Re "decompose work into agent-compatible units"... Senior engineers are better at eating the elephant one bite at time, whether using "agents" or not. You can train this: basically plan out your milestones before you start coding, then reflect on how it went at the end

That said, two teachers spring to mind as exemplars of drawing small questions into bigger conversations, who also share some of their work publicly. One is @schools4humans (Science is Weird), the other is @flowidealism (The Socratic Experience). Check them out!

With luck this leads to the kind of long, captivating conversation that really elevates "learning" beyond the accumulation of facts. Yes it requires a thoughtful, patient adult. But why not you? It's easier at the dinner table than in the classroom.

Ok look, even *I* wouldn't pile all this on a 4yo without warning. But I do think we can reply with something like "around 365 and a quarter" with a mischievous smile, and see how curious they're feeling today 😉

... and while some of the detail may be lost on a 4yo, don't you think they'd find it fun to know that our calendar is "falling behind" the Sun by a few days per 10,000 years? And that the conversation hints at something profound about how humans try to model the world?

None of these quite capture the amount of time it takes the Earth (typically, as far as we know) to orbit the Sun, so here you might check your notes, take a deep breath, and say something to the effect of:

If your 4yo can't yet read code, you could instead say "365.2425 days per year on average", although you must now clarify that this is the Gregorian calendar, and that it's 365.25 in the Julian, perhaps 365.2468 in the Hebrew, etc. Of course all are still wrong...

As everybody knows, every 4th year has 366 days... unless it is also a multiple of 100 but not 400. So it is more accurate to reply: 365 + !(y % 4) - !(y % 100) + !(y % 400)

If a 4yo asks you "how many days in a year" you would probably say 365, although this is of course wrong.

A student suggested I make this video free, as a PSA 😅 https://t.co/w6NCMIRiKO I'm no authority but can at least say I wish I'd received this message 20 years ago. Long story short: all the "clean code" style advice is fake, and you should just work backwards from your goals

Can confirm this is what we’re doing with youngest, and core part of the homeschooling program we followed for oldest kids Would add: tightly restricted screen time unless creating Screens are for making / our family creates, does not consume much

Formula for homeschooling (or afterschooling) that's so effective that people think you're lying: - Teach them to read ASAP then fill the house with books - 1 hr/day of Beast Academy - 1 hr/day of their special interest (currently biochem for us) The rest takes care of itself

In case you haven't seen it: Algorithms for Modern Hardware is quite a nice bridge between DSA and comparch https://t.co/MrMeN1RerI The two are traditionally taught separately which is the pragmatic choice for beginners, but IMHO the synthesis is where things get interesting

I have friends whose kids learn (much) more in an hour at home each afternoon than they do at school. This "afterschooling" seems to be a more significant trend than the mild increase in full time homeschooling, which is too onerous for most and largely driven by ideology

This article by the peerless @flowidealism is likely to be very helpful for anybody thinking about their kids' humanities education

This is how one student transitioned from a non-technical career as a translator to a demanding engineering specialty (malware analysis) in 2 years, through self study:

This is how one student transitioned from a non-technical career as a translator to a demanding engineering specialty (malware analysis) in 2 years, through self study:

Birds flap their arms; bats flap their hands

Funny thing is, children's encyclopedias are better than ever, just organized quite differently (and mostly published by DK)

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