Book Review: A mind for numbers , how to excel at math and science (even if you flunked algebra) By Barbara Oakley

I purchased this book quite a while ago because I read an article by Barbara Oakley in the Nautilus magazine and it intrigued me. The story of her career path was highly unusual and quite inspiring. She was a math phobic in her formative years, failing her algebra class in school. She naturally opted out of the STEM related  path and became a translator in the military, shying away from math and the technology path.  As she worked in the military, she realized that it is impossible to get ahead without some inkling of the math and sciences, so she decided that she needed to overcome her fear of math. Indeed, she got so good at the math and sciences that  she eventually received a bachelors, a masters, and then a PhD in electrical engineering. She is now a professor  in systems engineering.

This book is her way of passing on the method of her madness, her way to  overcome her fears and retrained her mind to be accepting of the mathematical learning and thinking. The  critical point that she is making is that it is possible to change the way your mental processes deal with problems. It is possible because your brain is malleable, but you need to put in the work to overcome bad habits, mainly procrastination and avoidance. A perfect illustration of the growth mindset.

She directly addresses those students who are working in the math and science area,  as her purpose is to demonstrate to a very skeptical audience how to be better at doing math and science. The useful part of her pedagogy is that even though the book is focused on math and sciences, the lessons can be transferred to other things: sports, music, literature, etc. Even though Oakley lays it out in 18 simple-to-read chapters,  the lessons are not easy, if it was easy, she wouldn’t be writing the book. She has set herself up for an informative and enlightening argument with the traditional way of teaching math and science.

A keyword that comes up time and time again is einstellung, it is defined as the process where an idea that you already have in mind, or your simple initial thoughts, is preventing a better idea or solution from being found. This is what she identifies as the culprit for our habit of depending on rote thinking and for our penchant to convince ourselves that a problem is the same problem that we have seen before, even though it is not.  She identifies the necessary mindscape for solving problems, defining the oppositional modes of thinking that she  terms focused and diffused thinking. The two terms are like the System One versus System Two thinking that the Tversky and Kahneman made famous. It is also like the terms  procedural versus conceptual thinking. They are all similar but not the same, but similar enough so that one can draw analogies between them.

When thinking of those in the math and Sciences, the public often talk about the amount of focus and  concentration that is needed to solve those problems. This is the stereotypical way we think of our mathematicians and scientists: these wild haired geniuses, with furrowed brows, and unkempt lab coats covered with chalk dust, thinking with superhuman concentration, even though that is the worst way to be creative and innovative. What cause people to get locked and blocked in their thoughts is this excessive focus on focus, which brings our tendency for einstellung to the fore. The real breakthroughs in math and science often happens when the mathematician or scientists or engineer uses what Oakley terms diffused thinking; that is they don't hang on tightly to what they know already, they try to diffuse their focus so that the brain has freed up their active memory so that they could see other ,; open their minds up to different ways of approaching a problem; or even make giant leaps of faith which would help them solve the problem. It is not just a matter of serendipity; it is a matter of necessity that scientists’, mathematicians, and engineers are deliberately diffused when they do their best work.

Another thing that Oakley talks about is chunking,  this is a term that have become ubiquitous amongst the other cognitive scientific literature. Indeed, much of Oakley's book seem familiar because she has called upon much of the latest research on learning. Chunking is a way of combining steps in any progression that leads up to a unified piece of knowledge which allows the brain to unite the discrete steps of a progression so that the separate steps coalesce into a coherent chunk of knowledge. This condenses the knowledge and it allows  making connections between different ideas and understanding the underlying principles and fundamentals of many things easier.

Connection making is something that humans are exceptionally good at;  in fact, I believe this is what separates us from other animals, this ability be able to chunk knowledge together to create connections. Chunking also serves a great purpose in helping us manage the limited capacity of our active memory. If it is chunked, it is in our long-term memory; if it is in the long-term memory it is there for us to reference. We do not need to recall the fundamentals every time we are solving a problem because having the chunk in the long-term memory means that it is there being ready and  useful for us.

The idea is that the active memory can only hold a certain number of chunks of knowledge. If  your active memory is full, you are not able to absorb other new knowledge or new information. The book  spends many pages on how to chunk information and how to store that chunk into the long-term memory for safekeeping. Which frees up our active memory to help us make connections between different ideas.

Oakley also spends a lot time dealing with procrastination. Procrastination is what we do when we are scared or if we are intimidated by the task. She delves into different tips and strategies on how to deal with procrastination. One of the best things about this book is that she is able to create checklists for dealing with procrastination and she gives tips and hints on how to become better learners.

The reader gets the idea that this book goes beyond just being a favorite topic for the author, this is her passion: to share what she has learned from her own experience learning to be a converted math and science geek while practicing her profession as a teacher.

This is a very worthy  book to read. It is not a hard read, it is quite an easy read, some of that comes from the fact that much of the material seemed to be familiar to me so it was preaching to the choir. As I say that however, I would recommend this for any of my future STEM students. It is especially useful for anybody who is interested in learning or in the area of  cognitive sciences of learning because she integrates all the different concepts from different books and publications. The material is presented so easily and rationally so that it all makes sense.

Many of the other books I have read in this area emphasizes the why’s of learning, i.e. the methodology; this book shows us the how’s that we need in order to execute so that we can be better learners. I highly recommend this for anyone, whether you are math phobic or not, or if you are just concerned about being the best learner you can be, this book will help you get well on your way.

Book Review-What did you do during the war sister?

This book was unlike any other books that I have had the pleasure to read. It is a historical novella based on historical records. The author, Prof. Dennis Turner, had the good fortune of being given the task of telling the stories based on letters that were stored in the archives of the Sister of Notre Dame de Namur in Cincinnati OH. It was a treasure trove of firsthand records from the letters written by the sisters who lived in Belgium during the second world war.  The sisters had written assiduously about their experiences in  German occupied Belgium at that time to their sisters in the United States. Their accounts of the war form the foundation of this story.

What makes this account unique is that the author chose to cleverly weave a fictional account that is based on letters and historical records in order to unify the disparate accounts. He was able to gain access to both in Cincinnati and in Belgium by serendipity, a nun of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Dayton was a colleague of Prof. Turner’s wife, and he was drawn into the project due to that friendship. The story telling is clever because of the use of fictional narrative form to pull together the personal recollections from the nuns’ letters while the author placed the personal accounts in historical perspective as he integrated the fact from history with the personal accounts of history. Prof. Turner has successfully worked all the details from the historical and the personal into a cohesive and cogent narrative, allowing us to delve into the minutiae of the effects of war on those affected by war as well as giving us allowing us to see history from a most personal and intimate view point. It is no surprise that the research is impeccable and the attention to details extraordinary. The author is a professor of law at the University of Dayton and a renowned law expert. His undergraduate degree in History no doubt served as an invaluable compass for the directions that this book and shaped the organization of the narrative. The impeccable  research on the letters, the stitching of the details  into a cogent and flowing form, and then integrating the bits into a readable and interesting whole was a labor of love.

The story revolves around a fictional character, sister Christina, an amalgam of all the sisters who wrote the letters. Prof. Turner gave the character life by giving her a midwestern life, she is an American nun from Dayton Ohio. The opening chapter shows Sister Christina a brief background: her upbringing, her world views, and her reason for pursuing the religious life. This background chapter gives the reader a peak to her as a character and to explain who she is as well as give a boost of realism to the narrative.

The story proceeds with sister Christina travelling to Belgium in 1938 to join the Sisters of Notre Dame of Namur.  She had been trained in the Cincinnati motherhouse but needed to complete her training in Belgium.

As a side note, the author did the readers a great favor by making three critical decisions: one is to name the chapters with the time and the place to note when and where the action takes place; the second critical decision is to provide an extensive and complete set of end notes. The third decision was to include several photos, both old photos taken during the period of the story and during Prof. Turner’s research trips to Belgium.  All three decisions paid dividends as I was able to trace the story chronologically and me to answer the critical question: which part of this narrative is historical. The pictures gave me the reassurance that I was indeed reading about real people and real places. The author did not overtly insert too much fictional accounts to entice the reader, he stayed true to the story he was given.

The story is told in chronological format. For those of us who are somewhat knowledgeable about the Second World War the dates helped put the story in perspective. The Germans had not yet invaded Belgium as the story began, the narrative picked up during the diplomacy phase of the negotiations as Belgium was attempting to ward off the inevitable. Sister Christina related some of the realpolitik during the negotiations between Belgian King and the Germans. This detail added yet another interesting perspective to the story without seeming pedantic.

Some  of the initial narrative was devoted to describing the daily lives of the nuns. Prof. Turner described a typical day in the life of a nun in Belgium during the 1940s. It was not an easy life obviously; the details evoke strong feelings of admiration and some disbelief, but this part of the book laid the foundation for the reader to understand the nature of Sister Christina’s story.  

As the drumbeat of war became louder in Belgium, numerous travails befell Sister Christina and the nuns in her abbey as she navigated the changing fortunes of war. We were able to experience the war through the eyes of Sister Christina and the nuns. Sister Christina related the conditions of the abbey as well as the shifting sands of circumstance that are both interior and exterior to their narrow existence in the abbey. The material hardships were immense while being under German occupation added an immense amount of terror to their psychological hardship. At the same time, the narrative was inspiring because of how the sisters were able to improvise, adapt, and overcome the material and psychological hardships that fortune dealt them.

The  stories about the cleverness of the nuns as they attempted to hide refugees, some Jewish children, and wounded Americans within the abbeys were funny, terror filled, and tense, they were harrowing and exciting at the same time.

Most of the dramatizations on World War Two in film and television relates the battlefield narrative.  It is rare to find a historically rigorous account of civilians enduring the hardships of the war in Europe without Hollywood dramatization. This book gives us a unique perspective and takes a different turn from the familiar.

Another interesting side note is that these letters were written after the nuns’ has had time to think, consider, and reflect upon their experience, so they have had time to digest the meaning of these experiences and placed their importance in the context of their life experiences, their religious beliefs and training. The letters were indeed quite unique in their sentiments. It is particularly fortuitous that Prof. Turner recreated the  ethos of the time and place beautifully with his deft handling of the material.

The book’s existence serves as a timeless reflection upon the chaos of that man has wrought upon ourselves, the goodness and the badness that the self-inflicted chaos had brought to  the lives of those who experienced it. It was an enjoyable and instructive sojourn into a time and a place that elicited my curiosity.

This is great story telling.