one done. Boom. Are you actually learning? No. You're just filling time. You could do 2 plus 2 all day.

You didn't get better at math. But look at all the math worksheets that I did. That's not your sweet spot. If you get every question right, that was a waste of your time. You shouldn't get more than 4 out of 5 right. Or, it's too easy, you're in the comfort zone. The other side of that is I skip math class all week, I show up and have a test.

You're in the danger zone. You have no idea what you're doing. You don't even know how to start to solve the problem. That is just system overload and I shut down. So, try to spend more time in the sweet spot and less time in the comfort zone and the danger zone and you'll get more out of school.

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

We learn about the French Revolution, specifically the Reign of Terror.

We discuss the Law of Suspects & The Decree Against Profiteering issued by the Committee on Public Safety in 1793.

We compare monoplists from Revolutionary France to toilet paper hoarders during the COVID Pandemic of 2020.

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

five ways to pick a high quality teacher or coach.

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

Talent Tip #11: Don't Fall for the Prodigy Myth

The myth that talent is inherent and marked by early success is debunked.

Notable examples of late bloomers include Michael Jordan, Charles Darwin, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, and many others who were not recognized as prodigies.

Research and observations suggest that early success can hinder long-term development because it may lead to risk-averse behavior and a lack of challenge.

Dr. Carol Dweck's theory highlights that the praise received by prodigies can lead to a fixed mindset, slowing their learning and progress.

Talent development is seen as a gradual process, not predetermined by early achievements. This is supported by insights from experienced coaches and Anson Durrance, head coach of UNC women's soccer team.

The focus should be on continuous improvement, regardless of early success or failure. Effort and perseverance are emphasized over innate ability.

The podcast encourages a growth mindset, advising to treat early efforts as experiments and to not be deterred by initial setbacks or swayed by initial success.

Personal reflection on missed opportunities due to buying into the prodigy myth, advocating for a persistent and humble approach to skill development.

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

Talent Tip #10 from The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle.

Honor the Hard the Skills.

Hard skills are the trunk, soft skills are the canopy. First build the trunk, then work on the branches!

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.

How can I use AI as a student today? In this episode we use Google Gemini to write a well researched resume for Napoleon Bonaparte & cite digital sources in MLA formatting for us. All in under 4 minutes & without typing more than two keys!

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
Simplify and streamline technology
Save teachers’ time
Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.