Astral Codex Ten

Your Attempt To Solve Debate Will Not Work

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18 days ago · 314 likes · 309 comments · Scott Alexander

— and I’d very much benefit from your thoughts on it.

If you haven’t read it already, you’ll probably want to go ahead and do so — it’s just a seven-minute read. But in a nutshell, here’s what I see Scott as saying:

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Where does our math come from?

Around 600 BCE there was an explosion in ancient Greece, and we’ve been trying to re-create it ever since.

Last week we talked about the roots of Greek math: wandering Babylonian priests sharing riddles around campfires. But how did we get from those riddles to modern math? The answer, according to the historian of mathematics Reviel Netz, is the quest for glory.1

Take a look at the first distinctively Greek math problem we’ve found record of —

What’s the area of the yellow moon? If it helps to give numbers to the triangle’s sides, call them “1”. Peer at it for ten seconds. (Hint: the moon is formed by drawing arcs — the moon’s “inner” curve is a quarter-circle centered on the green triangle’s right angle, and its “outer” curve is a different half-circle centered on that big black dot.)

This is the famous Lune of Hippocrates.2 Before this, clever people could do a fine job figuring out the area of a shape made of straight lines, but no one could figure out how to do it with one made of curves.

Until Hippocrates. He constructed this, and showed that the moon’s area and the triangle’s are exactly the same. His proof is short and elegant. Netz explains it well:

…you start out not assuming anything… but a few sentences later, you have been, epistemologically speaking, punched in the gut. You cannot speak back, you are doubled over by the force of the proof. You must stare at Hippocrates and admit: yes, you won. You are right. The [lune] is equal to the triangle.

– Why the Ancient Greeks Matter: The Problematic Miracle That Was Greece

We need to understand that mathematical proofs began as provocative artworks — think something like Picasso’s Guernica or the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or the ending of Planet of the Apes. This shock of delight became the dragon that all future mathematicians would chase for more than two thousand years. Netz again:

From this knockout there is no turning back and mathematics, henceforth, would be the science of amazing proofs.

What happened? How’d Hippocrates pull this off? What made the Greeks special?

Old-school racists, of course, had a simple answer to this: it was in their DNA. Greeks were just smarter than everyone else; their intellectual victory was inevitable. Alas, the subsequent history of Greece doesn’t give us any confidence in this — after it was conquered by the Romans, its creative intensity dampened.3

A better answer comes in looking at the particular moment in which this explosion sat. In this blog, we’ve made a big deal of two factors:

• the first easily-usable alphabet was invented in Greece; this allowed common people to share their ideas farther, and across time (see Origins of the Alphabet°)

• the particular place the Greek miracle began — the islands off of Turkey — was a hotspot for trade; anyone living there could see that there was no one “natural” way for humans to live (see Other Alphabets°)

Netz adds a third observation: the nearby empires were centrally-run bureaucracies. Rulers ruled, and subjects obeyed. Because of the mountainous island geography of Greece, its people were broken up into small city-states that ran themselves. Societies were relatively egalitarian. In these cities, status came from the ability to persuade other people. In these cultures (Athens above all) if you could say something new and interesting, people would celebrate you. You’d have clout and the chance to exercise power.

It’s in this context that “the author” gets invented. Stories and poems had existed for eons, of course — but they were anonymous or semi-anonymous. Suddenly, we get individual philosophers and poets who made a name for themselves through outrageous utterances.

You could achieve personal glory through your ability to compose a poem, to wax philosophic, and — suddenly — to prove a surprising mathematical truth.

Imaginary Interlocutor: This history is fun and all, but what does this have to do with middle school?

Because the origin of math tells us a lot about what we struggle with now. Why don’t we regularly see genius in contemporary math classrooms? Maybe because we’ve re-created Sumerian classrooms:

An educational traditionalist might tell you we need to double down on this. (This seems short-sighted.) A progressivist might say we need to liberate kids from this and restore humanity’s native love of numbers. (This seems blind to humanity’s long indifference toward math.)

An Egan-head, however, might ask how humanity became obsessed with mathematics in the first place. That runs through (1) riddles & puzzles, into which (2) a quest for glory is injected.

We began the first in elementary school. And middle school seems a good time to start doing the second.

I.I.: Could a “quest for glory” backfire?

Indeed — we’re playing with psychological fire here. I’ll address that at the end of this post.

So what does glory look like in middle school math? Four things: mysterious messages, complex games, joke-telling contests, and impossible puzzles.

🧵PUZZLES, Practice A: Mysterious Messages°

In elementary school, we delivered kids Mysterious Messages° in a rather simple way — “oh look, here’s a sealed envelope”. Now in middle school this continues, but the mystery merges with history.

In short, continue giving encoded messages, and helping kids solve them. Obviously, keep making the ciphers more elaborate, but also start finding ways to power them with a lust for glory.

I.I.: How elaborate are you thinking?

In elementary school, we want to start with super-simple ciphers like Caesar shift…

and Atbash…

You can combine these in various ways, of course. But these ciphers are weak: as soon as you figure out one or two letters, you’ve broken the whole code. So in middle school, we can move to straight-up monoalphabetic substitution…

This is much harder to solve. You can’t brute-force it (at least not without a computer, or a lot of willpower). The way to solve it is to analyze letter frequencies: if the letter “Q” comes up a lot, see if it makes sense for it to be an “E” or a “T” or an “A”.

I.I.: And how can you fuel this with a lust for glory?

A few routes. (And a clever Cipher Master — someone we’ll need to find to help us develop this curriculum! — could come up with more.)

First, we can tell the stories of the 🦹‍♂️HEROES of cryptography. Among them:

• Alan Turing, whose brilliance may have shortened the life of Nazi Germany by years (and who was rewarded by his government with chemical castration)

• Thomas Phelippes, whose cleverness decrypting the letters of Mary, Queen of Scots led to Mary’s beheading

• Elizebeth Smith Friedman, who dismantled networks of rum-runners in Prohibition and exposed Nazi spy rings in South America

We can also hold 🦹‍♂️CONTESTS to see which teens can crack a new code the fastest. And we can invite them to encipher a message that no one can crack! Emulating the famous Kryptos monument outside the CIA, these teenage works can be hung up on the wall as a challenge to anyone who comes inside.

🧵PUZZLES, Practice B: Board Games°

Last week, I wrote about how board games in elementary school can power analytical thinking. And now, as with Mysterious Messages°, as these continue, they should get more complex, and be charged with more glory.

I.I.: In what ways should the games get more complex?

Obviously, we should add on more complicated games. If elementary schoolers played Checkers and Carcassonne, middle schoolers can move to Hive and Settlers of Catan.

But we can also increase the complexity by playing old games in new ways. What would happen if you changed one rule of Connect Four, and let players remove one of their discs at the bottom of a column instead of adding a new one to the top?

When playing an old game, you can institute a meta-rule: whoever wins must invent a new rule for the game and write it down inside the game box. Try the rule out — how does it change the way the whole game works?

I.I.: And glory?

Learn about the greatest players of the games you love. The 🦹‍♂️LORE of chess masters is so famous that even those of us who don’t play recognize some grandmasters, but did you know that there’s a GOAT of Checkers and a GOAT of Scrabble?

Getting good at a game, too, feels cooler when you understand some of the history of where the game comes from — it helps you imaginatively enter into the tradition. So look up some of the 🦹‍♂️HUMANIZING KNOWLEDGE of the games that you’re playing.

🧵PUZZLES, Practice C: Jokes°

In our elementary school puzzles post, I argued that we should hone analytical reasoning through helping kids learn and create jokes — especially ones that play with words.

These should continue, and we should increasingly move into jokes that engage satire.

I.I.: Why satire?

Alessandro suggests that different modes of comedy develop from different ways of understanding:

SOMATIC (🤸‍♀️): slapstick
MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️): basic wordplay
ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️): satire (plus refined wordplay — puns)
PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) / IRONIC (😏): paradoxes & irony

To satirize, you have to understand the complexities of how humans interact with each other.

I.I.: How can we do satire with kids?

Satire needs to be about something — so the best place in the curriculum to actually do this is literature and music. After reading a classic story (or listening to a great song), teens can make a parody of it. (For more on this, see an earlier post, Playing Inside Stories°.)

And let’s not kid ourselves about how naturally mocking something comes to most middle schoolers! One way to honor them is to channel this (frequently destructive, consistently irritating) trait into something useful.

Throughout all of this, look for opportunities to hold joke-telling 🦹‍♂️ CONTESTS.

Historically, many cultures have used contests as a way to focus attention on glory-worthy skills. You can imagine contests being made for satire (“write a parody of the Gettysburg Address”) or for wordplay (“this afternoon, we’ll have a 5-minute pun contest on the topic of the isosceles triangles”).

🧵PUZZLES, Practice D: Strange Math°

In elementary school, we introduced a smattering of classic mathematical puzzles — one every week or so. We hooked kids with a 🧙‍♂️SIMPLE STORY to pull them into 🧙‍♂️PLAYING with the things… and then put them away!

Now, we bring those puzzles back out again, one at a time, and use 🦹‍♂️COMPLEX STORIES to root them in the actual history of the world, and then push kids to exploring 🦹‍♂️LIMITS and 🦹‍♂️EXTREMES.

Let’s take the Tower of Hanoi as our example again.

Phase 1: 💥 Orient

Before, we introduced the Tower with the simple fantasy first told by the puzzle’s creator, the French mathematician Édouard Lucas. Now, we can tell his story:

Phase 2: ⚠️ Complicate

Teens have tackled the Tower of Hanoi years before, and you may want to start by just letting them play with it. But soon, challenge them —

• how quickly can you, personally, physically, solve the puzzle?

• how few moves can you solve it in?

• what if you vary the number of discs?

Phase 3: 🐛 Transform

Here, you might just want to set them loose on Lucas’s original problem — how long would it take you to move all 64 discs from one pole to another?

I.I.: How would they solve that?

If you’d like, you can give them a hint — is there a pattern to how many moves it would take to solve the puzzle for different numbers of discs?

• 1 disc → 1 move (duh)

• 2 discs → 3 moves

• 3 discs → 7 moves

• 4 discs → 15 moves (see above)

What’s the pattern? With every new disc, you double the number of moves, plus one. If the teens know exponents, you can give them this as a hint:

Using that insight, how long would it take you to solve Lucas’s original problem, with 64 discs? How long would it take you to solve the 32-disc version in the photograph above?4

The usual thing we do with the 🐛Transform step is to make something — here, teens could write/draw an explanation of how they got to the answer.

Well, if they got the answer. This stuff is hard! And remember that the purpose of these 🧵PUZZLES is to sit outside the mainstream math curriculum and be delight-inducing add-ins.

Phase 4: 🪢 Integrate

Afterwards, prompt teens to reflect on what they learned, and what they’re wondering about now. (This is true whether they’ve solved the problem or not.)

I.I.: I asked this last week, but I’ll ask it again: where would I get a collection of puzzles like this?

We’ll eventually want a Puzzle Master who can make a collection of these. If you have a recommendation for one, feel free to put it in the comments… but know that we’ll be revisiting these in high school, where these same problems will take on a new purpose.

In the meantime, I’ll again recommend Dylan Kane’s wonderful post on his choice of such puzzles, which he dubs “glimpses” (as in, “glimpses into the wonderful math that didn’t happen to fall into the K–12 scope and sequence”). And Dylan, thanks for your help in thinking through this practice!

But is this bad?

I.I.: I believe you that this sort of “quest for glory” was how an obsessive love for mathematics was originally sparked. But I worry — is it necessary now? Couldn’t this sort of egoistic love of the self have downsides? Is math worth making our kids into a**holes?

I have two answers, neither of which is complete.

First, insofar as the story I told at the top is true, I think that we’d be fools to ignore this possible source of math love. That said, yeah, we should go in with our eyes open.

Second, I wonder if there are different ways to channel this. In her book The Mattering Instinct, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that people can be grouped by the four “mattering projects” we put at the centers of our lives:

1. competitors (who seek to beat others)

2. heroic strivers (who seek to achieve something great)

3. transcenders (who seek to connect with something larger than themselves)

4. socializers (who seek to connect with other people)

Greek mathematics was born by embracing #1 and #2. The third — transcendence — is touched upon by the “sense of magic” that we’re building all our math on, starting in elementary school, and will get even more attention in high school.

So I’m actually feeling okay about how our approach treats most people. It’s the fourth category — the quest for socialization — that I’m not sure how to address in the math curriculum. Maybe a little of this is done by Making Friends with Numbers° and Number Extremes°? Perhaps more of this could be done through communal struggle — so that figuring out math is a way to help the people on your team?

I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

Next up: A quixotic goal

Again, we suspect that there might be one more remarkable thing to chase in middle school math: Fermi estimates and Bayesian reasoning. Look for it in our next post.

And inspiration for this post came from Dan & Katherine Cook at Math for Love, who introduced me to the Julia Robinson Math Festivals. All I can say is, if someone ever asks you to spend three hours in a gymnasium pushing artfully weird math puzzles at middle schoolers, say yes.

© 2026 losttools.org. CC BY 4.0

Since this was written in 1623, the life of the mind hasn’t been the same.

Before Galileo, there were two streams of mathematics. The first saw numbers as mystical objects with hidden meanings — the “magic” of numbers that we wrote of last week. The second saw numbers as a means to the end of measuring stuff. Galileo fused these streams. He realized that math can subdue reality not because (per the Greeks) whole numbers were special, but because the universe is spun not out of words or stories but out of ratios.

We want middle schoolers to feel this shift. While in elementary school we helped kids fall in love with numbers for their own sake, now we want to invite them into the project of using numbers to wrestle the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world into neat models that let us understand it.

Imaginary Interlocutor: This sounds… romantic, and not entirely practical.

It’s a high goal, to be sure. To meet it, we need to plug into the energies unleashed by ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️) understanding as kids grow up. Hank Green — who understands more-or-less everything! — understands adolescence, too:

There’s something in all of us, something that blooms in adolescence and never leaves… and it’s just… want. And the most amazing tool that anyone in the world can have is the ability to control and direct that want.

– A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

This “want” can take many forms — fame, excellence, a longing to matter. Any attempt to rehumanize education has to provide ways to channel this.

Just as in elementary school, our middle school math curriculum will follow three threads:

1. 🧵 LESSONS, where we push against our own limits,

2. 🧵 PUZZLES, where we complicate the extra-curricular math we saw before and discover a hidden simplicity, and

3. 🧵 QUIXOTIC GOALS, where we use all of this to do something crazy: Fermi estimates and Bayesian reasoning.

Middle school math thread 1: 🧵DAILY LESSONS

In which we get to feel our boundaries, and poke through them

🧵LESSONS, Practice A: Daily Ladders°

As in elementary school, so in middle school we’ll ground ourselves in a pre-existing math curriculum. I introduced JUMP Math last week; it’ll continue apace.

🧵LESSONS, Practice B: Boss Problems°

These, too, continue more or less the same, though of course with higher levels of math. If anything, you can make these bigger and brasher to fit the mood of self-overcoming. (See our explanation of Boss Problems° in elementary school for more.)

🧵LESSONS, Practice C: Number Extremes°

Here, we’ve got some bigger changes. In elementary school, we spent some time Making Friends with Numbers°. In middle school, we keep this going — but our numbers increasingly get wilder.

It turns out that the world is big. To describe it with numbers, we’re gonna need some very big numbers. At first glance, this is no problem at all — numbers increase endlessly. But practically, we have no innate ways to differentiate big numbers from one another. To most adults, “a quadrillion” and “a quintillion” sound more-or-less the same, even though one is a thousand times bigger. (And you’ll remember if I say “sexillion” only because it makes you snicker.)

The difficulty of understanding big numbers has famously led to some very bad decisions:

One immediate goal is to create a vivid mental image for the “illions” — when you think of a million, you could think of (to pick just one thing that I learned watching Reading Rainbow) the number of goldfish bowls it would take to hold a whale. A cube of a billion Go Pro’s would crush a Target store.

I.I.: Oh yeah, I think one of my teachers did this with our class, once.

Indeed, picturing large numbers isn’t unknown in school. (Here’s a particularly excellent example.) What’s missing, we think, is treating it as an essential part of the curriculum. Time should be devoted to coming up with a 🧙‍♂️VIVID MENTAL IMAGE of each “illion”, and then they should be remembered and used throughout the rest of math, and the other subjects, too.

I.I.: What about big numbers that are less than, like, a million?

It’d be nice to have mental images for other “big” numbers —

• hundreds (100, 200, 300…)

• thousands (1,000;1 2,000; 3,000…)

• ten thousands (10,000; 20,000; 30,000…)

• hundred thousands (you get the idea)

If you’d like to help out, throw some in the comments below! My recommendation is just that these all be (1) countable objects rather than measurements, and (2) vividly memorable.

I.I.: What about numbers that are much higher than the “illions”? Are those really necessary?

Practical usefulness is only one goal in learning these numbers: the other part is the sheer mind-boggle that comes from contemplating such 🦹‍♂️EXTREMES in quantity.

How big is a googol, really? How can we feel it? How about a googolplex? And did you know that there are named, meaningful numbers that make a googol look like taking a whizz in the ocean?2

I.I.: Hasn’t this already been covered in your post Masters of Measurementº?

Masters of Measurement° works with units — meters, kilometers, megameters, gigaliters, and so forth. This practice is just about countable numbers, which is a prerequisite for understanding those. (You can’t really understand what a “teraliter” is without feeling how big a “trillion” is.) Look for both of these to become part of the first of middle school’s 🧵QUIXOTIC GOALS, Fermi Estimates.

I.I.: How can I do this, now?

Simply extend the notebook (or cards) you made to Make Friends with Numbers° in elementary school to include these extreme numbers.

🧵LESSONS, Practice D: Origin Stories of Math°

In elementary school, we made sure to tell the 🧙‍♂️SIMPLE STORIES behind the symbols of math. A challenge was that many of the details have been lost. (Am I the only one who’s bothered by the fact that we don’t really know where the ÷ symbol comes from?)

In middle school, of course, the math that students learn becomes more complex — functions, rates, rational numbers, and so forth. The silver lining here is that these tend to have been developed more recently, often by specific people whose stories we know.

Historically, these people are often odd. The Pythagoreans worshipped integers, refused to eat beans, and murdered one of their members when he discovered irrational numbers. René Descartes believed he discovered the seat of the soul, did most of his work in bed, and invented his “Cartesian coordinate system” while watching a fly wander the ceiling. The decimal number system was introduced to Europe by a pope who built a hydraulic organ along with — according to rumor — a mechanical head which would answer any question he asked it.3

Again, these people are odd. Our job, pedagogically, is to make them into 🦹‍♂️HEROES who wrested fire from the gods.

I.I.: But how true should we make these stories? (I note that the thing about Pythagoreans murdering the guy who discovered irrationals is a legend told centuries afterwards.)

In general, of course, we should strive to be truthful. In our history classes, that’s especially important. But we can’t forget that one of the reasons for these origin stories is to induct kids into the 🦹‍♂️LORE of math. A safe compromise would be to be quick to include the mythical stories, but to name them as such. (The book The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths is, sigh, a particularly solid debunker of some of my favorite stories.)

I.I.: Can we really spend the time in math to tell stories?

I have two answers to this; one is happy, the other is angry. First, the happy answer: because we’ve made a memory palace in elementary school history, we’re able to tell a memorable math story in just a few sentences. That is, we’ve already helped kids understand what life was like at many different locations & times; now, all it takes to set a math story in ancient Greece is to say, “the Pythagoreans lived in ancient Greece”.

Now, the other answer. I don’t know how to say this clearly enough:

With apologies to Steve Jobs, learning can be so much broader once we discover one simple fact: that everything we call “math” was made up by people who were no smarter than us. Well, okay, a good number of them were geniuses — but none of the formulas or algorithms that students struggle to learn was obvious to the person who first figured it out. It was an achievement. It felt like stealing fire from the gods. To master it while knowing its origin is to teleport through time back into their skin, and to become a hero, if only for a moment.

This is part of what we mean when we talk about “re-humanizing math”.

🧵LESSONS, Practice E: The Deep Practice Book°

In elementary school, we introduced the practice The Return of the Bosses° — on Fridays, pull out the Boss Problems° that bedeviled you, and take another pass at them. This was mostly intended to solve the problem of memory by bringing some light spaced repetition into the math curriculum.

In middle school, we’re going to deepen this with a “Deep Practice Book” (hereafter “DPB”). I wrote quite a lot about this in one of my favorite posts:

In a nutshell, it’s a notebook built on deliberate practice.

I.I.: Wait, in that post, didn’t you say that a DPB was “doomed to fall into a pit and crash and burn when it enters the classroom”?

Yes, because it’s built on deliberate practice. Deliberate practice sucks. It’s hard and boring and painful. It demands repetition and attention, the willingness to veer into error and correct it again and again with the stubbornness of a saint. It’s singularly unglamorous. Everyone hates it. Throughout the history of education, every single attempt to force deliberate attention on an unwilling subject has backfired.

I.I.: Why are we talking about this, then?

Because it is the one best way to grow skill. But in order for it to work, you need to want to grow skill.

I.I.: And how are we cultivating a “want” for math?

In short, everything I wrote in the last three posts, on elementary school math. But we can summarize those in two pieces:

1. practices that help you fall in love with the math itself, and

2. practices that help you develop a taste for getting stumped by hard problems.

In adolescence, all this can be multiplied by the joy of 🦹‍♂️SELF-OVERCOMING… something that teenagers often have in spades. (This is why we didn’t introduce DPBs in elementary school — and for many students, the DPB should be held back until high school.)

Here’s a reminder of what it can look like:

If you’re interested, go ahead and re-read that essay. To capitalize on 🦹‍♂️SELF-OVERCOMING in the middle-school years, you might want to focus on the “How’d it go?” section on the front page, in which students record how difficult the problem was for them:

• I = impossible

• H = hard

• M = medium

• E = easy

• A = automatic

All in all, a DPB can become a mathematical dojo — a place to go, be knocked onto your back, and get up stronger (and hopefully wiser).

Next up: Puzzles in middle school math

Hopefully, you’re getting a glimpse of the personal transformations that we’re trying to make happen through math. I wrote last week about how the “magic” of math can only really be brought out when we take math seriously — and help kids take it seriously, too. People pushed back on that! Alessandro and I will be recording a conversation soon with the redoubtable Michelle Scharfe, creator of Minimalist Math (and of researchparent.com) who thinks all my talk about “seriousness” is me trying to look edgy and cool towards traditionalists. Maybe she’s right!

In any case, I think that in middle school, the payoff of “seriousness” is greater. There’s a desire in teens to transcend boundaries and embody 🦹‍♂️HEROISM. But as any Marvel character can tell you, being a hero sucks.

Do you want to be a hero?

Look forward to seeing how this can be done with less pain and more joy in our next thread: 🧵PUZZLES.

© 2026 losttools.org. CC BY 4.0

I’m teaching two week-long online camps this summer designed, in rather different ways, to fix that. They train the instinct for truth, and make the truth feel real.

This Sunday I’ll be doing an open house to help parents know if this is for their kids; you can sign up below.

Believe it (or Not): UFOs

Monday June 1 – Thursday June 4, 2026
Morning & afternoon sessions open
See the webpage

What’s it about?

On the surface, UFOs. What’s going on with those weird objects Navy pilots keep seeing? But beneath that, it’s about how to know what’s true. What does good evidence for aliens actually look like?

This is the third in our series of “Believe it (or Not)” summer courses, which train kids in the subtle art of Bayesian reasoning. (I wrote a bit about this on Astral Codex Ten last year; this year’s class will go much further.) If you sign up, you’ll get the recordings from last year’s topic (Sea Monsters) for free.

A Dinosaur a Day

Monday June 15 – Thursday June 18, 2026
Morning & afternoon sessions open
See the webpage

What’s it about?

To say that I was “dinosaur obsessed” as a kid probably undersells it. Dinosaurs were my window into the adult world, and especially the world of science…

…and dang it, they really are a great window. While, as a science teacher, I bring a little bit of dinosaurs into everything that I do, up to now I’ve avoided teaching a “dinosaur” class, because where would you even start?

I think I’ve figured it out. Our goal, here, will be to (1) look at some of the most thrilling recent discoveries in paleontology, and (2) try to imaginatively bring them back to life. Expect all of the Egan tools that we talk about on this blog to make an appearance.

The open house

These classes aren’t what they seem on the surface, but I think I can more clearly give a taste in the our open house. If you’ve got a kid (ages 8–15 is our sweet spot) who you think this might be good for, feel free to attend our Zoom webinar open house this weekend:

3pm Eastern / 12 noon Pacific
Sunday, April 12

Sign up for the open house

Sign up for a course

By the end of elementary school, every kid should be able to perform feats of mental arithmetic that others might call “freaky”.

This is our last post on elementary math. If we play our cards right, the two threads before — 🧵DAILY LESSONS and 🧵PUZZLES — should help kids cultivate both (1) a proficiency at math and (2) an affection for it.

Having put all this together, Alessandro and I thought: maybe that's enough! But then we asked ourselves: what if we wanted to go deeper? What could we do with this appreciation for the magic of numbers that our students will have? We concluded that we wanted kids to have them bring the power of numbers inside themselves.

To do this, we propose having a third thread of math: 🧵QUIXOTIC GOALS. In elementary school, this means fantastic feats of mental math.

Hold onto your butts; this is about to get strange. And we admit that while we’re in love with it, it might not be right for every kid. As you read this, ask yourself whether it seems approachable for your son or daughter (or, if you’re a teacher, your students), and register your hot take in the comments.

We could push this back to middle school… though that would mean that middle school’s 🧵QUIXOTIC GOAL of Fermi estimates and Bayesian fights would be pushed back to high school, and high school’s 🧵QUIXOTIC GOAL of Philosophy of math would disappear in a puff of smoke. So there’s a trade-off there, too.

Let’s dive into this one.

To state this clearly, by the end of fourth grade, our goal is to have helped our students calculate impressive sums, differences, products, and quotients without a calculator or pencil.

I.I.: This feels — what’s the word? — “stupid”. No, “abhorrent”. No, “evil”! (Help me out here, I’m no good with words.)

If this is forced on students, yes, all three of those are true. Our goal is to create the conditions so that (1) building these skills is straightforward, and (2) the kids want to do it (or at least don’t fight against it).

The trick to cultivate desire is to tap into kids’ sense of 🦹‍♂️THE HEROIC, and to show them what the human mind can do.

I.I.: I see by that emoji that “the heroic” comes from ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️) understanding. Usually you associate that with middle school. Isn’t elementary a bit early for this?

Possibly — and if this isn’t right for your kid or class, then by all means hold this back until middle school. But we suspect there’s enough of a desire for heroism in little kids that we can start building this now. (And for what it’s worth, Egan was keen to emphasize that we don’t suddenly switch from one way of understanding to another as we grow, and that the seeds of each are with us at every age.)

I.I.: If I want to do this, how can I tap into this hunger for the heroic?

Show your kids that the human mind is amazing, and that with the proper practice individuals can achieve amazing things. Introduce them to quick videos of young kids performing freaky feats of mental math. Tell them that to learn this they don’t have to be naturally gifted at math, but that learning it will make them something akin to being gifted.

🧵MENTAL MATH, Practice A: Counting Rhymes°

We’ll start utterly simple. As stated above, our native 🧙‍♂️NUMBER SENSE sucks at numbers above three or four. But of course we want kids to learn to count! While they’re still young, we can teach kids various 🧙‍♂️RHYMES to lock patterns into their memories.

But this goes further than “one, two, buckle my shoe” — we can also use this for skip-counting to prepare the way for mental multiplication.

For more on this, see my earlier post Counting Rhymes°.

🧵MENTAL MATH, Practice B: 9-bead Abacus°

A basic abacus is an OG computer, but people mostly use them as rather chintzy home decor. If you remove just one bead from any 10-bead abacus, you make obvious its true power: each row is a “place” in the base-10 numbering system, and every configuration of an abacus literally displays a number.

To be fair, it’s actually pretty hard to remove the beads on a store-bought abacus; easier is to paint the left-most bead black and use it to “carry”. For more on this, see my earlier post Basic Abacus°.

🧵MENTAL MATH, Practice C: Finger Math°

Your fingers are mightier than they seem. If you know how to use them, they can give the answers to impressive calculations, and there are hints that using them is cognitively privileged — that it recruits extra parts of the brain.

We’ll teach this to prepare the way for the next type of abacus, which follows the patterns of finger math suspiciously closely. For more, see Finger Math°.

🧵MENTAL MATH, Practice D: 5-bead Abacus°

This is a finger calculator, but better — a tool for people who want to do arithmetic quickly and accurately and actually understand what’s happening. It’s the penultimate step before being able to do truly fantastic feats of mental math —

(Watch the fingers of the first kid fly.) For more on this, see Bead Computers°.

🧵MENTAL MATH, Practice E: The Grammar of Numbers°

Throughout, unveil the patterns that keep popping up when we do arithmetic. As always, start with the simple classics:

When you multiply by 10, the answer is always the original number with a “0” on the end:

• 4 × 10 = 40

• 5 × 10 = 50

When you multiply a one-digit number by 11, the answer is always the original number written twice:

• 4 × 11 = 44

• 7 × 11 = 77

I.I.: But this isn’t new. Everyone learns these.

Exactly! The dominant curriculum introduces these bits of mental math — and then drops them. All we’re suggesting is that we keep going. So make it slightly more complex by going to two-digit numbers:

When you multiply a two-digit number by 11, the answer will always have three digits. The first and last will stay the same; in the middle will be a new number… which will be their sum!

• 42 × 11 = 462 (6 is the sum of 4 and 2)

• 27 × 11 = 297 (9 is the sum of 2 and 7)

Whenever those two digits sum to 10 or more, the pattern continues — but you carry the “1”:

• 49 × 11 = 539 (13 is the sum of 4 and 9)

• 28 × 11 = 308 (10 is the sum of 2 and 8)

From there, it’s not too hard to move to numbers that are many digits long:

When you multiply a super-long number by 11, the answer will always have one more digit than before. The first and last will stay the same, but each number in the middle will be the sum of the pairs of adjacent digits:

• 1,234 × 11 = 13,574 (3 is the sum of 1 and 2…)

• 1,002,005,009 × 11 = 11,022,055,099 (1 is the sum of 1 and 0…)

I.I.: But where would you get the basic building blocks of the curriculum?

Like I wrote before,

a well-made math curriculum is a complex machine, and people have invested their lives into making good ones. Rather than trying to invent our own, we’ll build on someone else’s.

That’s true here, too. Thankfully, the world abounds in mental math curriculums. If you’ve gone through one that you’d like to recommend (or to caution us away from) — or if you’d like to explore the options for us — let us know in the comments. (For the moment, I’ll assume Arthur Benjamin’s Secrets of Mental Math.)

Once that’s chosen, we can Eganize the heck out of it, starting with the concept ladders and boss problems we use in the 🧵DAILY LESSONS.

And then, perhaps, we can go further. More than anything else we teach in elementary school, this has the potential to really seem like arcane magic. So lean into that: treat these tricks as ancient 🧙‍♂️MYSTERIES. By 🧙‍♂️FINDING PATTERNS, kids can unveil them, and add their power to themselves. (In truth, this can be done in all the practices in this thread.)

Why mental math?

This deserves to be answered squarely. Imaginary Interlocutor, take it away!

I.I.: Who cares about this? Why is this worth anything? Haven’t you heard of calculators? This is old school to the point of parody; even mathematicians don’t learn to do mental math anymore. You’re letting your cottagecore aesthetics push out your common sense.

Four reasons, perhaps.

1. It makes all math easier

Arithmetic is, practically speaking, part of all the math we do in school; any middle schooler who still struggles with

will bang their head against the table when they see

The easier that we can make addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, the more we can free students from pain.

2. It makes everyday math possible

If arithmetic is automatic for you, you’ll actually use it in everyday life. If it’s not, you won’t.

I.I.: “Everyday math” is a lie concocted by textbook companies to sell curriculum. No one actually uses math in real life.

If by “everyday math” you mean contrived word problems, you might be right:

But elementary school math pops up constantly — adjusting a recipe, comparing prices, estimating times, and so forth. And when arithmetic is really easy, then all sorts of opportunities open up.

I.I.: But surely not enough opportunities to justify all this work.

Ordinarily, you might be right. But see if you still think so after you read the 🧵QUIXOTIC GOAL for middle school — Fermi estimates.

3. It turns elementary math into real intellectual food

It’s easy, I think, for a certain type of “math person” to look down their nose at arithmetic as “mere calculation”. Best (they think) to master it quickly and move on to the good stuff.

But arithmetic, understood properly, is as heady as anything in math.

To understand why, for example, the “11 trick” above works, you need to build a mental model of how numbers split and recombine across place values. That means that you need to have a deep appreciation for how our base 10 system works, which means that you need to understand how any base system can work.1

4. It makes you a wizard

Deep in our hearts, all of us want to be accosted by an 8-foot tall bearded man who proclaims, Yer a wizard, Harry!2 Like I said before, mental math is one of most direct routes into wizardry for young kids.

When we first learn to add, it’s effortful, and we get frustrated by screwing up. In normal schools, we move past that, and can (with some focus, and perhaps a pencil) get the answers right without too much suffering. We enter, that is, into tool-aided fluency.

But few people take the next logical step, and progress to automaticity.

And automaticity can feel amazing. There’s an ecstasy to it that’s difficult to put into words, but I’ll try it: you stop being a thing that’s doing math, and become the place where the math is happening. You feel that there’s great power swirling inside you, and finally you have a way to focus it.

And this, in the end, is why we think that every kid should have the opportunity to learn mental math. Alessandro and I get that this sounds strange. But what’s truly strange to us is that we do 90% of the work to learn math… and then stop before the last 10%, where it would become something truly powerful.

Next up: Middle school

We’d love to get your radically honest thoughts below; we’ll try to answer everything. In any case, we’ve now laid out what we’re going to do with math in elementary school, and are ready to turn to middle school.

Oh, that reminds me of a question — I’ve been trying an experiment of publishing each thread separately. How do you like it?

© 2026 losttools.org. CC BY 4.0

As promised, Alessandro and I got together to discuss Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives us and Divides Us. It’s good! And, we think, it has huge ramifications for how we think about education.

We talk about how the book’s ideas can help us understand where progressivist & traditionalist education go wrong, and how we can explain Egan education as a bridge between them. Along the way, we find that the book also elucidates how competition (done in a particular way) can make schools better, and how Hogwarts should have really structured its houses.

Maybe we’ll make this viewable to everyone at some point! For the time being, if you’d like to see it, just become a paid subscriber. (And throw any questions into the comments!)

00:00 Introduction to the Mattering Instinct
01:36 The Role of Education in Finding Meaning
06:39 Connecting Mattering with Egan's Educational Philosophy
11:58 Teaching Strategies for Mattering in Education
18:58 The Dialectic of Progressivism and Traditionalism
25:46 Re-enchanting the Curriculum
30:34 The Importance of Wonder in Education
36:32 Tools for Engaging Students in Learning
47:51 Emotional Engagement and the Quest to Matter
50:32 The Essence of Mattering
56:11 Exploring Mattering Projects
01:01:47 The Role of Competition in Education
01:10:01 Noble Competition and Its Educational Value
01:19:55 The Complexity of Mattering in Education

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In our last blueprint post, I laid out how we’re planning to rehumanize the boring part of the elementary school math curriculum: daily lessons. Today, I want to limn out the obviously exciting part that we’re putting in: puzzles.

Elementary math thread 2: 🧵PUZZLES

It’s one of those niggling facts of history that the brilliant minds who created the discipline of math… had no standardized math curriculum to learn it from themselves.

It’s not that these people (and I’m talking about the Greeks1) were somehow more brilliant than their neighbors — the centuries before and after their Golden Age show they were average. As the historian of math Reviel Netz points out, they were lucky enough to live at a cultural moment where a few ingredients came together. One of those was that they were the heirs of the mathematics of the Babylonians:

The Babylonians were masters of numbers…. the training of Mesopotamian bureaucrats was always geared toward the needs of the state.

But what the state needs, above all, is legitimacy, meaning, symbolism. What ancient masters of knowledge were doing, above all, was looking for signs…. The world was a web of signs, point to each other and ultimately shining light… on the big questions of the state: the rivers, the kings, the outcome of war.

– Reviel Netz, Why the Ancient Greeks Matter: The Problematic Miracle that was Greece

The Babylonians taught by puzzles that would look familiar to anyone who’s taken algebra: “the area of a square and the length of its side, taken together, equals three-fourths: what is the length of the side?”. What changed, though, is the context in which the Greeks heard the puzzles. While, for the Babylonians, they had been sets of problems encountered in classrooms for nose-grinding scribes-in-training…

…for Greeks, these were presented as “nice puzzles”:

The school exercises were, among other things, nice puzzles. Maybe we need to imagine caravans with merchants from different lands, camped for the night, sharing tales and riddles. They did not know it but those mathematical riddles could well have been their most precious cargo. From such small events, knowledge gets transferred.

By encountering these problems as tasty treats in themselves, some Greeks began to savor mathematics.

This isn’t the only ingredient in the Greek invention of systematic mathematics. (We’ll explore another ingredient in our post on middle school math.) But it is an important one — so 🧵PUZZLES will be a second thread in our math curriculum, one that will extend the magic of math outside the mainstream curriculum.

🧵PUZZLES, Practice A: Mysterious Messages°

There’s something satisfying about cracking a code. Enciphered messages will appear in our classrooms, and we’ll drop hints as to how kids might be able to unravel the 🧙‍♂️MYSTERIES.

They’ll start simply (e.g. A = 1, B = 2…) and very, very slowly become harder. Eventually, they’ll lead kids into thinking about their native language (e.g. English) from a mathematical perspective — what letters are most common? Which two-and-three-letter combinations are most common?

For more on this, see my previous post Mysterious Messages°.

🧵PUZZLES, Practice B: Board Games°

Turn-based 🧙‍♂️GAMES are already ripe with analytical thinking. And while there are some overtly mathematical games that are actually enjoyable to play — Prime Climb is probably everyone’s favorite here — in truth, any game that features strategy is inherently math in disguise.

Think Connect Four or Carcassonne. Think Hive or Risk. Heck, think Tic Tac Toe — they all reward seeing (and exploiting) patterns. In middle school, we’ll talk about how to make them more deeply mathematical while also making them more fun. But for that to work, the kids first need to enjoy the games, so we’ll start this early.

🧵PUZZLES, Practice C: Jokes°

A 🧙‍♂️JOKE is perhaps the most immediately-rewarding type of reasoning. Each is a tiny house of screwy logic;2 “getting” the punchline requires making a new sense of how the pieces fit together.

I.I.: It feels faintly ridiculous to put this into the “math” curriculum, though.

Which means there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here! We want to have kids read jokes, practice telling them, and even make their own. In elementary school, our focus will be on wordplay — puns, knock-knock jokes, lightbulb jokes, and so on.

I.I.: I’m not sure I could take a whole classroom of joke-spouting children.

Indeed, it’s hard to be a teacher. But the payoff is worth it; as Egan writes:

Stimulating each child to become a jokester is fundamental to the later development of logical thinking.

– Kieran Egan, Primary Understanding

And we want kids who are logical — and who know how to bend logic. For more on this, check out my earlier post, Telling Jokes°.

🧵PUZZLES, Practice D: Strange Math°

There are so many branches of mathematics that never darken the doorway of an elementary school. Some barely enter into K–12 education at all — think topology, game theory, and so on. Each branch of math has its classic riddles, stories, and games.

Among math geeks many of these are famous, and you probably already know of some of them already — the Tower of Hanoi, the grains of rice on a chessboard, Zeno’s paradoxes, a young Carl Friedrich Gauss adding all the numbers from 1 to 100 in his head, and so on. These survive because they’re fun!

Our goal is to collect perhaps a hundred of these, and to bring them into the classroom once a week. We’ll be engaging them in a manner inspired by the people who champion “Thinking Classrooms”, and then perhaps find ways to turn up the drama by triggering 🧙‍♂️EMOTIONAL BINARIES and ramping up the 🧙‍♂️FANTASY.

And a good way to do that, of course, is to narrativize the puzzle. Let’s take the Tower of Hanoi as an example.

Phase 1: 💥 Orient

Our first step, as always, is to help kids feel something. The Tower of Hanoi started as a silly story told by a 19th century mathematician. We can modify his version a little as we tell it:

In a land far, far away, there is a tower. On the top of this tower are three diamond needles. And on the first needle, when the world was young, priests stacked 64 disks of pure gold, each one slightly smaller than the one beneath it, forming a perfect cone.

The priests were charged with a sacred duty: move the entire stack of golden disks to the third needle. They only had to follow two rules:

1. they could only move one disk at a time, and

2. they could never place a larger disk on top of a smaller one.

When they complete their duty, the world will come to an end.

How long will that take?

Phase 2: ⚠️ Complicate

Now it’s time for the kids to get hands-on. Give them a little version of the tower (you can make one, or buy one for $10), and challenge them to move any size of stack (four is fine; three or even two is fine to begin) from one needle to the other following the rules. Then, of course, have them add more disks. How many can they manage?

Phase 3: 🐛 Transform

Here, we want them to produce something that shows their understanding of the specific pattern for solving a certain number of disks, or (better) the general pattern for solving any number of disks.

I.I.: And what should they produce?

For this, they could, say, write a letter, teach it to a friend, draw a diagram, or shoot an explainer for YouTube. (Across their education, elementary schoolers should be experimenting with many types of production, so just make sure they’re getting a smattering of everything.)

Phase 4: 🪢 Integrate

As usual, it’s good to “close the book” on this, and prompt the kids to reflect on what they did — what they discovered, what surprised them, what they learned about themselves, whatever. This needn’t take more than a couple minutes.

And then the puzzle can be put away for a few years… until we return to it in middle school.

Imaginary Interlocutor: Where would I get a collection of math problems like this?

Start with this post:

Five Twelve Thirteen

Glimpses

I love learning math. One element of math I love is exploration: figuring out something new and feeling the rush of realization…

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6 months ago · 25 likes · 5 comments · Dylan Kane

It’s written by the invariably insightful and preternaturally pleasant Dylan Kane, who was generous in spending a couple hours talking through this practice with me. I suddenly realize that I’ve somehow never formally recommended his Substack. Fixed!

Next up: A quixotic goal

If we do our job well (and the stars are aligned), the four practices above will help most kids fall in love with math. This is, obviously, a ridiculous goal to swing for — but then, why else get out of bed in the morning? In any case, any sensible person would say that, having achieved it, we should move onto other topics. (Geography! Writing! Cooking!)

We, however, suspect that there could be one more remarkable thing to pursue in elementary school math: stupendous feats of mental math. Look for it in our next post.

(Inspiration for this post came from Dan & Katherine Cook at Math for Love, who introduced me to the Julia Robinson Math Festivals. All I can say is, if someone ever asks you to spend three hours in a gymnasium pushing artfully weird math puzzles at middle schoolers, say yes.)

© 2026 losttools.org. CC BY 4.0

Arithmetic — which we make students spend years studying — is an enchanted thing, but to most students, it’s presented as cold. Because of that, most of them grow up not caring about math; they put up with it only because school demands it of them. Immediately upon graduating, most of them put it out of their minds, only fitfully recalling the things that are routinely required for life.

This is a tragedy. It squanders human potential, and shows that we don’t value students’ time or effort. To solve this, educational Traditionalism and Progressivism have each had their own suggestions:

Though if you had to distill what the core of mathematics is, they might say…

We can’t dismiss this fight — important values are at stake; everyone reading this has Opinions. But I want to suggest that while this war rages on, some of the things that matter most are being ignored: the magic of numbers, the power of numbers to wrestle reality into submission, and the possibility that numbers can help us peek into ultimate reality itself.

Imaginary Interlocutor: Slow down; that’s some pretty heady stuff there.

A sign we’re not wasting our time! Each of those will become, in turn, the north star of the three cycles of our curriculum, starting in elementary school (grades 1–4) with “the magic of numbers”.

Through each of those cycles, our math curriculum will follow three threads:

1. 🧵 LESSONS, where we build a wee bit of magic into the foundation of math,

2. 🧵 PUZZLES, where we go wild with that magic in other kinds of math, and

3. 🧵 QUIXOTIC GOALS, where we use all of this to do something crazy (in elementary school: mental math).

Let’s get started. (A note that I’m trying something new today — instead of giving all three of those threads in one post, I’m going to give them one post each. My hope is to make these easier to read. After the third one, I’d love your feedback as to how this is working.)

Elementary math thread 1: 🧵LESSONS

In which we secure math-magic through rather rigorous daily practice.

Parents depend on a school’s elementary math curriculum to keep their kids at (or above) grade level — so anyone wanting to do something new with math needs to first show kids won't fall behind.

The first task of any exciting new math curriculum, then, must be don’t screw this up. Think of this thread as being the serious, risk-averse side of the curriculum.

I.I.: This sounds like the opposite of “enchanted”.

No — “serious” needn’t rule out “magical”. As professional illusionists (and debunkers) know, the real experience of magic comes through diligent work.1

🧵LESSONS, Practice A: Daily Ladders° 

A well-made math curriculum is a complex machine, and people have invested their lives into making good ones. Rather than trying to invent our own, we’ll build on someone else’s.

I.I.: Which curriculum will you build on?

If you’re a homeschooler, whatever works for your kid is great. If you’re a teacher, we can help you utilize whatever curriculum you’re obligated to use.

But as we get to recommend curriculums to new schools, our answer is going to be JUMP Math, which (along with geodes, cats, and the first Jurassic Park movie) is one of the world’s few perfect things.

I.I.: I’ve never heard of that one before! What makes it so good?

It’s built on one singular idea — they call it “guided discovery” or “incremental mastery”; I call it Concept Ladders°. In brief: it teaches big new hard ideas through tiny steps by taking kids through those steps (rather than separating the teaching from the doing).

It’s the brainchild of the playwright-turned-mathematician2 John Mighton, who discovered a method of teaching math that could help more-or-less any student build skill quickly.

Say a student can’t figure out:

0.80 + 0.04 = ?

The temptation for a teacher is explain with words. But in math, words suck! Much better to build on our innate ability of 🤸‍♀️SPOTTING PATTERNS. So instead of explaining, write a simpler question:

0.80 + 0.01 = ?

If that’s too hard, ask a simpler one:

0.8 + 0.1 = ?

If that’s still too hard, then ask a simpler one:

8 + 1 = ?

Let’s call this “stepping down the ladder”. Once you find something related that students can do, start stepping up:

8 + 0.1 = ?

8 + 0.2 = ?

8.0 + 0.2 = ?

The goal in choosing these is to keep the student mental state where the answers come with only a moment of thinking — that magical area between “boredom” and “kicking chairs”. (Educational nerds like to call this “the zone of proximal development”. It’s similar to the experience of “flow”.)

Keep climbing that ladder!

8.1 + 0.1 = ?

0.8 + 0.1 = ?

0.80 + 0.1 = ?

Keeping students in this state is the genius of JUMP’s teacher training program; they’ve built their whole K–8 curriculum around the idea of making this easy.

0.80 + 0.01 = ?

0.80 + 0.02 = ?

0.80 + 0.04 = ?

…and that problem, if you recall, is the original problem the student couldn’t solve.

And this is the magic of daily math ladders — you hit your head against something that seems too complex for you, and then you come back, and realize it’s simple. JUMP makes it easy to make this routine. To make kids care, we need to show that this isn’t merely true for adding decimals, but is also true for fractions, percents, long division, and everything in math. Mighton points out that this, in fact, was proven by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica: all mathematics is decomposable. It’s all one long ladder. There aren’t any gaps.

This is the magic that we want to help kids feel.

I.I.: I’m a bit confused — is JUMP Math part of educational progressivism, or educational traditionalism?

It blends both in the most remarkable way. Unlike old-school traditionalism, it doesn’t spend much time telling kids how to solve problems; instead, it tucks the teaching into the problem-solving itself. And unlike old-school progressivism, it doesn’t give kids much creative room to find their own ways to solve problems; instead, it shepherds them through efficient, powerful methods.

To me, it’s the best of both worlds: it respects kids as agents who need to make sense of things themselves, but doesn’t assume that they have god-like powers to re-invent the corpus of math on their own.

But maybe this isn’t your kid! If JUMP doesn’t float your boat, there are certainly other curriculums that people love. (In our Egan homeschooling group, Beast Academy comes up a lot, as does Minimalist Math and Math Academy.) If your curiosity is piqued by JUMP Math, Zach Groshell’s interview with John Mighton is a great place to start, as are these pieces (1, 2) in The New York Times.

🧵LESSONS, Practice B: Boss Problems°

There’s a problem with doing ladder lessons as a class — kids who already know how to do the problems will be bored. (This is, of course, a problem with teaching anything in a classroom.)

We can solve this elegantly: before teaching each day’s lesson, write down a couple of ludicrously hard problems that kids will be able to do only if they understand the lesson perfectly. Give kids a couple minutes to read the problem, to ask questions about it, and to try it.

Invite any students who get it right to skip right to doing their homework.

For the math lesson above, such a problem might look like this:

I.I.: Is that actually “ludicrously hard”?

For you it may look easy — but it’ll make many a fourth grader’s eyes bug out. Which is precisely what’s important for a good Boss Problem — it should look hard, but not actually require any cleverness beyond what they’ll learn in the lesson.

And this is the magic of Boss Problems: you take the drama that we talked about above and crank it up to 11. You lead them into experiencing defeat; then you help them experience success. Problems that seemed impossible suddenly seem obvious.

JUMP’s genius is that it makes math easy. Boss Problems’ genius is that they make math hard.

Showing these Boss Problems to kids at the start of a lesson has a huge benefit: now the lesson has purpose. They want to beat that sucker, and understanding the lesson is the key to doing it. (Again and again, I’ve seen kids’ eyes go wide in the middle of teaching, and then see them jump up and run to the wall to try out an idea that’s just come to them.)

We can make the lessons matter even more by repeating this on a larger level: write a special set of Boss Problems on colored paper at the start of a new unit (about once a month). These should presage what they might learn — I based them on the problems in the unit’s final test, but then made them look even harder.

If you’d like to learn more about this, take a look at my old post, Boss Questions°.

🧵LESSONS, Practice C: Making Friends with Numbers°

It’s important to recognize how uneasily numbers fit inside our heads. Until recently, most languages didn’t even have names for anything in the double-digits. Our 🤸‍♀️NATIVE NUMBER SENSE is paltry. As Kieran Egan quips:

“Our number system is about as good as that of a blackbird’s, but less good than that of some species of wasps.”

Egan, Primary Understanding: Education in Early Childhood

I.I.: This sounds like the excuse of someone who’s not going to expect much of their students.

No, the opposite: understanding our innate weaknesses is the first step toward overcoming them.

I.I.: And how can we overcome them?

For a hint, we can look to where math came from historically: numerology.

I.I.: I feel my finger reaching for the “unsubscribe” button…

Throughout many cultures, before numbers were technical things to compute with, they held mystical significance. We suspect that this was load-bearing. In China, odd numbers were yang, and even numbers yin. Across the Near East, 7 was a “heavenly” number — seven planets, seven heavens, seven days of the week. The Pythagoreans swore oaths on the number 10.

I.I.: Oh glory. Are you planning to impose some sort of spirituality on kids?

Nothing like that. All you want is to show how each number has meaning outside itself, and to do that all you need to do is collect links that each has to things in the natural and human worlds. For example:

• 1 star in the solar system and eye on a Cyclops

• 2 arms, ears, nostrils, pinky toes, and so forth on most animals

• 3 primary colors

• 4 cardinal directions

• 5 fingers on a hand

• 6 legs on every insect

• 7 planets (classically)

• 8 arms of an octopus, legs of a spider

• 9 Muses

• 10 fingers, toes

• 11 players on a soccer team

• 12 months in a year, signs in the zodiac, tribes in ancient Israel, hours on a clock face

To keep this collection, you may want a special notebook or cards from 1–100 hanging on a wall. At the top, write the number lightly, and in pencil.

Use the paper to write down links. For the single-digit numbers, you can also sketch in a little history of where our numeral came from — easily found on each number’s Wikipedia page:

After you find two or three links for a number, it's time to 🤸‍♀️PERSONIFY it. Ask what the number feels like to you. What color does it seem to want to be? What font feels right to write it in?

When numbers have feelings, people pay attention to them.

🧵LESSONS, Practice D: Origins Stories of Math°

Now that we’ve made an emotional connection with numbers, let’s turn to the other squiggles we face in math: symbols like +, –, ×, ÷, and =, and the written numerals themselves.

Unlike the numbers, these don’t describe things in the natural world — they’re conventions created by some now-dead person (often a very quirky one) who was trying to solve a problem.

Historians have figured out where all these come from. All we need to do is to turn them into 🧙‍♂️SIMPLE STORIES, and slip them into our math lessons.

Let's turn back to that initial problem:

0.87 + 0.04 = ?

Squiggles, squiggles, squiggles.

Why is “plus” written as a tiny cross, and “equals” as two straight lines? What’s up with the decimal point? Heck, what’s up with decimal values — why is the “8” in “0.87” ten times bigger than the “7”?

I.I.: That’s a lot of questions, and I don’t want to bog down a lesson.

Three responses to that. First, this can be solved by teaching these stories early, just as kids are learning each of the concepts. That is, when they’re learning addition, they should hear why we use the “+” symbol.

Second, these don’t take much time to learn: a few sentences suffice:

• “+” is a lazy way to write the word “and” in Latin — “et”

• “3” is just three horizontal lines, swooped together

• “÷” was invented by a Swiss professor in the 1600s and we still don’t know why he chose it… but it’s interesting that it looks a lot like a tiny picture of a fraction

But I can’t say the third part emphatically enough: math is stories, too. To do math isn’t just to arbitrarily manipulate random squiggles: it’s (also) to step into a millennia-long tradition. When we forget this, we alienate students from what we’re asking them to do. (No wonder so many people hate math!) When we remember this, we re-humanize the discipline, and make it easier for normies to fall in love with math.

If you’d like to see more about this, take a look at my earlier post, Origin Stories°.

🧵LESSONS, Practice E: The Return of the Bosses°

So much of math that’s learned gets forgotten. This is especially true of the hardest problems that kids struggle with, which is tragic: having put in the work, they’re what students most deserve to remember!

A simple fix: instead of throwing away the Boss Problems, hold onto them. Put them in a box. Each Friday, as you sip your tea and review your Memory Box, pull out one to see if it still stumps them. If it does, great — you created these to be really hard, and this one is a good fit for the kid! Savor that feeling of confusion, and write down more questions on the front of the paper.

Hard problems can become friends, too.

(In middle school, we’ll go deeper into this with our Deep Practice Books°.)

Next up: Puzzles

If we do our job right, the five practices above will make it easy for students to not hate math, even as they stay at (or above) their grade level. But our bigger task is to help them fall in love with math. That’s what the next thread — 🧵PUZZLES — is for.

Be prepared for things to get strange, and delightful. In the meantime, ask questions below.

© 2026 losttools.org. CC BY 4.0

We’ll have up a special paid-subscribers-only post with our recording, and you’ll be able to comment! We plan to put it up in two weeks — Thursday, April 2. So if you’d like to grab a copy, there’s time.

Imaginary Interlocutor: Is this a book about education?

It proposes to give a new foundation to human flourishing, so… yes.

Its bold claim is that the need to matter isn’t just one feeling among others, it’s a biological imperative that spools out of our evolutionary history. Among the questions that I want to raise with Alessandro:

• is helping people matter the goal of education?

• is the hunger to matter the über-tool of teaching?

• how does this look different across different academic subjects?

• how does this look different across different ages?

If you haven’t read any of her books before, you should know that she’s a philosopher and novelist: when she addresses a topic, it is addressed. Her works cut to the core of whatever she’s talking about, and this is no exception. If you’re interested in what it means to matter, this book has insights for you.

You can get a taste of this book in her interview with :

Persuasion

Rebecca Goldstein on Why Humans Need to Matter

Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. Her latest book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us…

Listen now

4 months ago · 6 likes · Yascha Mounk

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We’re in the process of building the world’s most powerful history curriculum — one that opens kids’ eyes to the world, and helps supercharge everything they learn with meaning. It took a whole month, but I’ve now published the three posts outlining the blueprint of our K–12 history curriculum in elementary, middle, and high school.

Now comes the harder easier harder fun part: finding the stories.

Our goal is as simple as it is grandiose:

Imaginary Interlocutor: That’s so megalomaniacal that I fret for the soul of anyone who even imagines they’re up to the task.

Agreed! Yet it has to be done. (Every single history curriculum in existence has to go through the same step.)

And this is where you, delightful reader, come in. See this as an old-fashioned barn-raising: if a community (of parents, teachers, history buffs, and lovers of things that matter) comes together, we can make this good.

Which is all to say: we’d like your recommendations for great history stories.

What Makes a History Story “Great”?

The stories we’re looking for aren’t just fun facts — they should be the kind of stories that can grow with a person over time.

Specifically, they should pack a MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️), ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️), and PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) punch. In elementary school, a story should center on a person in a vivid situation — danger, discovery, courage, foolishness, wonder — that a kid can picture clearly. In middle school, that same story should open onto competing ideals and complex decisions. And in high school, the story should deepen again, revealing larger historical forces — economics, ideas, technologies, cultures, and systems that shaped the world.

The best history stories — the ones that we’re hunting! — work at all three levels.

Nominate a Story

If you’re willing, set a timer for sixty seconds. If a history story comes to mind, suggest it in the comments.

It’ll help us if you can use this format:

1. Story/person:
2. Year:
3. What basically happens (in your memory):
4. Why you love it:

If you’d like to include anything else, go for it! If you follow that format, feel free to submit as many recommendations as you’d like.

I.I.: Any particular time that the stories should be from?

Our memory palace will cover everything from the Big Bang to the future, so any time or place at all.

I.I.: Are these guaranteed to be used?

We can’t guarantee that we’ll use them in our official version of this curriculum, but even if we don’t, others who are reading this and making their own versions1 might.

Ask Me Anything (history edition)

Finally — what would you like to ask about teaching/learning history? (Of all the academic subjects I’ll be writing about, I might have the most experience in history — I have hot takes!) Ask away.

As you know, Alessandro and I have been building something for a while now — the secret we’ll announce on January 1, 2027.

The work itself is moving well, but, like any troop on a good adventure, we’ve encountered a dragon. This particular dragon’s n…

Read more

In elementary school, we leaned into kids’ storytelling superpowers to plant ~100 history stories in their heads. In middle school, we leveraged their emerging angsty obsessions to make those stories bigger and more ethically complex.

But what we want to do, of course, is prepare adults who can help mend the world. So in our high school history curriculum, we’ll be helping students see the biggest, deepest things about the human world.

So far, we’ve built our history curriculum on two threads:

• 🧵 A memory palace

• 🧵 Stories

Let’s see how these can evolve in high school.

HS history thread 1: 🧵Memory palace

🧵Memory palace, Practice A: Murder board (scholar’s edition)° 

In elementary school, we made a Memory Palace°, and in middle school, we used it to play the Murder Board Game°. Now we’re going to keep playing that game, but make the questions about historical forces. For example, you can start by asking students to stand in their memory palace and point to stories that feature one of the following:

• socioeconomic class

• gender roles

• religion

• the environment

• cultural values

• law

• war

• technology

Marxist interlocutor: You fool! ALL stories involve class!

Actually, I’m not going to disagree with that one. This is a profound insight — in fact, it’s so profound that we want students to have it for themselves. As soon as they realize it, they’ll start “winning” the game. That’s our cue, of course, to make the game harder by asking for more specific connections. Just to take “class” as an example, ask students which stories feature…

• a violent uprising

• someone moving into a higher class

• a society whose class system is more (or less) rigid than our own

Former Religious Studies Major: You fool! ALL stories involve religion and cultural values!

Environmental Lawyer: Also the environment! And don’t forget the law!

Yes, yes, you too. All these things we call “historical forces” tend to be present more or less everywhere, at all times. The point of the “scholar’s edition” of the murder board is precisely to help students learn to use these forces as lenses to see what’s going on beneath the surface in the stories.

Politically Moderate Interlocutor: Are you trying to make kids into Marxists?

If I were wiser, I’d answer that with a clear “no”. Reality, however, is more complicated. Wait until the end for the real answer; it’ll help to first see what we’re doing with stories.

HS history thread 2: 🧵Stories

In elementary school, we planted Simple History Stories° into kids’ heads. In middle school, that practice split into two: one that zoomed out to the whole society, and one that zoomed into specific characters. These’ll evolve further in high school to help kids see the world with 👩‍🔬BIG IDEAS.

🧵Stories, Practice A: History’s biggest questions° 

This is an evolution of middle school’s Explore a Society°, in which we looked at one of elementary school’s Simple History Stories° and asked what bigger narrative this is part of. Now, we’ll be connecting multiple stories together, and discovering some of the biggest processes that those narratives are part of.

To do this, we’ll be leaning on the PHILOSOPHIC tools of the 👩‍🔬SEARCH FOR AUTHORITY & TRUTH, 👩‍🔬GENERAL SCHEMES, and 👩‍🔬PROCESSES.

In short, we’ll help students fight about some of the same things scholars fight about. There’s a recipe for this:

1. present them with an epic question,

2. show them how scholars have answered the question in very different ways, and

3. help them form (and defend) their own answer.

I.I.: What sort of questions qualify as “epic”?

For any important historical topic, there are questions that stir controversy. We’re not looking for technical historical questions; those can remain the territory of academic historians. We’re looking for things which (1) serious scholars have debated, and (2) still can get a rise out of people on the internet.

• slavery: what explains why some societies enslaved people, and others didn’t? Was the abolition movement driven by economics, or moral ideals?

• technology: was the Agricultural Revolution (aka “the invention of farming”) good, or bad?

• imperialism: did the Pax Romana actually bring peace to the lands they conquered? Why did Europe take over the world, rather than, say, New Guinea?1

• religion: why did Christianity take over the Roman Empire? Why did Islam take over southwest Asia? Is America a secular country?

• philosophy: what caused the near-simultaneous development of Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, and the Hebrew prophetic tradition?

• economic progress: Why did the world suddenly get rich around 1800? (Was it capitalism?)

I.I.: Do we really have to have kids fight?

Yes: 👩‍🔬IDEA FIGHTS are the fundamental way that modern, academic, PHILOSOPHIC understanding happens.

But probably this is too abstract. Let’s take, for a specific example, one of the biggest questions of history: why Europe? Why did Western Europe in particular leapfrog all other regions in technology, economics, ideas, and military? How was it this small, backwater isthmus of Eurasia that ended up taking over the world?

Phase 1: 💥 Orient

You might start by writing down that question, and stick it in an envelope. Have the students try to guess what you wrote, and give clues. Walk through the memory palace, and point to events that touch upon this pattern of “Europe takes over” —

• 🟣 space 11, dot 1: Columbus

• 🟣 space 13, dot 2: Galileo

• 🟣 space 14, dot 4: Newton

• 🟣 space 15, dot 1: Darby kicks off the Industrial Revolution

Or give them a map with the key removed, and have them guess what the colors stand for:

Give as many hints as kids need to guess the question. Throughout, present the question as something that matters — one whose answer (if we only understood it) would help us fix what’s wrong in the world.

Phase 2: ⚠️ Complicate

Read snippets of scholarly works that answer the question in radically different ways. For example:

• Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: It’s the religion, stupid — Calvinism prompts people to work out the proof of their salvation by getting rich

• Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: It’s the violence, stupid — Europe’s system of colonialism terrorized other societies into submission

• Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: It’s the environment, stupid — Europe’s native domesticatable animals allowed for more tech development

• Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: It’s the psychology, stupid — the Church’s marriage rules break the clans, and make Europeans oddly individualistic

I.I.: Is there any place for reading whole books, here?

Probably not here — the thrust is to show a diversity of answers to a big question. Because of this, typically, short excerpts are our friends.

Phase 3: 🐛 Transform

Now the student joins the fray! They need to choose a scholar whose thesis they’ll support, or forge their own path. However they choose, they’ll need to make their argument strong by navigating evidence, employing logic, and pulling in specific historical details. (Good thing they’ve been working with detail-strewn historical stories for a decade!)

As usual, we want students to make something in this phase. The classic project at this level is 👩‍🔬FORMAL WRITING — the much-hated five-paragraph essay — and now would be a great time to master the skill of writing them.2

Phase 4: 🪢 Integrate

As usual, make a memory card. A simple format would be to write the big question (and a list of some of the thinkers) on the front, and to distill what they each said on the back.

Sometimes, though, students will learn something profound about life.3 When they do, that warrants a memory card.

🧵Stories, Practice B: See history like a scholar° 

This is an evolution of middle school’s Judge a Character°. There, we zoomed into the private, inner lives of the main characters from the elementary school Simple History Stories°. Here, we’ll be similarly zooming into the stories, but to see what scholars say is really going on.

I.I.: What makes scholars special?

Brilliant scholars in the humanities and social sciences don’t only have a high IQ or know lots of details. They’ve mastered many concepts which, once you know them, can help you see how things really work.

So to do this, we’ll be leaning on the PHILOSOPHIC tools of 👩‍🔬PROCESSES and 👩‍🔬CONCEPTS.

Usually, these concepts are held back until upper-level classes in college. But they’re powerful tools that everyone can learn. Here, we’re going to introduce some powerful concepts, and use them as lenses to see into what students spent eight years learning.

I.I.: What particular concepts are you thinking about?

The foundational ideas of each academic discipline — big ideas which, if true, change everything. Just to name a few:

Economics

• Smith’s “invisible hand”: self-interest counterintuitively benefits everyone4

• Hayek’s “price signals”: markets process information better than any central planner

• Ricardo’s “comparative advantage”: everyone (even the less capable) benefits from trade

Political philosophy

• Hobbes’ “social contract”: governments exist because anarchic life is nasty, brutish, and short

• Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony”: those in power make us want to be ruled

• Machiavelli’s “virtù”: effective rulers must be willing to do what morality forbids

Psychology

• Freud’s “unconscious”: our behavior is caused by hidden mental forces

• Bowlby’s “attachment theory”: our early bonds permanently shape our emotional lives

• E. O. Wilson’s “sociobiology”: we can understand our behavior more clearly once we understand that we’re a type of primate

Sociology

• Marx’s “conflict theory”: society is an artificial system of oppression

• Durkheim’s “functionalism”: society is an organic system where each part serves a purpose

• Said’s “orientalism”: we create distorted stereotypes of other cultures to justify oppressing them

To see how we can use them, let’s work through one example in depth. We’ll take our story of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (previously discussed in elementary school and middle school), and show how using Gramsci’s theory of “cultural hegemony” helps us see something big and new in it.

Phase 1: 💥 Orient

We want to help students feel how much Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony” matters… which calls for a 🧙‍♂️MYSTERY and a 🧙‍♂️STORY.

You might tell the students that you’re going to revisit Julius Caesar to spot something no one had noticed before. Together, ponder a mystery: if Caesar broke the law, why didn’t the Senate just arrest him?

Then briefly tell the story of someone who had an insight that might help us answer that question clearly:

Antonio Gramsci grew up poor and sickly in Sardinia but became one of the twentieth century’s most thoughtful Marxist thinkers. Watching revolution after revolution fail in Western Europe, he asked a simple question: why don’t people rise up against systems that dominate them?

In prison under Mussolini, he developed his answer — power survives not mainly through force, but through hegemony, shaping culture and “common sense” so that being ruled feels natural.5

Then ask them: how might Gramsci tell the story of Caesar crossing the Rubicon?

Phase 2: ⚠️ Complicate

Here, tell students that to answer that question, they’re going to need to understand Gramsci’s idea clearly, and revisit what they learned before about the end of the Roman Republic.

I.I.: How can I help them understand “hegemony”? I’m no Marxist scholar.

No problem — Gramsci was, and was a fairly clear writer! A surprising number of the people who gave birth to the big ideas were. You can pluck some samples from Gramsci’s prison notebooks.6

This, by the way, reflects a major piece of our high school reading curriculum: reading important, real, primary sources. But they’re hard! To get students into reading him, you might start with a romantic quote:

To build to reading his actual work, you might segue to one of the YouTube videos on his theory of cultural hegemony.

I.I.: How should they revisit what they’ve previously learned about Caesar?

Re-read the original elementary story of Caesar crossing the Rubicon and whatever work students made in middle school around it.

I.I.: Egad, does that mean we need to save everything that kids do?!

The details of this need to be worked out. We should be clear about the challenges that come with leaning on a continuity of materials: what should we do, say, with the students who enter a school in high school?

But we should be clear about the failures of any approach to education which doesn’t even try for this: students are doomed to forget nearly everything they learn. Worse, when education is a “conveyor belt” — when the physical objects students learn with are whisked away to never be seen again — the meaning drains out. Revisiting old things, and making them useful again, is the cheapest way to build epic meaning.

Which is all to say that when kids work hard to make and learn things, we owe them the honor of helping them retain it.

Phase 3: 🐛 Transform

Here, as usual, we’ll make something. We can see two obvious options.

You can re-tell the story of Julius Caesar, putting Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony” at the center. For example:

For generations, the republic had been run by a small group of senators who believed the state belonged to them. The system endured because most people accepted that this was simply how the republic worked. But after years of broken promises, ordinary people had quietly begun to stop believing. While the old order still held, it had already lost the hearts of its rulers. The republic had always depended on something invisible: the shared beliefs among its powerful actors that its rules were legitimate.

On a cold day in early January, Caesar summoned his loyal followers and spoke to them of betrayal — how his enemies in the Senate had stripped him of his command and threatened him with prosecution the moment he became a private citizen again. The game, he told them, was rigged. The senators were not defending the Republic; they were using its laws to destroy him and to keep their own hands on power. Then he bade his followers to cross the sacred boundary.

At that moment, in the capital, the Senate was in session, doing the formal business of the state. When they heard the news, the senators fled to safety. It was a rupture of the unspoken beliefs that the centuries-old order had been built on. Many called it treason. But Caesar wasn’t arrested, as he commanded the hearts and minds of too many of the citizens.

The sacred constitutional order, it turned out, had been weakening for decades — the political elites just hadn’t noticed how far it had gone. But Caesar had. He had seen that rules only held when the elites stood together to defend them, and that the republic’s ruling class had already fractured.

(Note that that story was done with some help of AI… but also note that it contains a carefully-laid Easter egg. Hint: what story is it actually telling?7)

Or, instead of telling a story, you could write a formal essay, explaining in a more analytic way how Gramsci’s idea does or doesn’t help us understand the story of Caesar. For this, you’d want to use the tools of 👩‍🔬ANOMALIES, looking for details that don’t match Gramsci’s claims. (Doing a debate here, too, would be excellent.)

Phase 4: 🪢 Integrate

As always, you want to cap this off with a reflection on what was most important. Here, the focus should be on the big idea that was learned.

The end

Politically Moderate Interlocutor: Are you looking to turn all students into Marxists?! 🫣

tl;dr: no.

But the real answer is a bit more complex, because

If you study the humanities seriously, you’ll encounter ideas that are powerful and seductive. You’ll meet (and fall in love with) thinkers who make everything you see suddenly snap into focus. Marx (and his follower Gramsci) is one of those. So are Adam Smith, Steven Pinker, bell hooks, and a hundred others.

This isn’t a bug in a humanities education, it’s the friggin’ point.

Many approaches to education try to make the humanities “safe” for students by steering them toward what they see as the “right” ideologies. But this (1) usually doesn’t work, (2) makes the humanities boring when it does work, and (3) puts students at risk when it does. When people encounter these ideas later, without guidance, they’re far more likely to fall under their spell.

The safer path is the path of exposure. When students experience many ideas pulling them at once, a remarkable thing happens — they begin to build resistance. They begin to instinctively look for blind spots. They begin to ask harder questions. And they begin to use others’ theories to build their own models.

Guiding students through this process is an important part of a high-school history teacher’s responsibility. We want to introduce students to as many compelling ideas as we can, and to help them feel the pull — and then, when they’re half-bewitched, to help them see the holes in the idea.

Our hope, thus, isn’t that students graduate high school as Marxists, anti-Marxists, or any other kind of ideological soldier, but as something better: adults who can think historically, weigh ideas carefully, and use them to help mend the world.

© 2026 losttools.org. CC BY 4.0

(Note: the usual plan is to smoosh the middle- & high-school curriculums into one post… but there’s so much to say about history that I’m going to split this up.)

In our last wireframe, I suggested that a rich elementary history curriculum can be seen as a rope of two threads:

• 🧵 A memory palace

• 🧵 Stories

As kids get older, each thread evolves. In elementary school, we rooted kids in the story of the world, but in middle school, something riskier needs to begin. The picture must sharpen; the shadows must deepen. History has to transition from a parade of memorable tales to a stranger, more complicated landscape.

In these four years, we want to master the techniques to help us tame our alien, exotic, and fascinating reality. This is the “climb” phase of our journey. Starting in 5th grade, we can take full advantage of the tools of ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️) understanding (Egan’s phase of heightened detail, limits, and heroic scale — for a reminder, take a look here). We add resolution and texture and let students feel how untidy the past is. Our goal is to create history geeks who feel its weight and strangeness, and after four years are hungry to explore it at a higher level.

MS history thread 1: 🧵Memory palace

In elementary school, we built a memory palace to hold the ~100 thrilling history stories we learned. Now, we want to begin to tie all ~100 stories together into one huge narrative. In middle school, we have two practices to do this: writing a song, and playing a game.

🧵Memory palace, Practice A: Write an epic history song

Here, you’re going to incorporate references to all ~100 stories into a single 🧙‍♂️SONG.

I.I.: What’s gained from this? (We’ve already made those images.)

The task of building a personal narrative of the history of the world is no small feat; we’re using all the tools we have. Both 🧙‍♂️IMAGES and 🧙‍♂️SONGS, historically, have been used to secure memory; here, they buttress each other.

A song, too, adds meaning: it brings in your family or classroom’s humor and way of looking at the world. And a song links together lyrics into a cohesive whole.

I.I.: When should we create this song?

We see two options: make it all at once as you start middle school, or stretch it out a little at a time.

I.I.: I’m no poet.

The English folk tradition has your back. Just write each room’s stanza in common meter — four lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter:

da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
da-da-da-da-da-da

Common meter is ridiculously versatile:

Amazing grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me…

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun…

Just sit right back and you’ll hear the tale
The tale of a fateful trip…

O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain…

I want to be the very best
Like no one ever was…

Any meter that can span devotional hymns to the Pokémon theme song can work for your memory palace too.1 To make all five spots fit into each space, you just need to cram two events into the fourth line.

I.I.: What about rhymes?

In common meter, it’s common typical to have the odd and even lines rhyme: ABAB. But in a pinch, you can just rhyme the even lines: ABCB.

By the end of this, you’ll be able to sing your way through world history! A moment’s work with ChatGPT gives me anchors for the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th, and 15th centuries CE:

He sailed beyond the western foam
She ruled in Aquitaine
He drove his riders ’cross the steppes
Peasants rose, fleets crossed the main.

(Can you guess any of these characters?2)

Of course, you could also decide to write a parody song of an existing song. Just pick something you love to sing aloud, and then Weird Al the crap out of it. Squeeze together some tiny reference to each of your ~100 history stories into your version, in order. (Alessandro and I suspect that an over-the-top epic song might fit this best — think “American Pie”, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Stairway to Heaven”. We also suspect that this is the sort of thing an LLM should be good at helping with… but the frustrated last hour of my workday suggests that’s wrong.)

If you run out of song, you can always add an extra stanza, or continue with a different song entirely.

🧵Memory palace, Practice B: The murder board game

Here, you’re going to turn your memory palace into a sort of “murder board of the mind”.

A murder board, of course, is a way to show connections between disparate pieces of information (usually with colored string). Our game, alas, will not use colored string. (We’re assuming you want to be able to walk through your school/house without being garroted.) You can think of this more as a “murder board of the mind”. What it takes from the crime-solving tool, however, is a conviction that it can be fun to make connections. And in the middle-school years, connection-making is the whole game.

In sum, ask kids to find stories in their memory palace that have something in common. You can ask about geography — which stories take place…

• in a desert?

• on a mountain?

• on the sea?

• on an island?

• in the Southern Hemisphere?

• along a major trade route?

• in a Spanish-speaking country?

Or you can ask about characters — which stories feature…

• a religious leader?

• a teenager?

• a king or queen?

• a president or prime minister?

• a scientist or inventor?

• a political revolutionary?

These, at least, are simple examples. As time goes on, you can make them more complex: which stories take place in a contested borderland? Which stories feature an ambitious outsider, or someone who becomes a symbol larger than themselves?

Imaginary Interlocutor: What’s the educational purpose to this?

Story-memory is a great anchor, but it’s not enough. We want to turn the memory palace from something we think about to a tool we think with… and to do that, we need to prompt kids to search between stories and notice shared traits.

I.I.: Games should be fun. Is this fun?

We think it really could be… but we’re not game designers. Think of the memory palace as a meticulously-designed board that you could play many types of trivia game on. For that, you want to pick some constraints. As Ian Bogost writes in Play Anything:

Play is the operation of structures constrained by limitations…. The limitations make games fun.

For the moment, we’ll leave it to you to imagine what constraints you could add for kids of various ages. We’re imagining constraints in movement (you can only get around, say, by crab-walking, or stumbling around blindfolded) and in time/quality (who can find two events the quickest vs. who can find the best example by the end of three minutes).

The roots are now tangled deep, and the climb is underway! High school will demand something sharper still — look forward to that in the next post.

MS history thread 2: 🧵Stories

The stories that kids will have learned by the end of elementary school will be packed with meaning and emotion… but for all that, they’ll still be rather simple. In middle school we’re going to return to those stories to experience them in a whole new way.

I.I.: How are we going to do that?

If we were lazy, we could just re-read the stories again — kids change a lot over four years, and they’d naturally see new things in the stories. As I quipped in Spiral History°:

Who hasn’t had the experience of re-watching a beloved childhood film (or re-reading a beloved childhood novel) as an adult, only to discover it was totally different than we’d first found it?

But just as the kids grow, our stories can grow, too. We see at least two separate options for how to revisit these events: judge a character, and explore a society.

🧵Stories, Practice A: Judge a character

When you revisit the history stories first heard in elementary school, you can zoom into the main character, and try to figure out what they were really like. What were their virtues? Their vices? What kind of person were they? In the end, should you see them as one of the “good guys”, the “bad guys”, or something else?

I.I.: Goodness, are we going to be so childish as to imagine the world is divided into “heroes and villains”?

This division is worse than “childish” — it’s probably one of the great sources of evil. The goal of this part of the curriculum, in fact, is to overcome it. That, however, is much harder to do than it first might seem: binaries like “good guys vs. bad guys” go deep. We’re going to use it as a framing device specifically so we can challenge it, and help kids see that the past resists easy moral sorting.

I.I.: Oh, so you’re one of those precious postmodern “there are no real heroes” people?

On the contrary — true heroism shines out of many people, and others make themselves factories of moral putrefaction. The only way to appreciate when you find real saints and arch-sinners, though, is to actually move past our knee-jerk reactions and judge people thoughtfully.

I.I.: This feels weird. Is this weird?

This is totally common. So many adolescents go through the steps of

• Person X is my hero

• wait no Person X is a villain

• wait wait the world has defied my categories yet again!

that Hegel was forced to come up with his Dialektik.

Because we’re at risk of being misunderstood, this warrants writing out a full narrativization (see here for a reminder of what that means).

Phase 1: 💥 Orient

Start by re-reading the elementary school 🧙‍♂️SIMPLE STORY. As you hit each cliffhanger, pause and ask whether the kids are seeing the main character as more of a good guy or a bad guy.

Phase 2: ⚠️ Complicate

To judge this person fairly, we need to amass some detailed historical knowledge about them — call it 🦹‍♂️TRIVIA. To do this, we’re going to need to learn a lot about them in a short time.

I.I.: That sounds hard and boring.

Ah, this is where Egan education shines brightest! You can cut right to the Romantic tools. What’s some juicy 🦹‍♂️GOSSIP about them? Some damning (or inspirational) 🦹‍♂️QUOTES? How did they push up against 🦹‍♂️LIMITS as they worked to achieve their goals?

To find these, you can bring in living books,3 and other resources like YouTube videos, documentaries, and podcast episodes. In a pinch, you can just ask an AI to get you started on this. (These are famous characters, after all — a lot has been written about them.) In the later years of middle school, you can also step up your historical game and present kids with 👩‍🔬ORIGINAL SOURCES that talk about the character from different perspectives.

Bit by bit, students are asked to hold more in mind at once — more detail, more contradiction, more unresolved tension.

Phase 3: 🐛 Transform

Kids should make something that brings together what they’ve learned into an argument — a position in an 👩‍🔬IDEA FIGHT — about what this person really was like.

What they make can rotate between characters. Some ideas:

• a formal essay

• a debate between one of the character’s friends, and one of their enemies

• a semi-fictionalized “tell all” confessional from the character themselves

• the script for a drama

• a series of political ads (for or against)

Phase 4: 🪢 Integrate

As always, end by choosing something from the experience to preserve into the future: a card for the memory box, perhaps — or (if you’re composing a song over four years) a couplet for your ballad.

I.I.: I’m worried that this isn’t academic or professional.

There’s time to get to that in high school; what we need to do is get kids hungry to learn it. And trying to get inside the minds of others can be food to an adolescent. As I quoted Kieran Egan in my review of The Educated Mind:

“Early adolescence is commonly a time of intense and vivid emotional life, and also a time of deepest boredom and depression... [We] can give shape to the intermediate curriculum and offer the students a world that is rich, complex, varied, and as intense and vivid as their own emotional lives.”

🧵Stories, Practice B: Explore a society

Other times, instead of zooming into the character, you zoom out to the bigger picture. If judging a character sharpens moral vision, this move widens historical vision.

Now, you re-read the elementary story and treat the main character as a jumping-off point. Swivel the camera towards something else that’s going on — ideally something kids today would find strange. Then ask a simple question of it that’ll help us explore this lost world.

For example, you might have noticed an oddly out-of-place character in the painting of Julius Caesar in the last post:

Who is this guy?

When you re-read the story of Julius Caesar, you might ask that question. The answer comes from a strange detail of the version of the story told by the historian Suetonius. As Caesar stands at the edge of the Rubicon, uncertain whether or not to cross, he sees a beautiful youth, playing a song on a pipe:

A person remarkable for his noble mien… appeared close at hand, sitting and playing upon a pipe. When… a number of soldiers… flocked from their posts to listen to him… he snatched a trumpet from one of them, ran to the river with it, and sounding the advance with a piercing blast, crossed to the other side.

Upon this, Caesar exclaimed, “Let us go whither the omens of the Gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast.”

– The Lives of the Twelve Caesar, Julius Caesar, XXXII

In this telling, Caesar doesn’t decide on his own to change the course of Roman history — he’s just following a boy playing a pipe. What the heck?

This is a question you could pose to the kids. It opens the door to the world of Roman religion, where the world was thick with signs. Lightning, birds, dreams, strange boys playing pipes — many things were taken as omens of the gods. You could spend a few days on questions:

• how commonly did Romans make life-and-death decisions based on signs?

• were priests and oracles important in interpreting signs, or was prophecy more DIY?

• did other ancient societies also see the world like this?

• do we do anything like this now?

This example focuses on ancient religion — but you could pick a detail that leads into politics, economics, food, dress, law, military organization, gender roles, festivals, and really anything in the cultural iceberg:

Insofar as you keep a link to Caesar, the goal of this practice is to use him to explore his world. How did it affect him? How did he affect it?

I.I.: I’m not comfortable focusing so maniacally on these “main characters” of history.

Neither are we, actually! To balance against that, this practice can be an easy opportunity to see the world from the perspective of a “minor” character: a bloodied veteran of Caesar’s legion, say, or a one of the enslaved people who carried his equipment.

Egan writes that adolescents begin to master the tools of 🦹‍♂️CHANGING THE PERSPECTIVE. Indeed, this has become a go-to for novels and movies: Wicked retells The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view; Ender’s Shadow retells Ender’s Game from Bean’s; The Wind Done Gone retells Gone with the Wind from the POV of Scarlett O’Hara’s half-mulatto sister.

Where have we come from? Where are we going?

I.I.: You’re still sticking to stories, I think. History is so much more than this — ideas and processes and

Just wait until the final part of the history curriculum… actually, a word about that.

This progression in students is not accidental — it mirrors the deep history of the discipline itself. I’ve said before that history is, more than any other subject, the glue that binds an Egan education together. What I haven’t said, though, is how it was the spark that lit the fire of Egan education in the first place.

Kieran Egan’s entire paradigm of education began with his insight that all the educational theorists he read were missing something big about how kids learned history. The usual line was that students started by learning a few historical facts, then learned more, and then learned more:

When he observed how students actually seem to learn history, however, he saw something different:

And there was method in this madness: Kids don’t naturally begin with abstractions — they begin with stories. We go from 🧙‍♂️SIMPLE STORIES to 🦹‍♂️COMPLEX NARRATIVES to👩‍🔬ABSTRACTIONS.

To Egan, this seemed to mirror how the discipline of history itself evolved. What was history before it was history? MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️) stories about ancestors. What was history at its inception, in the Greek “Father of History” Herodotus? Complex, ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️), larger-than-life narratives that tried to engage the real world. What did history finally bloom into with Thucydides, the father of “scientific history”? PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) attempts to use abstractions to describe huge processes which otherwise couldn’t fit inside our heads.

If Egan was right, we are not inventing a clever curriculum — we are aligning education with the deep grain of how human understanding actually grows.

© 2026 losttools.org. CC BY 4.0

Last week I posted the outline of what might be the single most ambitious part of our epic twelve-year curriculum — elementary history — and the reaction to it might be described as “crickets chirping, unbothered by the chaos of the world.” And I think I know why. Outside of the few of us who have a bachelor’s degree in history, actually putting this into practice probably feels impossible (or worse).

So in this quick bonus post, I want to share a way I designed to make it trivially easy. Well, two ways.

🧵Thread 1: History memory palace

How can you pick a hundred stories? (Use AI!)

In the last post, I wrote:

After setting up your memory palace, pick ~100 great, true stories from history, read them to your kids, and play inside them.

But which ~100 stories should you pick?

Imaginary Interlocutor: Indeed! How could anyone have the expertise to pick these?

“What is most important” is the fundamental value question. We’re working on an answer we consider judicious and incisive (but is still guaranteed to be attacked by everyone).

But you can get an AI to do a passable job for you! Honestly, I’m surprised at how well the following prompt works for picking stories:

Help me build a “history memory palace” as described at https://www.losttools.org/p/history-in-elementary-school. Right now, give me three options for each of the “spots” in space 6. Make sure the events really happened in the times listed. Skew towards events that have visceral stories of individual humans at the center, the emotional binary of which can be easily grasped by a first-grader.

This’ll give you three options for each; you can ask for more. Then just repeat, repeat, repeat for the other spaces.

I.I.: Dammit, Brandon, I’m a doctor, not a historian! This is still too much power for me to wield. How can you help me?

Last summer I spent ~5 hours populating a list of stories that people could choose from. It’s an imperfect list — our (secret) team is (secretly) working on building a better one. For each spot, it suggests three different stories:

• a “classic” story (typically the most well-known of the bunch)

• an “outsider’s” story (typically one centering someone whom traditional histories might have missed)

• a story of invention & discovery

The document is nearly 40 pages long. Here’s a sample from modern history:

And here’s one from prehistory (which doesn’t give three stories for each spot, but who needs that when you have dinosaurs):

Again, I can’t emphasize enough how imperfect this list is, but if you’re looking for something to rip off someplace to start, this might be helpful! I’ll put a link at the bottom of this post for paid subscribers.

🧵Thread 2: History stories

How can you tell a compelling story? (Use AI!)

The next step, of course, is to actually compose a gripping, kid-friendly story for each of these ~100 events. But how can you do that?

Obviously, if you’d like to do the research for all of this, do! When you want to do a story on, say, Ashoka the Great, third-century ruler of the Maurya Empire, you can read his Wikipedia article, watch a YouTube video, and maybe peruse a book or two (some are for kids!). And then you can put it all together in a story custom-made for your kid.

Or you can have an AI do it. (Reading & putting together words, after all, are what we built LLMs to do in the first place.)

I.I.: I’m aghast! Offended! Storytelling is a high human calling; it shouldn’t be offshored to a machine.

Brother, I’m with you. And for what it’s worth, as our (still secret!) team works on a history curriculum, we’re committing to making it human-written.

But if you want a pretty-good story that you can use with your kids today, dang, an AI is a pretty useful tool. Again, even stupidly simple prompts can get you pretty far. Pasting this into even a free, not-connected-to-an-account ChatGPT window…

Act as a historian. Tell me a story about Ashoka the Great at a pivotal moment in his life.

…got me a response that I’ll declare five times better than anything in my high school history textbook. (I’ll paste its response into this footnote.1)

Of course, you can do better with some prompting. To make it more accurate, you can ask it to begin by listing out historical details from its research. To make it a better storyteller, you can ask it to ground the story in the challenge the character faces, to show us the character’s personality through their choices, and to ground the whole thing in a suitable emotional binary.

And so on, and so on. Last summer I spent some time playing around with this and created a custom GPT into which I poured everything I know about historical storytelling, and as many public-domain history books I could get my hands on. I’ve shared it, and I’ll put the link to it after the subscribers-only break — note that you’ll need a ChatGPT account to use it (but not, I believe, a paid account).

If you type “Ashoka the Great” into it, it’ll give you…

1. the precise spot he should go in your memory palace,

2. where he lived (easy to find on a map),

3. some important art associated with him,

4. a 4-paragraph story that connects to his larger life and the broader historical narrative,

5. hints for how to imagine him physically,

6. a pronunciation guide,

7. philosophical discussion questions,

8. a vivid image to put on your wall, and

9. a bad poem, if that’s your thing.

Just typing in the name “Ashoka the Great” gave me this story2 and the rest of the above.

In sum

For most of human civilization, helping kids fall in love with history required a private library and years of reading. It was beyond the reach of almost any parent, which is why rich households hired aristocratic tutors — learned adults who had already done the reading, and could pass the best stories into children’s minds.

As Erik Hoel has argued, this practice was one of the engines of aristocratic achievement.

For the first time in history, that bottleneck is gone. We have AI!

The educational world is split between

A. people excited this will bring about the golden age of learning, and

B. people who fear it will dehumanize schools.

I’m on the side of both. My hope is that AI can supercharge our engagement with the curriculum — helping every teacher (and homeschooling parent) to speedrun the research so we can enter into vibrant intellectual experiences with our kids.

That is: fewer screens, richer stories, and deeper questions… all made possible by machines who have already done the reading.

Read more

Table of Contents

Part 1: Why history?
Part 2: How’s history done now?
Part 3: A new approach to elementary history

1: Why history?

Our big fat hairy problem

Congratulations! You’re a human in the 21st century — you’ve won the vertebrate lottery!

Now what?

By every biological measure, we’ve succeeded. No other animal has ever lived with more power or comfort. We live to see the majority of our kids survive us. Evolutionarily, this is what winning was supposed to look like. So why don’t we feel like it? As E. O. Wilson put it:

“We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.”

– The Social Conquest of Earth

We worry that none of what we do matters. We retreat into doomerism, suicide, or egoistic pleasure-seeking.

What history can do for us

A fully-humanized history curriculum can help us explore what it can mean to be human. It can help us gain vision for both ourselves and our societies.

I.I.: This is where you unveil to kids the secret meaning of life?

Oh, would that we knew that! We don’t have any one precise answer to “what humans can be”. The question has been answered many times, by people from different times, cultures, psychologies, and life trajectories, sometimes in radically different ways.

What a good history curriculum can do is help us explore those.

I.I.: That sounds like a pretty heavy responsibility for a history curriculum to shoulder.

You’re right. The task of helping students be more human is shared by all the disciplines… but history has a special role to play. As I’ll never tire of citing Susan Wise Bauer:

“History is not a subject; history is the subject.”

– The Well-Trained Mind

History is the glue that binds the bigger meanings of the curriculum together. When kids hear in math class about Eratosthenes’ (successful!) attempt to measure the Earth from the length of a shadow, his story will mean more because they’ll already know stories from Greece in the 3rd century BCE. Ditto with all the origin stories we share — rather than taking place in some undefined “a long time ago…”, kids will be able to place the stories in the bigger story of humanity.

2: How’s history done now?

How progressivists do history

How does Poppy the Progressivist approach history? By asking what’s most relevant to kids’ needs.

I.I.: But how can history even be relevant? It’s definitionally “things that are not happening”.

And in fact it shouldn’t be shocking that, over the last century, educational progressivists have made history just one small feature of social studies.1

But most progressivists still want some history taught. So how can it be relevant?

Poppy might explain how she focuses on skills rather than content. There are far too many details for anyone to ever learn; meanwhile, a skill like “historical thinking” will be useful across your life. How do professional historians read documents? How do they use evidence to argue? How do they connect the present and the past?

How traditionalists do history

Things look very different on the other side. How does Theresa the Traditionalist approach history? By asking what’s most important to developing a historian. And to Theresa, the answer to that is simple —

So what information, secured in a kid’s brain, will best prepare them to understand the most history later?

The answer for this, traditionally, has been names, dates, and facts:

• When did King John sign the Magna Carta? 1215.

• When did Columbus land in the Americas? 1492.

• When did Japan bomb Pearl Harbor? December 7, 1941.

In fact, in some traditionalist classrooms, this seems to be nearly all of what history is.2

And now, back to us

From an Egan perspective, both progressivists and traditionalists have some good insights into what history can be. The only trouble is that, save for the intervention of a gifted teacher, both sorts of history teaching often end up dead. Egan never tired of citing studies showing that in elementary school, social studies was the least-liked subject. And does anyone dispute the emptiness of the classical history curriculum — not in its ideals, but as most people experience it? Traditionalists should appreciate the irony that the greatest argument against their work was done in opera:

We need to make history come alive — to pull together kids’ emotions, hopes, and clear-headed thinking.

Easier said than done, obviously. How can this be pulled off?

3: What history can look like (in elementary school)

History is made up of at least two threads:

• the one BIG PICTURE of everything that’s ever happened

• a zillion different STORIES

Here I’ll unveil what Alessandro and I have been planning for these in elementary school. A warning: these practices are rather extreme. We think it’ll give educational progressivists & educational traditionalists quite a lot to love (or, worst-case scenario, an opportunity to gang up on something they both hate, which would be success of a different sort).

If we pull this off, though, we’ll secure the foundation of a more fully humanized history education than we’ve seen anyone else create.

Thread 1: 🧵History memory palace

We’re going to turn our homes/schools into memory palaces — sprawling collections of events on our walls, chronologically arranged, which will span the entire history of the Universe, and which will allow us to secure (and more deeply understand) everything that we learn.

This’ll take a couple days.

I.I.: Why not just make a timeline?

We’re on record as being big fans of timelines! (See Nested Timelines° for my particularly wonky take on them.) But they have a crucial weakness.

Their strength, of course, is that they externalize information. Because you can see more than you can hold in your head at once, this allows you to be historically brilliant… but only when you’re staring at a timeline.

Their weakness is that they don’t actually help you get the information to stay in your head.

Well, as we said in our very first geography practice, we want to get the world into kids’ heads; for that, we’re going to need something more powerful than a timeline. So we’re starting from a different place — in fact, the very science of place. As I wrote about in that post, location is neurologically special: vertebrates have special parts of our brains devoted to tracking where things are.3

The ancient Greeks figured out how to exploit this. Thus was born the Method of Loci (colloquially called “a memory palace”). In short, you pick a building that you know well, and you use its rooms & details as fixed locations where you deliberately place the things you want to remember.

We’ve written a bit about this before in our pattern Art of Memory°, but if you’d like step-by-step instructions for how to make and use a memory palace, I recommend this page at The Art of Memory.

(Note: this was first inspired by Ed Nevraumont’s post, “How to memorize all the presidents” [link!], which gives the most straightforward explanation of how to create a memory palace that I’ve ever seen. We’re doing this a bit differently, but you might enjoy reading his approach.)

Practice A: Walk a path through your home/school

Chronological order matters, so in order to turn a building into a memory palace, you’re going to need to decide on one official path through it.

My recommendation is to pick a door and start with it. This will be where the Universe begins, so feel free to choose one with some metaphorical heft. (In the Hendrickson household, we’ve started in the garage, whose chill and darkness seem fitting.)

Then choose a direction — left or right. You’re going to follow this direction through your entire home/school. Touch the wall with one hand. Walk a path through your building.

Ideally, choose a path that doesn’t require you to back up. (This can mess with your sense of location.) The path, though, can be as twisted as you care to make it, and in a pinch you can imagine a portal connecting one part of your building with another.

At the end, you might want to exit out a different door.

Practice B: Pick 22 spaces

Now, you’re going to divide your path up into 22 “spaces”.

I.I.: What constitutes a “space”?

A “space” can be more-or-less any wide space of wall. The bigger, the better: a whole room would be ideal, but as most of us don’t have 22 rooms in our homes, we have to get creative. Smaller spaces include:

• a closet

• a shelf

• a piano

• a particularly large window

If you still don’t have enough, you can make some of the outdoor areas “spaces”, too.

These do need to be in areas, though, that everyone has access to. (My teenagers hate it when anyone comes into their rooms uninvited, and if you’re turning a school into a memory palace, you probably want to avoid individual classrooms.)

Practice C: Label the spaces

Each space is going to hold a particular span of history. Go ahead and create a little label, and hang it up near the space.

Space 1: Matter (13.7 billion years ago – ½ billion years ago)

Space 2: Life (538 – 251 million years ago)
Space 3: Life (251 million years ago – 10,000 BCE)

Space 4: Prehistory (9,999 – 5,000 BCE)
Space 5: Prehistory (4,999 – 1,000 BCE)

Space 6: Ancient (999 – 500 BCE)
Space 7: Ancient (499 BCE – 1 BCE)
Space 8: Ancient (1 CE – 499 CE)

Space 9: Medieval (500 – 999 CE)
Space 10: Medieval (1000 – 1499 CE)

Space 11: Early Modern (1500 – 1549)
Space 12: Early Modern (1550 – 1599)
Space 13: Early Modern (1600 – 1649)
Space 14: Early Modern (1650 – 1699)
Space 15: Early Modern (1700 – 1749)

Space 16: Modern (1750 – 1799)
Space 17: Modern (1800 – 1849)
Space 18: Modern (1850 – 1899)
Space 19: Modern (1900 – 1949)
Space 20: Modern (1950 – 1999)
Space 21: Modern (2000 – 2049)
Space 22: Future (2050 – 2099)

I.I.: Do I need to write “BCE/CE”? Is that more historical than “BC/AD”?

Culture-war-adjacent fights about identically-useful-but-superficially-different systems may literally be the death of us. I literally flipped a coin for this; you do you.

Practice D: Add dots

To prepare the way for the second thread — “History stories” — we’re going to put five dots on each space. These can be small stickers, or pieces of tape.

Each dot is going to be where we’ll put one story.

I.I.: Do I really need to use stickers?

Masking tape would work okay. You want to put something there as placeholders for the stories we’re going to tell.

That said, color can be a powerful memory device. We bought these stickers to bedeck our home, and picked a different color for each “meta-story”:

🔴 red: space 1 (the story of matter)
🟠 orange: spaces 2 & 3 (the story of life)
🟡 yellow: spaces 4 & 5 (prehistory)
🟢 green: spaces 6–8 (ancient history)
🔵 blue: spaces 9 & 10 (medieval history)
🟣 purple: spaces 11–16 (early modern history)
🩷 magenta: 17–20 (modern history)
⚪ white: space 22 (the future)

I.I.: Anything else I should know?

For reasons that’ll become clear soon, spaces 2 & 3 should get six dots each. And as we’re currently living in the middle of space 21, make the first two dots magenta, and the last three dots white.

I.I.: Do I need to put these on the literal wall?

To keep the path easy to remember, keep things close to the wall, at least. Don’t make spots in the middle of a room. The floor is a bad choice, and couches aren’t much better. The drapes are okay.

I.I.: What do each of these dots represent?

They’re a span of time. We’re going to tell at least one story that takes place in each of these (see Thread 2 below). How much time they span, precisely, depends on what part of history we’re talking about.

In the history of the “early modern” and “modern” world, each dot holds just one decade. So, for example:

• 🟣 space 11, dot 1: 1500s

• 🟣 space 11, dot 2: 1510s

• 🟣 space 11, dot 3: 1520s

• 🟣 space 11, dot 4: 1530s

• 🟣 space 11, dot 5: 1540s

In the history of the “ancient” and “medieval” world, each dot holds a century. Thus:

• 🔵 space 9, dot 1: the first century

• 🔵 space 9, dot 2: 100 CE

• 🔵 space 9, dot 3: 200s CE

• 🔵 space 9, dot 4: 300s CE

• 🔵 space 9, dot 5: 400s CE

I.I.: Why do the old dots have bigger spans?

Less cool stuff happened then.4 And this expansion gets even more extreme the further back we go. In “prehistory”, every dot holds a millennium:

• 🟡 space 5, dot 1: 4000s BCE

• 🟡 space 5, dot 2: 3000s BCE

• 🟡 space 5, dot 3: 2000s BCE

• 🟡 space 5, dot 4: 1000s BCE

• 🟡 space 5, dot 5: first millennium BCE5

“Prehistory” in this breakdown, by the way, goes back to about 10,000 BCE — around the end of the last Ice Age. Before that are the two “Life” rooms that do stuff before humans evolved; to keep them graspable, we key them to geologic eras:

• 🟠 space 2, dot 1: Cambrian (542–488 million years ago)

• 🟠 space 2, dot 2: Ordovician (488–444 mya)

• 🟠 space 2, dot 3: Silurian (444–416 mya)

• 🟠 space 2, dot 4: Devonian (416–358 mya)

• 🟠 space 2, dot 5: Carboniferous (358–299 mya)

• 🟠 space 2, dot 6: Permian (299–252 mya)

• 🟠 space 3, dot 1: Triassic (252–201 mya)

• 🟠 space 3, dot 2: Jurassic (201–145 mya)

• 🟠 space 3, dot 3: Cretaceous (145–66 mya)

• 🟠 space 3, dot 4: Paleogene (66–23 mya)

• 🟠 space 3, dot 5: Neogene (23–2.6 mya)

• 🟠 space 3, dot 6: Pleistocene (2.6 mya–10,000 BCE)6

And the very first room has a logic all its own:

• 🔴 space 1, dot 1: cosmic soup (0–0.4 million years after the Big Bang)

• 🔴 space 1, dot 2: first stars (0.4–200 million years)

• 🔴 space 1, dot 3: first galaxies (200 million–9 billion years)

• 🔴 space 1, dot 4: solar system (9–10 billion years)

• 🔴 space 1, dot 5: first microbes (10–13.3 billion years)

I.I.: Why are we going back all the way to the Big Bang? I thought this was history, and that’s a humanities thing.

In school, nearly all the time in “history” will be about humans (see “History stories” below). But we need a method to hold everything that we learn in school.

One goal of an Egan education is to help kids explore how we’re all fibers in the great 13.8-billion-year story of Life, the Universe, and Everything. This is the domain of the discipline of Big History, which we’re champions of — something we’ve written about before in our pattern Big History°.

I.I.: How many dots am I going to need?

22 spaces × 5 dots each + 2 extra = 112 dots

(Again, those two extra dots come in those “🟠 Life” spaces — the ones with the dinosaurs.)

I.I.: I understand that one “empties” a memory palace after they use it. Are we going to do that?

Memory palaces are emptied when they’re used for ephemeral information, like getting the groceries. It’s common practice, though, to keep them permanently for things like the elements of the periodic table. We’ll be following that course: our history events are going to keep growing and connecting as school progresses.

Speaking of which, it’s time to turn to the main course, for which the memory palace merely sets the table.

Thread 2: 🧵History stories

After setting up your memory palace, pick ~100 great, true stories from history, read them to our kids, and play inside them. After each, we’re going to put a little picture next to the dot on the wall.

At a rate of one story per week, this’ll take three or four years.

History is big. We have an embarrassment of riches: too many fascinating people, eras, and societies than anyone can learn. We need a trail of bread crumbs through it… and these stories can be that trail.

Practice A: Tell simple stories

I.I.: Why ~100? Weren’t there 122 spots precisely?

We’re going to choose at least one story for each dot in your memory palace — or at least the dots in the last 12,000 years, the ones that include humans. (We’re on the fence as to whether we’ll make stories for, say, squid and dinosaurs and such.)

I.I.: Cool cool. But which ~100 stories?

We’ve been working on a list for months, and in next week’s post, will be inviting your help! But “which history is most important?” is a monstrous question. In some ways, it’s the question of all questions — it can only be decisively answered once one fully understands, well, everything! The best we’ll ever be able to hope for is a Good Enough (TM) scope and sequence.

But right now, I can tell you some that we’ll almost certainly be using:

• 🟡 space 5, spot 3 (2000s BCE): the princess, priestess, and mathematician Enheduanna writes hymns to the goddess of love

• 🟢 space 7, spot 1 (400s BCE): Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans fight and fall at Thermopylae

• 🔵 space 9, spot 1 (500s CE): St. Benedict survives numerous assassination attempts by unruly monks to found the monasteries that will preserve the texts of the ancient world through the Dark Ages

• 🔵 space 10, spot 5 (1400s): Chinese eunuch Zheng He commands a huge fleet of treasure ships across the Indian Ocean

• 🟣 space 11, spot 4 (1530s): the Incan civil war between two brothers weakens the empire and opens the way for the Spanish conquest

This is to say that the stories should be fascinating, important, and serve as an entry into many cultures and sorts of people. (There are more criteria, but we’ll talk about these in the next post.)

How can we make these stories meaningful to everyone?

We narrativize them, of course!

In the geography posts, I treated the narrativizing process as an option to help kids who aren’t naturally geography Ravenclaws. In history, it’s more load-bearing. For each of these, I’ll use a story we’re considering for 🟢 space 7, spot 5: “Caesar and the Rubicon.”

Phase 1: Orient

Behold the hook! How can we create anticipation for the story to come?

One way is to ask a 👩‍🔬BIG QUESTION that pulls kids in:

• what should matter more — following the law, or helping the people you love?

• is it good to be prideful?

• should you ever overthrow your leaders?

A second way to hook kids into the history story is to do a Touching the Art process on a painting about it — say, “Jules-César arrivé au Rubicon” by Gustave Boulanger:

(This isn’t the space to explain the Touching the Art process. Suffice to say right now, it’s the game-changing creation of the brilliant Luc Travers, who I’ve interviewed here, and we’ll be incorporating it into our art curriculum — stay tuned! In the meantime, you can purchase Luc’s book on it.)

It’s not particularly gripping, but this would also be a good moment to point to the location the story is going to take place on a map.

Phase 2: Complicate

Now, actually read the story aloud.

I.I.: That’s it? “Read it”?

There’s reading, and then there’s reading. You’ll want to pull out all the dramatic stops here. Emote. Give the characters different voices. Put your heart into it! (You might also want to sit on the floor, dim the lights, and put on some white noise.)

Also, we recommend making full use of one of the oldest tricks in the book — cliffhangers. Break the story into two or three parts, and read them over a couple days. Milk your kids’ desire to know what happens next. Use the pauses as opportunities to guess what’ll happen next.

Phase 3: Transform

In phase three, we want to make something with our kids. Here, the natural thing is to choose a way to play with the story and make it our own.

In elementary school, kids can 🤸‍♀️ACT OUT the story with their bodies, or pick stuffed animals to 🧙‍♂️ROLE-PLAY the characters. They can pick one crucial moment and 🤸‍♀️DRAW it, or even make a comic book of it. They can treat it as 🦹‍♂️SPECULATIVE FICTION, and by changing one tiny event, imagine how the rest of the story would play out. This is a small sampling — for more, see the pattern Playing inside Stories°.

Playing with the story, however, can also mean playing with its ideas. You can

• Is Caesar a hero, or a villain? How could we find out?

• How bad must a government get before you should risk a life (yours and/or others’) to overthrow it?

• If someone says “I’m doing this for you?” how do you know whether they’re telling the truth — or if they’re just out to help themselves?

(Like the orientation question near the top, these pull from our Philosophy Everywhere° pattern.)

Phase 4: Integrate

In phase four, we want to pick something from the story to make part of ourselves. You can create a memory card to preserve something important about the story:

• what moral you take from the story

• a quote from it (e.g. “the die is cast”)

• a pun or joke (e.g. “what’s stupid about the ‘Jeep Rubicon’?” “you could drive over the real Rubicon in a Chevy Metro!”)

• an ironic summary of the story (e.g. “The Roman Republic thought it could protect itself from a brilliant general with a piece of paper and a foot-deep stream.”)

Practice B: Post a picture

Regardless of what you do, you then want to channel your feelings for the story and draw a simple small picture that you’d like to burn into your brain. Tape it up onto the wall right about the appropriate dot. As time goes on, you’ll fill up your home/school with these images, which will be a great way to remember everything you’ve learned.

The spiral continues

History, done right, doesn’t just teach what happened, but makes us feel that it matters. By the time they leave elementary school, kids can get a sense of how big the past is, and to see that the future is coming.

I.I.: You talk a big game, but these are just simple stories.

Oh, we’re not done. These stories are deliberately simple. They’re designed to stick, because we’re going to return to them, in proper spiral-fashion, in middle and high school. There, the stories will be expanded, complicated, and seen through whole new lenses.

To see all that, stay tuned for our next wireframe. In the meantime, please fill the comments with anything you don’t understand, think we’re missing, or know we can improve on.

You know what’s great about life? Going to visit old friends in far-flung states.

Today (Sunday) I’ll be driving three hours back home to Rochester, Minnesota, from having spent the weekend on a culinary tour of Des Moines, Iowa with a good friend. We’re stuffed.

Wanna chat on the phone for a bit and help me break up my drive?

Sunday, February 1: 1pm–4pm …

Read more

There’s been some excitement online recently about teaching kids to become philosophers.

This is something I think about a lot. I’ve taught philosophy classes, but I also have a habit of turning whatever I’m doing with kids — math, vocabulary, recess1 — into a philosophy seminar. Science is WEIRD occasionally gets criticized for being “too philosophical”.

This is all what you might expect from someone who used to run a program called “Young Philosophers” out of his Seattle-area apartment.

Lately, though, I’ve been getting excited about a new way that kids can have a profound interaction with philosophy… at an earlier age than ever before.

Imaginary Interlocutor: Philosophy is self-pleasuring for eggheads. Why would anyone want to waste kids time with this?

Oh my gosh you’re so wrong! Philosophy done well can make kids morally curious, serious, and intellectually bold (but epistemologically humble). Don’t think of philosophy as a set of content to be learned (though it is some of that), but rather as a disciplined way to engage the world through abstractions.

I.I.: That’s a lot to claim.

Agreed, but because this is a quick little side post, this isn’t the spot to lay out here the big picture of why philosophy is close to the beating heart of education. Feel free to skim through my earlier pattern Philosophy Everywhere°, or wait until Alessandro and I publish our “Philosophy Wireframe” near the end of the year. But since I know some of you would like to take advantage of these while your kids are still young, I thought I’d write down some of these early-age practices now.

But before I give them, I need to nod — bow? — toward Philosophy for Children.

Philosophy for Children (often abbreviated P4C) was founded in the 1970s by Matthew Lipman. Its claim is ambitious: children are capable of genuine philosophical thought far earlier than we usually assume. The basic method (let’s call it “OG P4C”) looks a lot like a seminar: kids sit in a circle, a teacher reads an age-appropriate story, and then the class raises big questions that come out of the story — questions about truth, fairness, identity, meaning, and so on.

I.I.: Okay, that actually sounds impressive.

When it works, it really is! The trouble is that too often, it doesn’t work. Sometimes it fails gracefully (chit-chat about zombies, in my experience); sometimes it fails ungracefully (“good” kids aping what they think the adult wants, and the rest concluding that philosophy is bunk).

I’m obviously not the first person to make these critiques. The P4C community is a haven of smart, idealistic people who don’t shirk from the need to be self-critical. And some of the newer techniques that they’ve come up with help make philosophical conversations easier to do with kids. Alessandro and I think we can go even further.

A lot of P4C still ports in the model of a college seminar, and assumes traits that not all kids have. But these traits can be cultivated. Using Egan’s methods, we can teach these skills directly, and help practice them as habits.

And in fact, one group has been doing exactly this for years — the Philosophy with Children movement. Founded by Carlo Maria Cirino, it’s now (miracle of miracles!) headed by one Alessandro Gelmi… who’s been sharing these practices with me.

Taking words seriously

All of these practices center on taking words seriously. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it:

Philosophers use language in very interesting ways; this is, in fact, one of their powers. They ask what a word really means, and define terms precisely. They treat words as important, because they think they’re the best bricks we have in building a model of the world inside our heads. Words, used carefully, can get us to truths we couldn’t have grasped with our bodies.

P4C requires that kids…

• have a wide working vocabulary

• can listen attentively to the specific words someone else is saying

• can notice what a particular word is doing in a sentence

While some kids — call them “philosophy Ravenclaws” — show an early bent toward these traits, no kid is born with this stuff. How can we help nearly all kids love to take words seriously?

The same as we do anything: use the tools. In this case, simple 🧙‍♂️GAMES that can be played with kids as young as three. If we succeed at this, then our kids will be hungry for the “real philosophy” that begins in the early grades (where we’ll be using P4C).

So — what are these games? Alessandro has shared three of them with me…

Read more

Table of Contents

Previously, in geography:

Part 1: Why geography?
Part 2: How’s geography done now?
Part 3: What geography can look like in grade school

And now, the thrilling conclusion…

Part 4: Geography in middle school
Part 5: Geography in high school
Part 6: Geography in preschool/kindergarten

In our last wireframe, I suggested that a rich elementary geography curriculum might be seen as a rope of three threads:

• Maps

• Marvels

• Navigation

As kids get older, these threads continue, but evolve.

4: Geography in middle school

In these four years, we want to master the techniques to tame our alien, exotic, and fascinating reality. Starting especially in 5th grade, we can take full advantage of the tools of ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️) understanding.

I.I.: Can I have a little review on these “Ways of Understanding”?

We’re building our elementary curriculums on Kieran Egan’s conception of MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️) understanding. In my review of The Educated Mind, I suggested that the simplest way to understand the tools of Mythic understanding is “the things that kids are already good at” — things like 🧙‍♂️STORIES, 🧙‍♂️JOKES, 🧙‍♂️MENTAL IMAGES, 🧙‍♂️ROLE-PLAYING, 🧙‍♂️REVERIE, 🧙‍♂️RHYTHM, 🧙‍♂️METAPHORS, and 🧙‍♂️EMOTIONAL BINARIES.

We never really put away those tools, but as we grow into adolescence, we’re often drawn to new tools — like 🦹‍♂️IDEALISM, 🦹‍♂️EXTREMES, 🦹‍♂️HEROES, 🦹‍♂️GOSSIP, and 🦹‍♂️HOBBIES/COLLECTIONS. In fact, as I pointed out in the review, we often become obsessed with these. These are the tools of ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️) understanding, and we can use them to power this quest to get the world into kids’ heads.

MS Geography Thread 1: Maps

Practice A: Make a big, personal map of the world

Through these four years, our kids have one goal: be able to draw, from scratch, a map of the world.

Make this a big deal.

I.I.: What’s the point of drawing a map when professional ones already exist?

Drawing is a way to see what’s inside your own head… and we want to fit so much into kids’ heads.

The drawing event itself should be ritualized, held on a special day at the end of each year (grades 5, 6, 7, and 8), and given a couple hours at least. The drawings should be as accurate and as beautiful as the kids are able to make them, and show off their own (increasingly personal!) understandings of the world.

Practice B: Regularly draw maps

In elementary school, we matched names to the shapes on a map. But the shapes themselves are important; to get them in our heads, we need to practice drawing them. So: practice for the year-end draw-the-whole-world events by regularly learning how to draw different parts of the world.

I.I.: This sounds hard! How do you recommend doing it?

Thank goodness for the nerdiness of the homeschooling community! There are a few books that have already tackled this problem. My favorite is Ellen Johnston’s Mapping the World with Art, which makes ample use of 🧙‍♂️METAPHORS to remember the shapes:

I.I.: How long would it take to go through this?

The book has 88 pages of instructions. Assuming a 30-week school year —

• 88 pages ÷ 4 pages a day = 22 weeks ≈ 1 year

• 88 pages ÷ 1 page a day = 88 weeks ≈ 3 years

The book’s downside is that it doesn’t address drawing the whole world until the end; we, however, want to start with it — the whole gives meaning to the parts! Here, we can lean on a method that Leigh Bortins advocates in The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education.1 In short: divide a paper into four quadrants (the equator and the prime meridian), and then draw blobs:

I.I.: That seems hard.

Bortins wisely emphasizes the blob part. Start with crudely-drawn ovals — your first task is just to get the right number of continent-thingies in their right places. (North America in the top-left, Asia in the top-right, Australia in the bottom-right, and everything else straddling the lines.) After that, it’s just fine-tuning! (Fun fact: there’s a profound error in the map above, bespeaking a fundamental misunderstanding of all the continents. Try to guess it in the comments.)

I.I.: Do you just expect kids to get better through repetition?

No, of course not. To get better quickly, we need a component of deliberate practice — immediate feedback:

1. draw a place

2. compare it with a professional map

3. make corrections with colored pencils

Step 4 (not shown here) is to immediately draw the place again, and see if you got better. (You’ll also benefit from drawing all these maps in a special notebook, which’ll allow you to quickly see your progress over time.)

Practice C: Learn all the major countries, rivers, deserts, seas…

In elementary school, we learned a bunch of places in higgledy-piggledy through “Marvels”. Now, we’ll memorize them systematically: the world’s biggest deserts, the largest mountain ranges, the longest rivers, all the ~195 countries, and so forth.

I.I.: Gosh, why suck all the fun out of things?

Actually, the urge to make complete collections is a fairly common feature of adolescents. (Egan notes that it’s so obvious to people outside of education that it’s long been commercialized by any number of trading card companies. It’s also enshrined in the Pokémon song: gotta catch ‘em all!)

I.I.: What order should these be learned in?

At some point, we’ll find a crack curriculum maker to work with and devise a sage path through this madness. In the meantime, you can DIY this by compromising and putting the most important stuff first.

Here’s a stab at it:

1. 21 major cities

2. 30 most populous countries

3. Major physical features

4. G20 member countries

I.I.: Where do those links take me?

To an enchanted fragment of the pre-internet world called “Seterra”.

Seterra is a geography quiz app. It was created in Sweden by the programmer Marianne Wartoft as a personal project to make a simple, fun way to learn world maps and flags. Over the decades it grew from floppy disks into a globally-used website with customizable exercises used by millions of users around the world. It was sold to GeoGuessr a few years ago.

It’s so, so good.

I.I.: Any tips on how to use Seterra?

Since it was purchased by GeoGuessr, Seterra’s free web version is now choked with ads. It’s definitely worth paying a few bucks to get a subscription. Or, better yet, download the iPad or Android versions: it’s much more fun to use your fingers, and they’re either cheap or free.

If anyone is interested in advanced tips for using Seterra better, lemme know in the comments; I’ll share some there, or spend a bit of time making a special paid-subscribers-only post about it.

National geography should be brought into this. Here’s a stab at America’s:

1. U.S. major cities

2. 15 most populous states

3. U.S. 50 states (cartoon version)

I.I.: All of this is easier said than done. How do you propose to make this easy?

Before you practice where a place is, it’s nice to know that it is. Singing some 🧙‍♂️SONGS — and really one song in particular — can help kids preview the places, and learn to pronounce them. My fellow English-speaking 80’s kids probably know about “Yakko’s World”:

…but did you know there’s a cottage industry of YouTube videos that update it, and fix its problems? (For instance, “Caribbean” was never a country. YouTube is your friend in finding these; here’s a good 2025 version to start with.)

You could, of course, try to memorize the song, but the low-hanging fruit is

1. just being able to sing along to it while looking at the lyrics, and

2. being able to point to the countries on a map at the same time.

(It should be noted, too, that Yakko’s scouse-speaking brother Wakko has a parallel song for the 50 U.S. states.)

Practice D: Collect strange maps

Put up the oddest maps you can find on your walls.

As we’ll be discussing below, every map lies. The solution is to have more maps: different projections, different orientations, different data… you name it.

A note on ages

In the years to come, we want to be starting whole schools that follow these wireframes, and for that, we need some order for which practices start when. If you're doing these yourself, feel free to ignore this, and do what works best for your kids!

MS Geography Thread 2: Marvels

In elementary school, we let our choice of marvels be idiosyncratic. Now, we’re going to use marvels to help us achieve a more systematic grasp of the place of the world, and of the limits of Earth itself.

Practice A: One marvel for each hard-to-remember place

When something in Seterra just isn’t sticking in your head, find a marvel about it, and make a memory card for that. Watch as the hardest places to memorize become the easiest. You can use these for hard-to-remember nations, capitals, mountain ranges, rivers, deserts, and so on.

A great place to find these are the Atlas Obscura books I waxed eloquent on in the last wireframe.

Practice B: A marvel for each extreme

Create a sort of Guinness Book of World Records for geography, done as memory cards.

Egan writes that, as kids grow up, their sense of the world sharpens, and moves from fantasy to reality. We start off hearing fables about mountains so tall they pierce the clouds… but do such mountains really exist? Teens naturally are drawn to 🦹‍♂️EXTREMES; this helps them get a grasp of the nature of reality.

Taking this seriously, we can make memory cards for some very simple questions:

• what’s the hottest place in the world?

• what’s the coldest?

• what’s the highest mountain peak?

• what’s the deepest ocean trench?

• which place is the windiest?

• which place is the calmest?

• what’s the densest city?

• what’s the emptiest region?

• what’s the most massive volcano?

• which country has the most murders, and which has the least?

• which major city is the most dangerous, and which is the safest?

• which nation is the richest, and which is the poorest?

• which nations are moving the most quickly from the one to the other?

How many of those do you feel like you probably know the answer to — and which would you most like to know? (Feel free to do the hive-mind thing in the comments.)

MS Geography Thread 3: Navigation

Practice A: Globe directions

In elementary school, we internalized the cardinal directions. The only trouble is that east and west, in fact, aren’t directions! So in middle school, start using the actual directions to the places you’re talking about. This is hard, because your brain is a flat-Earther.

I.I.: Come again?

We all “know” the Earth is round. But we use flat maps so often that they warp our sense of where things are.

Say you live in Seattle, face directly east, and fire a gun. Pretend it’s a very powerful gun — the bullet flies so fast it doesn’t fall to the ground but keeps going around it.2 Pretend, too, that the bullet miraculously doesn’t hit any U.S. people or buildings. What’s the next country it’ll fly over?

The answer is so unexpected that I’ll put the link to it at the end of this post so you’re not tempted to ruin it too hastily. But here’s a simpler puzzle as a hint: If you live in Seattle, is Helsinki to the east or to the west?

The correct answer is that it’s nearly straight north:

Our minds aren’t used to imagining living on a globe! And the more that one becomes a “map-head” (to use the charming phrase by Ken Jennings in his excellent book of that name), the more one risks ironing a wrong view of the world into our brains.

I.I.: How do we do that?

You could do a lot of math… or you could just stretch a piece of thread between two points on a globe (your town and the place you’re talking about), and eyeball it.

Practice B: Guess the distance

In elementary school, we focused on direction, but ignored distance. So: when you’re learning a marvel (be it the Taj Mahal or your local ice cream store), guess how far it is away.

This is a way to develop the power of the Philosophic tool 👩‍🔬QUANTIFYING EVERYTHING.3 At first, though, you might build that up by using units based on🤸‍♀️MOVEMENT. Ask how long might it take you to run, drive, or fly to the place? Then you can compute back to distances:

• you run about 6 mph | 10 kph

• you drive about 60 mph | 100 kph

• you fly about 600 mph | 1,000 kph

So a two-hour run would mean ~12 miles away, and so on.

Practice C: Moon o’clock

In elementary school, we learned to tell time by staring directly at the Sun; did you know that you can do the same thing with the Moon?

I raised this possibility in the pattern Track the Sky°, though I didn’t have the time to flesh it out there. I don’t here either, though I can give some hints:

• where is the Moon in the sky? (it rises in the east and sets in the west)

• which part of the Moon is lit up?

With these, you can figure out where the Sun is, and the Sun’s location is how we set our hours. (If you’d like to understand more, watch the YouTube video I Learned to Tell Time by the Moon. Here’s Why It Was Hard.)

Practice D: Orienteering

In elementary school, we learned to tell north and south by reading nature’s signs. The more systematized sequel to this might be geocaching, and the thrill-seeking sequel to that might be orienteering.

Geocaching is treasure-hunting. You’re provided a set of GPS coordinates at which a box sits, and you have to figure out a route to it.

Orienteering is a Scandinavian invention that combines equal parts of jogging, map-reading, and not panicking. It developed in the late 1800s as a way to train Swedish soldiers; it’s since escaped into public life, and for the last century has been used in schools around Europe.

Look for more on these when we give the wireframe for our physical education curriculum. (If you have any experiences in either geocaching or orienteering, feel free to share them in the comments.)

5: Geography in high school

In high school, we want to help students knit together a detailed, coherent, realistic model of the world. As we go through these four years, we can lean increasingly on the tools of PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) understanding.

I.I.: Remind me, once again, what “Philosophic” understanding looks like.

In my book review, I suggested a heuristic for calling to mind the tools of Philosophic understanding: ask what motivates mad scientists?

They ask 👩‍🔬BIG QUESTIONS, float 👩‍🔬CRAZY IDEAS, and build 👩‍🔬GENERAL SCHEMES which they use to seek 👩‍🔬CERTAINTY and find 👩‍🔬THEIR PLACE IN THE COSMOS. Then they point out 👩‍🔬ANOMALIES in each other’s schemes, get into 👩‍🔬IDEA FIGHTS. To win, they tend to 👩‍🔬QUANTIFY EVERYTHING.

These are the tools of PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) understanding, and they’re what fuels modern intellectual life.4

A note on high school:

If we're doing our job, these practices will seem too good to be true.

That's because, with the exception of some elite academic high schools, the things we're suggesting can't be done in most schools, because the students aren't ready for them.

In an important way, few contemporary students are actually "students", at least in the original sense of that word, which was meant to connote "zeal" and "pressing forward" to understand something. (This is why I tend to avoid the word when describing people in elementary and middle school.)

But if we pull off our middle school curriculum —— if we regularly help kids become "map heads" —— we think they'll not just be able to do the following practices, but be hungry to do them.

HS Geography Thread 1: Maps

Practice A: Debates in cartography

So… what do professional map-makers get into fights about?

I.I.: I actually imagine them as fairly dull people.

If you counterfeit a lanyard and pop into a cartography convention, you might be surprised.

• even if we all hate the name “Gulf of America”,5 is there actually a principled reason to prefer one name over another?

• how should the ownership of a place like Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan, be shown on a map?

• is the Mercator projection racist?

• is there a north-hemisphere bias to putting the North Pole on “top”? Should half of all maps be drawn with the Arctic on the bottom?

Here, I’m limiting myself to fights over maps themselves — I’ll save some of the questions of geography more broadly for our History wireframes.

Practice B: The math of maps

Having become map geeks, with strong opinions on different projections, we’ll now dip our toes in the water of understanding how different projections actually work.

I.I.: Do you mean actually crunching the numbers?

What an aspiration! With a gifted teacher, perhaps. But (as professional mathematicians love to remind us) math needn’t always involve numbers. A handful of diagrams can illustrate a big idea of cartography quite succinctly: all maps lie.

There is no neutral projection of a globe onto a flat plane; in order to do it, you have to distort something profound. There’s no getting around this: it formally falls out of Carl Friedrich Gauss’s “Remarkable Theorem” of 1827. The only choice we have is what distortions we want to live with… an idea that actually peeks into IRONIC (😏) understanding.

HS Geography Thread 2: Marvels

Practice A: Shading maps

In middle school, we focused on shiny, bright specifics, and incidentally learned a lot about different countries. Now, our attention turns to systematizing that knowledge into building 👩‍🔬GENERAL SCHEMES.

1. Pick an interesting quantity that varies by location — say, for example,

• population density

• crime

• average temperature

• infant mortality

• wealth

• most common religion

• age

…and with a colored pencil, shade in how you think it varies.

2. Check a professional map.

3. In a different color, shade over your first draft with the real amounts.

Cartographers call these “heat maps” or “density maps”.6 This is an utterly simple practice, but out of it can come major intellectual growth, because it corrects our internal model of the world.

Practice B: Correlations

On a map, shade two quantities (each in a different color), and observe how they interact.

How does population density overlap with crime? How does wealth overlap with CO2 emissions? How does the birth rate overlap with literacy?

Again, do a 1–2–3. Here:

1. Shade in both guesses.

2. Consult professional maps of each.

3. Reflect, in writing and conversation, about where your guess was right, where it was wrong, and what might actually be driving the correlations you see.

Practice C: Where in the World?

Give kids a photo of some random spot in the world. Only using details in the photo, how close can they get to figuring out where the photo was taken?

This is such a great idea that you see it all over the place. The political writer runs a weekly “View from Your Window” contest with reader-submitted entries which are really hard.

GeoGuessr (the company that purchased Seterra) runs a slick gamified version, with different levels of difficulty. Becoming great at any of these requires having a truly insane amount of knowledge of the world (to get a sense of how much, check out Scott Alexander’s post on training an AI to do this).

HS Geography Thread 3: Navigation

Practice A: Plan a route

The ultimate reason to know the map of the world is to be able to do things in it. So, pick a place, and figure out how you might get there. First create a model in your mind, then check the internet to see how correct you were. Kick it up a notch by estimating time and cost. Kick it up again by min-maxing different variables.

For example: can you tell me how you could get to Niagara Falls?

You first guess at an answer. This requires reflecting on your model of the world. (“I could fly there, but that would first require driving to the airport. Then I’d need to rent a car at one of the NYC airports and drive to the falls… wait, that’s on the US/Canada border. There’s gotta be a big Canadian city that’s closer to it. Which city might that be…?”) You could then check your guess against reality by doing some Googling.

At a more advanced stage, you could then estimate how long the trip might take. (“It takes me only 20 minutes to drive to my small local airfield, but do they have flights that go to NYC? If not, it’s 90 minutes to the big airport. I think a plane flies at about 600 mph, and I think Niagara Falls is about 600 miles away, so the flight itself would only take about an hour. But then I’d need to drive that rental car the rest of the way…”)

Then estimate the costs. (“A 20 minute Lyft might just be… ten bucks? How much is a plane ticket to NYC? And then how much would the other car ride cost?”)

At a very advanced stage, you can try to min-max different values by playing with some odd situations:

• what if I have a million dollars, and really want to get there fast?

• what if I only have a hundred bucks, but a month?

• what if I’m trying to do this with the smallest carbon footprint, but have all year?7

As a fun twist, you can do this based on certain values:

• what if I care most about speed, and money were no object?

• what if I’m trying to save as much money as I can, and have forever to get there?

• what if I’m trying to do this with the smallest carbon footprint — would it be better to ride a horse, or take a boat?

For locations, you can start with the “Marvels” you’ve already learned about… but could also do it for random latitudes & longitudes, and even random historical periods.

Practice B: Astronomical navigation

Learn to see where you are on Earth by looking at the night sky.

In elementary and middle school, we learned to estimate time with the Sun and Moon, but if you know the time and date, you can also figure out where you are on the Earth — or at least your latitude. It’s most accurate to do this with the stars.

Doing this puts students in the imaginative role of early explorers. It’s a way to grasp the roots of knowledge.

Practice C: How fast are you going?

Practice seeing how fast you’re going when you’re sitting down.

It doesn’t look like you’re moving, but motion is relative: the Earth is (of course) spinning on its axis, which means you’re moving around the Earth. Anyone at the equator is going ~1,000 mph, but what speed are you going at your latitude?

At the same time, the Earth is also falling around the Sun at nearly 70,000 mph. In the daytime, do those speeds add together, or subtract from each other?

And at the same time, the Sun is also falling around the Milky Way at about 500,000 mph. How does that interact with the other speeds?

This requires students to hold a 3D model of our local branch of the Universe in their heads. (I can imagine doing this as a race to see who can go the farthest in one second: the winner will be whoever can most accurately hold these vectors in their head, and relate them to the room.)

5: Geography in preschool/kindergarten

I.I.: Seems odd to save this for last!

We want to lay out everything that we’ll be reaching for in our geography curriculum (and the others to follow) before sketching a sense of how we might pave the way before elementary school. Without that, we risk falling into “cute things for kids to do”.

While Alessandro and I have both taught young kids before, neither of us is a trained preschool or kindergarten teacher, so our thoughts here are incomplete: we’d love your ideas in the comments.

To pave the way for “Maps” (Thread 1), we think it a great idea to bedeck your home in maps! You can find ones that focus on topics your particular kids find interesting — animals, say, or dinosaurs. When someone mentions another part of the world, you might want to raise your eyebrows, say “I wonder where that might be…” and walk over to the map. Every once in a while, turn one of the maps on your wall upside down, and ask if that makes it wrong. And be on the lookout for buying the biggest, spinniest globe you can find on your local Craigslist.

To pave the way for “Marvels” (Thread 2), go to marvelous places! When you’re there, invest time in 🧙‍♂️REVERIE and commune with something special. (We’ll have much more to say about this in our “Science” wireframe.)

To pave the way for “Navigation” (Thread 3), look for stories and movies of explorers. Pretend you’re a pirate, and practice your swashbuckling on the bed. Create a treasure hunt: stuff an old kitchen spoon in the bushes, and write a few clues that lead to it. And this goes without saying, but get out and explore.

Thus ends geography

Last time, I wrote:

Geography, done right, teaches people not just where things are, but that the world is real, and worth knowing.

I think we can improve on that now.

Geography, done right, is an antidote to drift. It saves us from thinking of the world as an abstract idea-space mediated by screens; it’s a single real object with shape, weight, and distances. Adults who have drawn the world, sung about it, and navigated it don’t float so easily into the fantasies the infest the 21st century. This is what we mean by “making reality take root”: geography needn’t sit on the surface of the mind as mere facts. It can grow deeply, and help everything that students learn matter.

If this way of teaching geography feels like it is itself worth rooting in the world, you’re invited to help it grow.

If you’d like to, you could share this with one particular person who might appreciate these ideas (a social studies teacher? a homeschooler? just a geeky parent?). Or you could post this to a group of such weirdos (but, um, don’t lead with that). And if you know of any podcasters or journalists who’d be interested in this approach, that’s a powerful way to get more people working with these ideas.

Also, you can write a comment with any ideas or questions you have:

• are you less than 100% sure you know what something in here means?

• do you feel like we’re missing something?

• does something seem weird or off?

The answer to the bullet puzzle:

The answer can be found on the Twitter thread by that I adapted the puzzle from; h/t to Scott Alexander.

© 2026 losttools.org. CC BY 4.0

I gushed about how much I love the Atlas Obscura books in this week’s Geography Wireframe post, and mentioned the incredibly minor issue that, for our purpose of finding particular “marvels” for particular countries (say, if you need a marvel for Thailand), the books can be a little hard to navigate.

I’ve made a fix for this, but it goes so far beyond “geographically nerdy” that it edges on actually being geographically dorky. So I’m making this a dorks subscribers-only post.

Here we go:

Read more

Table of Contents

Part 1: Why geography?
Part 2: How’s geography done now?
Part 3: What geography can look like

1: Why geography?

Our big fat hairy problem

Most people know absurdly little about the rest of the world.

Survey after survey, for example, finds that most Americans can’t locate on a map the countries that their nation is currently at war with. But factoids like this undersell the depth of our problem. I worked with a high school student once who didn’t know about the Pacific Ocean. He had gone to “good” schools — some of the best-rated ones in the Seattle suburbs. He was smart and curious — when I found this out, we had just finished a discussion about the (underrated) role Rosalind Franklin played in discovering that DNA was the genetic code. He was even rich — his family owned two homes, one of which was on the shore of Puget Sound!

But when I mentioned the Pacific Ocean, he politely asked what I was talking about. When I pulled up Google Maps and zoomed out from our location, his eyes went wide, and he looked embarrassed. He lived on Earth’s single largest geographical feature, and he didn’t know about it. (“What did you think was between here and China?” I asked him. He answered sheepishly: “You know, I never thought about that.”)

He’s not even a statistical fluke — the idea for the TV show Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? was sparked when producer Howard Blumenthal saw a survey reporting that 1 in 4 Americans couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean on a map.

What geography can do for us

We’re starting from a very low point, and almost anything we do can improve this. But we don’t want to just pull down low-hanging fruit. The true purpose of geography isn’t merely to locate places on a map — it’s to help us connect everything that kids learn.

Too often in schools, knowledge appears as facts fallen from heaven (or ginned up in a dark textbook factory). But knowledge comes from people, and people come from places. Literature, for example, comes from minds of oddballs who were shaped by their oddball cultures which were shaped by their oddball environments. The same is true of science, math, sports, and everything else.

There are many ways to connect information, and in the wireframes to come, we’ll be pursuing all of them! But our location-sense is cognitively privileged. Grid cells, tucked just behind the eyes, map the structure of whatever space you’re in, while place cells in the hippocampus fire to mark your current location.

Helping kids learn a lot of geography is the first step toward rehumanizing the entire curriculum.

2: How’s geography done now?

As the first post in our 2026 series of “wireframes”, this is a good moment to show how we’re taking a more radical approach to education than you might guess.

The story of 20th and 21st century education has been the war between educational progressivists and educational traditionalists. And in this war, we’re taking a new, third side. If we do this right, this year we’ll be sketching out a new hope for schooling that incorporates some of the strengths of each while avoiding both their weaknesses and the disasters that come when folk try to combine them.

Imaginary Interlocutor: Progressivism, traditionalism — are we talking politics?

We are not. While both educational progressivism and political progressivism were once joined at the hip more than a century ago (see: John Dewey), the movements have each drifted a lot, and what once might have seemed like contradictions (Communist revolutionaries pushing classical education, Christian über-traditionalists practicing unschooling) are much more common than you’d think.

Everyone defines educational progressivism and educational traditionalism (which I’ll hereafter often shorten to “progressivism” and “traditionalism”) differently, which is fair. Both are blurry movements, containing strange bedfellows. But to talk about these, we’ll need to distill an essence of each. For the moment, we’ll say…

• the battle-cry of educational progressivism is to set kids free to follow their passions!

• the battle-cry of educational traditionalism is to equip kids with the best ideas anyone’s ever thought or said!

From these everything else flows. Are students explorers (progressivism) or apprentices (traditionalism)? Should we focus on a student’s whole life, or their intellectual formation? Is a teacher a guide, or a content expert? Do we start from a kid’s interests, or from a summary of the academic content? Do we want practice to be experienced in natural contexts, or done in drills?

I.I.: This seems familiar.

It should be! This, in fact, is the one educational war that all other debates in education are mere skirmishes in. Whole philosophies of education can be seen as sitting on one side of the great divide: unschooling, world-schooling, Reggio Emilia, and project-based studies all fall on the “progressivist” side, while classical schooling, mastery learning, and the Great Books approach fall on the “traditionalist” side.

They show up in my book review, too, if in disguise. In the “SAD triangle”, progressivists are the people who have their home in the “development” corner and traditionalists are the folk who live in the “academic” corner. (They both send their scouts down into the “socialization” corner, though they have different opinions on what this should mean.)

We’re going to be talking about these approaches to education a lot, so it makes sense to personify them. Meet Poppy the Progressivist, and Theresa the Traditionalist!

To see how odd our proposal for geography is, it makes sense to quickly look at how they each do it.

How progressivists do geography

If you asked Poppy the Progressivist how she teaches geography, she might respond by saying that it’s an essential part of social studies. (“Social studies” itself is a subject created by early progressivists to give meaning to history and geography.) As such, kids should learn it as part of the “expanding horizons” model:

Kids, she might say, can best understand what they themselves have touched, tasted, smelled, heard, and seen. As such, it makes sense to build on this, beginning in the early years with the self, and gradually working outwards:

• kindergarten: themselves

• grade 1: their families

• grade 2: their neighborhood

• grade 3: their city

• grade 4: their state

• grade 5: their country

• grade 6: the contemporary world

In the future, we’ll be exploring things that progressivists get brilliantly right… but this isn’t one of them. The “expanding horizons” model diminished learning about the rest of the world precisely in the grades when it’s easiest! It digs a hole that most students never climb out of: by the time they get to middle and high school, most of their teachers don’t want to be doing anything as rudimentary as memorizing maps, so their classes jump to “higher level” understandings… with students who don’t know that there’s such a thing as the Pacific Ocean.

This is not a recipe for a deep, connected understanding of the world. When progressivist classrooms work, they cultivate curiosity, collaboration, and moral seriousness — but without a shared map of the world, those virtues often float unmoored. Expanding horizons is the original sin of 20th century education. It began as an attempt to honor children’s lived worlds… and ended by quietly erasing the rest of the planet.

How traditionalists do geography

In response to this, modern-day traditionalists present an approach to geography that, on the surface, seems like a solution: they have students

• memorize names of countries and capitals, and

• label maps.

Obviously, this is better than holding off on geography. But we should be clear that this isn’t the educational revolution we’re working toward. The goal of geography isn’t to be able to write names on a map — this makes a weirdly literal version of the old mistake of “mistaking the map for the territory”!

Kieran Egan put this mistake memorably:

We want living knowledge. Any geography curriculum worthy of our kids should expand their sense of what reality is. It should offer glimpses into other possible ways of life. It should help them fall in love with the world!

So… how can we do that?

3: What geography can look like (in elementary school)

“Geography” is a rope made up of multiple threads:

• Maps

• Marvels

• Navigation

Each of these threads will continue through elementary school, middle school, and high school, evolving as it goes forward. Today, I’ll unveil our thoughts on what these can look like in elementary school. In the next wireframe post, I’ll show off what these can become in middle and high school (and also sketch out some ideas for preschool and kindergarten).

For each of these threads, we’ll give at least one practice — an intellectually rich, emotionally meaningful activity you can engage in with your kids, either as a parent, teacher, or both.

Thread 1: Maps

In first grade, quickly become familiar with the biggest features of the world, so they can put everything else they learn into the full context.

A note on grade levels

To plan to launch actual schools, we need to be specific, but if you're a parent or classroom teacher, adapt these however you'd like. If your kids are starting geography in second grade or fifth grade or high school, they still might want to start here. If they're three years old and super into maps, sure, heck, go for it! If you're wanting to give yourself the geography education you've always dreamed of, knock yourself out.

Assume that every grade level recommendation is like this.

Practice A: Name the big things

Begin with the continents, then move to the oceans. (If you want to go beyond that, and don’t want to move onto the next practice, feel free to linger here and add on the major rivers and mountain ranges.)

You might want to proceed at a rate of adding one place per day, of course reviewing the ones you’ve learned before. Very quickly, and with little work, you’ll get the biggest pieces of the world into your heads.

How can we make “Maps” meaningful to everyone?

Narrativize the practice, of course!

A note on "narrativizing"

If your kids are Ravenclaws for geography — that is, if they’re the sorts of weirdos born with a penchant for flipping through old copies of National Geographic — then the above might be enough! But if they’re not, then you might want some more help. (This is especially true if you’re a classroom teacher.)

This is where Alessandro’s genius comes in. He’s added something to the standard repertoire of Egan tools: how to narrativize everything. Stories are, of course, the most powerful tool we have in communicating with other humans. When we say “narrativize”, though, we don’t necessarily mean to turn something into a literal story. Instead (following Egan) we mean to apply some of the deeper aspects of how stories work. 

(This, by the way, is what every professional communicator does when they need to communicate some non-story thing, be they a documentary filmmaker, a marketer, or a YouTuber.)

Kieran Egan looked at stories and saw what he called MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️) tools — 🧙‍♂️EMOTIONAL BINARIES, 🧙‍♂️METAPHORS, 🧙‍♂️VIVID MENTAL IMAGES, and more. Alessandro saw something else: that how a good story progresses is crucial, too. Nearly all good stories follow a certain pattern. Exactly what this pattern is has been described differently by people as diverse as Aristotle, the novel editor Shawn Coyne, and the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. Alessandro drew on the work of Egan’s longtime collaborator Mark Fettes, who was himself drawing from Gregory Cajete, the Native American scholar of religion and philosophy. 

Cajete observed that Indigenous learning often followed four phases: orientation, complication, transformation, and integration. Fettes observed that these look quite a lot like the beats of a story:

1. We begin with the orientation, where we experience something that pulls us in, calling us toward something that matters and asks for our attention and commitment.

2. We move to the complication, where we step into the story and go through difficulties that push us to grow.

3. We crest with the transformation, where we discover that we’re stronger than we had thought as we face (and resolve) challenges.

4. We return home with the integration, where we discover new insight from the journey we’ve taken.

And Alessandro has been working to develop these as a way to more fully Eganize everything.

I.I.: Dammit, Brandon, I’m a parent, not an inspirational classroom teacher! 

That’s why "narrativizing" is most assuredly optional for parents. If you’d like to skip this, go for it. But if you do, look for other opportunities to create experiences that have coherence, meaning, and continuity, and that are rooted in a deep sense of why what you’re learning matters. Those aren’t optional — they’re the whole game! And they’re what narratives excel at doing.

I.I.: Ah, this is like “hooks”!

Alessandro hates that term —– to him, it smacks of intellectual cheapness, a "hack" one might use at just the beginning of a lesson. We narrativize to generate profound interest (“wonder”), and we want to fuel a journey that requires effort. 

But I’m a yes–and guy, so I’m okay with being positive on “hooks”, so long as we understand that it’s just the beginning.

Consider doing the “Name the big things” practice in these four phases:

Phase 1: Orient

Kids below the age of seven famously have trouble understanding what a map actually is — they view it as just another picture, and miss that every part of it “maps” onto the world. (This was discovered by the progressivist psychologist Jean Piaget, and was another reason geography has been slowly removed from the early grades.) We can use the cognitive tool of 🧙‍♂️ROLE-PLAYING to help them understand this more quickly: just have them pretend they’re a bird.

Start by having them imagine that they’re a blackbird flying above you in the room you’re in, and ask them what they might see, looking down. Have them draw that on a paper, and do it along with them. Repeat this on a playground: if you were a hawk, what would you see? Then do it again for your whole building or neighborhood.

Jean Piaget was (somewhat) right when he said that young kids struggle to learn certain types of abstractions — but with the tools of the imagination, we can de-abstract them, and make them easy.

Phase 2: Complicate

After drawing local spaces, go bigger: look at a map of your town, and imagine it as something you might see if you were in an airplane. Look at a map of your country, and imagine it as what you might see from a rocket. Look at a map of the world, and imagine it as what you might see if you stood on the Moon.

Phase 3: Transform

After you learn each continent/ocean, create something to hold that knowledge forever: a memory card to put in your MEMORY BOX°. Ideally, you can make your card beautiful, perhaps tracing an image of South America on one side, and writing a 🧙‍♂️SIMPLE QUESTION like “what continent is this?” underneath.

Alternatively, you could write down a mnemonic you’ve learned, like “Panicked Alpacas Ignore Stomping Anteaters” (to learn the seven oceans from biggest to smallest).1 Feel free to set that to a 🧙‍♂️SONG.

In your daily memory box practice, you’ll be doing spaced repetition review of this (along with everything else you’ve chosen to remember).

Phase 4: Integrate

After you’ve succeeded at learning the continents and oceans, you can take a breather and review. You can play a 🧙‍♂️GAME (spin a globe, close one eye, and in thirty seconds name all the places you can see), but the goal of “review” here isn’t just cognitive but existential. You’ve gone through this work. You’ve become a master of the names of the world! What questions do you have, now? Where might you like to go next?

A note on local geography

This newsletter reaches a global audience, so in this wireframe, we’ll be dealing with global geography… but we each live in a particular place. That needs to come into our geography curriculum, too.

Our idea for the moment is to spend one week each month — the second whole week, say — on some rotating aspect of local geography. So, in the second week of September, you could focus on the geography of your country. In the second week of October, you could focus on the geography of your state/province/territory. And in the second week of November, you could focus on the geography of your city. In December, you can start back up with your country, again.

Thread 2: Marvels

The world is full of marvels — wondrous places that evoke strong emotions and stick in our memory.

Fantastic tales of painted deserts, impossibly long walls, cities carved from stone… wonders like this have always been how humans are introduced to the wider world. In this thread — coming short on the heels of the last one — we’re going to experience the marvels of the world as fully as we can (without getting on a plane).

This will be the core of our elementary school geography curriculum. The easiest way to do this is to obsessively read some books, which you’ll make part of your canon.

A note on building your canon

An Egan education can be weighed in books, but all books aren’t equal. In the words of Francis "The Scientific Method" Bacon:

 "Some books are to be tasted,
   others to be swallowed,
    and some few to be chewed and digested…"

There are a few great books that are so rich that they can only be digested over years. We’ll be building parts of our curriculum on a few such books. We recommend —— so far as you’re able —— purchasing these in hardcover, and perhaps storing them on a special shelf.

For geography, our canon includes first and foremost the titles in the Atlas Obscura series. If your kids are young, the first book to get is The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the Most Adventurous Kid. My GOODNESS this is a great book. Each two-page spread features one truly amazing place in the world, gorgeously illustrated, and paired with a couple paragraphs that are genuinely interesting to read.

The next book you’ll want is the original adult version: Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders. It has much more in it, and great photos to boot. And after that, if your kid loves animals and plants (which is almost coterminous with “if they are a kid”?) you’ll probably want Atlas Obscura Wildlife: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders.2

How can we make “Marvels” meaningful to everyone?

Again, if you’re working with a geography Ravenclaw, you might just be able to plunge into these books! Adding one each day (for perhaps 4 days/week) might be a good pace to shoot for, and you’ll probably want to make each into a memory card. But if you’d like to bring out the big guns, oh yes, we have ideas for you:

Phase 1: Orient

You might introduce the idea of “marvels” by first identifying somewhere marvelous within driving distance. Prepare kids to enjoy it by first telling a story about it, then take them there to experience it with 🤸‍♀️MOVEMENT (run around it, climb on trees) and their 🤸‍♀️SENSES. Blindfold them and have them explore the place by sound and smell! (We’ll be having a lot more to say about how you might do something like this when we get to our “Science” wireframe. In the meantime, look to Egan collaborator Gillian Judson’s A Walking Curriculum for inspiration.)

Then suggest something to your kids: if your local area holds a spot as amazing as that place… what marvels might the whole world hold? Wouldn’t it be great if someone had gone on an adventure to discover all those marvels? And wouldn’t it be great if they had written a book to collect them?

Then hand them the first book. Invite them to flip around it, and choose one marvel to focus on the next day.

Phase 2: Complicate

Begin by reading the entry from the book, but don’t stop there — treat it as a springboard to experiencing the place in more imaginative detail. Use the MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️) tools to go deeper:

• read a 🧙‍♂️STORY about why Galileo’s middle finger is on display in Florence

• listen to a traditional 🧙‍♂️SONG from the Ethiopians who built the Abuna Yemata Guh church

• spin 🧙‍♂️METAPHORS to try to make sense of whatever the Antikythera Mechanism did

• create a 🧙‍♂️VIVID MENTAL IMAGE of the world’s largest ball of paint as it might look if it were in your room

And find a high-quality image of the place, and use 🤸‍♀️YOUR SENSES to imagine you’re there, touching, smelling, hearing, and seeing it. (We’ll have much much more to say about how to do this in our wireframe about Art. In the meantime, you can look at Luc Travers’s classic book, Touching the Art.)

Phase 3: Transform

On a notecard, capture something about the marvel you’d like to remember forever, and place it in your memory box as a gift to your future self.

Phase 4: Integrate

Make a master list of marvels with

• their names

• what they are, and

• where they are.

Each week, have your kids stand by a map or globe and (as you read off the list) point to where the marvel is as quickly as they can.

Now, whenever you think of that country/state/city, you’ll have something vivid to connect to it.

A note on scheduling

Alessandro and I look forward to the day when we have this whole curriculum —— every topic, every year —— fleshed out in so much detail that we can give specific advice as to how long a family/classroom might want to schedule for these practices. We're definitely in danger of overwhelming education with too many delightful things to do. We'll only be able to winnow these down after we finish publishing these at the end of 2026.

In the meantime, feel free to play with these however you see fit.

Thread 3: Navigation

We stand by the two practices above, but if you were to do them, you might still not free your kids from a core problem of educational traditionalism — helping them see that their books actually describe real places in the real world. All of these marvels can exist in the same mental category of “Gotham City” and “Neverland”.

What we need is a series of practices that helps kids see these places as being just as real as the buildings around them. So here are five. You might want to move through them in order, but the latter ones especially are rich, and can be productively engaged for years.

Practice A: Cardinal directions

We orient ourselves with the cardinal directions of north, east, south, and west. The trouble is that even when kids learn about these, they can easily stay mere abstractions. How can we constantly think with these?

Make cards for the cardinal directions, and post them in different rooms of your home/school. On the north walls, put up a card that says “NORTH”, and so on for the other directions. Then, start referring to them casually as you talk about anything and everything. (If someone asks “where’s the stapler?” you can say “on the bookshelf on the east wall”.)

Of course, we can make this easier by employing some cognitive tools — particularly 🧙‍♂️METAPHORS and 🧙‍♂️IMAGES. (The rest of this post will assume that you live in the northern hemisphere. My apologies to LiD director and the other ~10% of readers on Earth’s unpopular bottom…)

• north: write this in blue (for “cold”) and draw a polar bear

• south: write it in green (for the tropics) and draw your favorite rainforest animal

• east: write it in yellow (for the sunrise) and draw the Sun going ↑

• west: write it in red (for the sunset) and draw Sun going ↓

Practice B: The walls are glass

Once you’ve gotten used to using the cardinal directions, you can connect them to your marvels. The most straightforward way to do this is (obviously) to imagine that an evil witch has turned all of the walls of your home/school to glass.

Now, what can you see?

To warm up, you might want to start with things inside your building. Ask everyone to point to the nearest toilet, or the nearest fridge. In your home, where’s the washing machine? In your school, where’s the gymnasium?

Once you’ve gotten good at this, bring in the world outside. Where’s a favorite tree? A favorite playground? The local liquor store?

Then, after you’ve gotten good at that, you can do the same things for the places and marvels you’ve been learning. In what direction is the Taj Mahal? The Mariana Trench?

Note: to pull this part off, you’ll want to imagine that

1. you have really, really good vision, and also that

2. the world is flat — otherwise, the things far away are hidden under the horizon.

You can either tell your kids this, or let your kids bring it up.3 But all this works using your building as a compass — how can you know the cardinal directions when you’re outside?

Practice C: The path of the Sun

Help your kids learn to navigate outside in the daytime. The Sun is what gives meaning to those cardinal directions in the first place — north, south, east, and west weren’t the inventions of some mad cartographer, but fall out of the single most important fact in astronomy: the Sun rises in a predictable spot, traces a precise arc across the sky, and sets in an opposite predictable spot.

I.I.: Didn’t we already teach that with those direction cards?

We did, and that’s unfortunate… because what we drew there was sort of a lie! Unless you live in the tropics, the Sun never actually rises straight to your east; it actually rises in the southeast, and sets in the southwest. (Precisely how far south depends on what season it is.)

If you know what time it is, and the Sun is out, you can immediately glean which way is north. (The Moon, too — though for that, look for the next post. In the meantime, take a look at the pattern Track the Sky°.)

Practice D: The path of the stars

Help your kids navigate at night. When the sky is clear, you can do the exact same thing with the stars. This, however, requires learning at least a handful of the major constellations that are visible at your latitude.

There are oodles of books that will teach you to do this; the only trouble is, they’re virtually all terrible. The lone exceptions that we know of are two by H. A. Rey: Find the Constellations (for kids) and The Stars: A New Way to See Them (for adults).4 His innovation is so simple it’s painful: instead of drawing frivolous pictures around the constellations that hide them —

or connecting the stars together randomly —

Rey takes the 🧙‍♂️METAPHORS seriously and plays “connect the dots” in a way that actually helps you see the constellation —

You may want to get both books at once; the second includes star charts that link up the constellations with the 🧙‍♂️SIMPLE STORIES they’re all characters in, making them even easier to remember. (For a delightful example of this, see our pattern Star Lore°.)

Practice E: The directions of nature

Finally, you can help your kids navigate outside in the daytime or nighttime when Sun and stars are nowhere to be seen. All it takes is to help them unravel some of Mother Nature’s directional clues. The master teacher of this may be Tristan Gooley, whom the BBC has dubbed “the Sherlock Holmes of Nature”, and whose best book for this is The Natural Navigator: The Rediscovered Art of Letting Nature Be Your Guide. And what he teaches is eye opening.

We all know, for example, that moss grows on the north side of trees. The only trouble is, much of the time, it doesn’t. It’s a fine clue, but no one clue will consistently point you in the right direction. If you want to confidently find your way in the woods, you need to weigh many of them together. The happy thing is, these work almost wherever you are in the Northern Hemisphere, where there’s one constant: the Sun shines directly from the south. From this, many things fall out:

• on a hill’s south face, the grass will dry faster, and the flowers will bloom earlier

• on a tree’s south branches, more leaves will grow

• on the base of a tree’s south-facing trunk, the dirt will be drier, lighter, and potentially cracked

These are just a few; you can help your kids learn many, many more! The deeper purpose of this, of course, is that it’s a way to connect the small picture to the big picture, the close-at-hand to the extraordinarily far away. It’s an invitation to pay absurdly close attention to the world around you. (For more on this, look forward to our “Science” wireframe, coming soon.)

Forwards, upwards, and twirling towards freedom

Geography, done right, teaches children not just where things are, but that the world is real, and worth knowing.

All the above practices, of course, just lay the foundation of what we’ll be building in middle school and high school. To see that, stay tuned for our next wireframe. In the meantime, please fill the comments with anything you don’t understand, think we’re missing, or know we can improve on.