A review and two readings

-Barbara Oakley's book review and two influential articles

I am honored that my book “Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Teacher” was featured in Barbara Oakley’s latest “Cheery Friday” newsletter. Barbara is the co-creator of THE most popular online course, “Learning How to Learn,” and has authored multiple New York Times–bestselling books. From failing math in college to mastering it and becoming a distinguished professor of engineering and a fellow of IEEE and AAAS, she has a lot to share about math learning and learning in general.

It is so encouraging to hear her affirmation of my take on the issue:

He grasped something many educators miss entirely—that learning operates at three levels: conscious understanding, mental muscle (the automaticity built through practice), and intuition. In American classrooms, he found students encouraged to explore but rarely required to practice deeply enough for genuine proficiency to take root—thinking without practicing, he writes, “can make learning empty and futile, like trying to learn tennis without wielding a racket.”

Meanwhile, on my below observation on kindness and coddling, she was not only well aware of it but has published an article in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled “Concepts and implications of altruism bias and pathological altruism”. It established a new field of study that could potentially address important issues that trouble education, where moral judgment is often entangled with practical decisions.

But his sharpest observations are about the culture of too much kindness. At his affluent private school, he watched well-meaning adults coddle students into fragility—providing so much accommodation that students never developed the skills to handle life’s inevitable challenges. He captures the self-fulfilling cycle perfectly: the more fragile students are perceived to be, the more support they receive, resulting in still more fragility, entitlement, and dependency.

Barbara is actively weighing in education issues and is quite influential in policy circles. She has just published her first note in Substack, “The Teaching Method That Can’t Fail”, addressing a topic that has long confounded me: Why are there so many educational theories that sound grand and logically correct, but produce disastrous results once implemented in classrooms? The post has already generated substantial discussion and really opened my eyes. I wish you would read it and join the discussion.

Finally, this is what Barbara has to say about the book overall. Thank you, Barb!

Unbalanced is that rare education book written by an outsider with no tribal loyalties to protect-someone who arrived with fresh eyes and the courage to describe what he actually saw. Yellow Heights isn’t grinding a political axe. He genuinely loves teaching, loves his students, and wants them to learn. That sincerity makes his critique all the more devastating. If you care about what’s actually happening inside American schools—and why so many well-intentioned efforts end up hurting the students they’re meant to help—this is essential reading.