Kazakhstan has had only one president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, since the office was created following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He established the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools and Nazarbayev University. There’s a naming trend here.

January 26th was Australia Day, the national day of Australia (kind of like Fourth of July in the US), marking the arrival of British ships in 1788. Some people believe it should be called Invasion Day instead. There’s a connection here. Kind of. Only in my experience.

Out of the post-Soviet states in Central Asia, Kazakhstan has arguably developed the most. Although his presidency has not been without controversy or many allegations of corruption, President Nazarbayev has always emphasized the importance of education in the nation’s development.

In 1993, Kazakhstan launched the Bolashak scholarship program, which finances graduate school and living expenses for promising students at overseas universities. In return, the students are required to work in Kazakhstan following their studies. What I learned is that there often do not exist job opportunities that take advantage of the education of those students, which unfortunately consigns them to work in more menial positions. Some people work around this by creating shell companies that are then contracted to overseas companies. I even heard of some students who didn’t want to return and let the government seize their collateral, usually a house property. But hey, if the house was worth less than the education, maybe that’s a good deal.

The Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS), another initiative of President Nazarbayev’s, are a network of twenty-ish schools for talented grade school students in Kazakhstan. Students take an entrance exam to qualify. Tuition is free, and non-local students are given free boarding as well. My impression is that these schools have much better instruction and resources than the average public school. Many of the scholarship students at Haileybury used to attend NIS. (GTL placed 11 MIT students across NIS schools in five cities.) I met two NIS Astana students, Rakhat and Sayana, and they were wonderful. We visited Hazrat Sultan Mosque, the largest mosque in Central Asia, had delicious beshbarmak at Sayana’s house, and saw a ballet at the Astana Opera.

The Bolashek program is pretty expensive for the state, and maybe it doesn’t make sense to educate everyone abroad, so President Nazarbayev created his own university in Astana. Nazarbayev University (NU) opened in 2010. The university operates entirely in English and hires an international faculty and staff. Tuition and board are free for all students (imagine that!), and students can even receive a stipend to study there. The university has pretty expansive facilities, including new maker spaces, a technocenter, and a hub for entrepreneurship. They are also opening up a new swimming pool.

Huge atrium

View of the ground floor of one of the dormitories

In Astana, I was hosted by Chris, Saima, and Saima’s two sons: 13-year-old Emad and 9-year-old Zayd. They had moved to Kazakhstan only three months ago to work for NU. Chris is the current (and first) Chief Information Officer, and Saima works as the Director General for IT projects. Pretty fancy. From what I understand, they are trying to move the university to use more modern systems. Saima and I talked about SAP at some point, which brought back some ehhh nostalgic memories of being ESP treasurer.

The family had previously lived in Australia for five years, which is why we were invited to a celebration of Australia Day with a bunch of Australians who currently work at NU. In attendance were Elaine, Janet, and Michelle, who all work at the Graduate School of Education. Loretta, the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, was there with her husband Tim, who’s been teaching at some other local university. I also met Alex, the head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, and Chit, the new Associate Provost for Graduate Studies. Some pretty high profile people were there although I didn’t realize it at the time.

A spread of the lovely food Elaine prepared for Australia Day

My host brothers with a cake they decorated

I got to talk to some of them throughout the evening, which was really interesting for me. I wanted to understand what they did at the university and what drew them there. Michelle teaches inclusive education and is currently researching how clinics in Kazakhstan administer tests for autism and what is happening to the diagnosed children education-wise. Apparently a lot of the time, any child diagnosed with something “abnormal,” whether it be autism or diabetes, does not receive the standard education, if any. Alex recently published a book on hardware chips for machine learning. I think his research deals with cognitive models of machine learning and creating an intelligence that is more general, unlike the models that solve a specific instance of a problem that people throw deep learning at these days.

Loretta used to teach business but now works on the administrative side at NU. I asked her about the admissions process and how the university recruited faculty. She has been in Kazakhstan for around seven years and had many stories to share. The day before the university opened its dorms, there was a mix up with the mattresses, and the Minister of Education (or former one, or something) ended up helping move the mattress onto the beds. Everyone contributed! Several people also shared reimbursement horror stories. One faculty member left with his family during break and never came back. (Just mentioning that this isn’t common.) He didn’t return his boarding passes, which the university needed for proof of travel. Kazakhstan has a culture where the cost of a  mistake or incident is not absorbed by the organization but by the individual. The travel person involved in this situation was panicking because he would have had to pay the full cost of the tickets, which was more than a year’s salary. The passes were eventually returned in an unmarked envelope.

Mostly, I heard the story of a university being born. Of the opportunity to establish new systems and programs, to be part of the beginning of something. Throughout January, I asked several people about Kazakhstan’s issue with brain drain, and some responded by pointing to examples such as this – the opportunity to fill a sector that is still underdeveloped – as a possibility for encouraging people to stay. I wonder how things will develop in the upcoming years.

The Skywalk, longer than our Infinite Corridor!

Sayana and a current student at NU

I’m now back at MIT, but I still need to finish writing up part II of my last post, so here goes:

11:25 AM [Lunch]

Students at Nueva have an extremely long lunch period. Part of that time is so students can eat lunch, but part of that time is also for student clubs to meet. I ate a solidly decent lunch of ravioli with Apple. I asked him about his classes, his outside projects, and what teaching is like in general. He asked me a few questions about what I do and what I’m interested in. He mentioned that teaching teaching at private schools often has fewer requirements (no certs required, no test prep required) and more freedoms. Apparently to start as a teacher, you can shadow / be mentored by a more experienced teacher for a bit to prepare for real teaching.

As lunch went on, I was able to take a bit of a mental break from all the activity and interaction. Near the end, I met Donut, a CS teacher and MIT grad. We talked for a bit about MIT, Course 6, and talked some about shared interests. She teaches a machine learning class (that I went to at the end of the day), so we talked about how she runs the class (which I’ll get into later).

Donut is also the new head of Invention Studio (after Connie left), so at the end of lunch, we listened to a team’s dry run presentation for their Design Review event. Along with the two student heads of Invention Studio, we listened to the student’s presentation and gave them some advice to prepare for Design Review (which was in 5 days). Nueva was a school built on design-thinking and a lot of other alternative methods. To Connie Nueva often represents the ideal picture / the extreme bounds that high school education can reach. Despite all of these things aligning, I think I saw the students struggle with lots of the same things students in my high school struggle with and students at MIT still struggle with.

The main struggle I saw was an uncomfortability with uncertainty. If students don’t know how to do something, their mind shuts off or it flounders around. These students in particular didn’t know how to get past an engineering blocker in their product. Rather than trying to take some first steps towards progress, they stalled because they couldn’t see most of the steps to get to their goal. Something about the size and unfamiliarity of the problem puts a mental block on students that they need a mentor to pull them up from.

12:55 PM [Third Block]

In third block, I visited a class that was on the philosophy of science. In particular, the discussion was about usefulness of intractable scientific theories. Before class, students read a reading about string theory and multiverse theory, which are essentially grand physics theories we aren’t really sure how to measure. Packed into this problem comes lots of questions — are these valid theories if we can’t support / deny them? how many resources should we put into these problems? are these theories just mathematical models or are they describing how the universe “actually” works?

Lots of these questions were brought up in students’ pre-discussion questions, so during class we slowly tried to step through a few of them. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get too deep into these questions. Students, while some were happy to contribute, would get distracted from whatever point was being made. They weren’t able to dig deeper into these problems — so it hit me that this was a problem with lots of discussions I had in high school. I’d often feel disengaged because the discussions wouldn’t matter. They would be a bunch of people saying a few surface-level random thoughts about a potentially interesting subject with no actual consequences.

2:15 PM [Fourth Block]

In the last block of the day, I went to Donut’s machine learning class. Class was fairly unstructured work time based on a lab about word vectors and NLP. Through the lab, students were given a brief intro to the subject material and asked to play with the code (potentially in line with some suggested tasks). One super bright side of this structure is that students had the freedom to use these tools for whatever they found interesting. In subjects like ML, this is especially great because these tools can be used for so many things. The downside is that students aren’t necessarily developing a solid understanding. As with all self-studying, students get out however much they put into it and for some students this may not be enough (though it is hard to say what “enough” is).

3:30 PM [End of Day]

After all these classes came to a close, I went back downstairs to pick up my things and Lyft back to work. Before I left, I got to stop by and thank all the wonderful teachers and students I met throughout the day. Nueva truly does seem like an awesome place to work — lots of awesome teachers and students. Reflecting a bit on what it’d be like to work at a private school, I imagine I’d really enjoy it. Each day, I’d get to work with a bunch of bright kids. I’d get to work with and learn with really passionate teachers. I’d also get to face different challenges each day and work on sharing the subjects I love with others.

One drawback that usually comes hand in hand with working at a private school is the feeling of not making a meaningful impact. Why serve the privileged students at the top when there are so many others that need it? If part of the goal of teaching is to make a difference in the world, how much of a difference is working at a private school? Later that night, I ended up talking to Connie about this, and she passed along some insight that I feel like I had started to realize a little bit after teaching in ESP programs and spending the day at Nueva: when you’re teaching at privileged schools like Nueva, you’re directly teaching the next generation of world leaders — the people who need to be able to make the difficult decisions — so hopefully as a teacher, you can rub off on them and prepare them to solve the problems in the world.

Thanks to everyone who read any of my lengthy (and probably confusing) posts! It’s been lots of fun writing these posts over the last month, and I’ve gotten lots out of spending time reflecting on my experiences — hopefully I’ve also helped you learn something new/realize something you didn’t know before!

Evan

Yesterday, I visited The Nueva School and shadowed a student and a couple teachers. This trip was a great opportunity to learn more about what teaching looks like in an alternative independent school like Nueva (and was a nice vacation from my work). Here are some random unorganized thoughts from things I observed:

8:25 AM [Before School]

Arrived at school via a Lyft. I walked up to the front desk and said I was visiting teacher Apple (replacing names with food for privacy). The receptionist called Apple, but he wasn’t there. Despite this, she asked if I knew where I was going and let me in anyway.

This was, to me, the first of many oddities at Nueva. At my middle school or high school, I would’ve been promptly and rudely escorted off school premises with the harsh warning that if I came back, there would be consequences. If you weren’t there with a purpose, you meant trouble. Even if you were an alumnus there to visit a teacher one year after graduation, they assumed you meant trouble. I think there were even times when I was a student when they saw us as troublemakers. I think this attitude from staff / security directly led to less behaved kids. At Nueva, it seemed like none of this existed.

At some point, I met my student host, Barley, who gave me a tour of the school. The school itself has an awesome innovation-lab — makerspace, chemlab space, and art studio space equipped with the materials, tools, and staff to make almost anything! Everything about the school is very open. Students are free to walk anywhere. Teachers have desks at pods out in the open. Almost all classrooms are glass walled. There are lounge spaces everywhere for students to hang out and work.

8:45 AM [First Block]

During my first block, I observed an advanced computer programming class. This class felt a lot like the independent study computer science classes I had in high school. Students were roughly left on their own to work on whatever they wanted. This ranged from learning a new language to working on fairly deep systems or ML problems. For me, this kind of class was super important for furthering my cs knowledge and developing self-study skill, but unfortunately I saw kids struggle with the same problems I did. In particular, this kind of self studying is heavily dependent on the teacher’s knowledge of resources or the availability of “good” textbooks (with the right pace for a HSer). A second problem is self motivation. If kids aren’t internally curious, they won’t learn anything. Luckily for Nueva, most of the kids seem rather curious except for a couple 2nd semester seniors I talked to.

This first takeaway I had from this is that it is important to learn skills. In particular, I’d want to learn enough breadth of topics to be able to help my students at least get started in any area. On the flip side, though, it’s unclear how much knowledge is enough. At what point should I focus less on learning and focus more on teaching? The second takeaway (or rather question) I left with is how can we teach kids to be internally curious? Connie pointed out to me one morning that waking up and directly going into watching econometrics lectures on youtube is something that even kids in higher education don’t have. I’m not exactly sure why people like me randomly enjoy learning things or if it was a learned skill at all, but maybe some answer to this question could help motivate other students.

10:05 AM [Second Block]

In my second block, I followed Barley to linear algebra class. Connie told me the teacher, Cauliflower, changed the way in which she saw math so she was really excited that I’d get to meet her. The linear algebra class was structured with students presenting solutions to problems (which generally asked for some proof). As the student presented their solution, other students, along with Cauliflower, would ask questions and note how ideas could have been explained more clearly. Naturally, the students’ presentations were full of mistakes and confusing explanations, so personally I couldn’t follow the line of questions Cauliflower and other students were asking. They never really led to a better understanding for me, so at some point, I started zoning out the questions until I found a solution. To me, this seems like the main downside — if a student doesn’t think about the problem in the same way (e.g. I saw many of the problem very visually), then the questions asked just add to the confusion.

On the positive side, though, there were so many awesome things the students seemed to get out of the class. Even though it seems like many of their linear algebra knowledge is very jumbled, I think they are developing what people describe as “mathematical maturity” fairly visibly. Students were comfortable with admitting they didn’t understand things. Nearly all of them were comfortable with asking questions or adding comments even though there were ~17 students in the class. Students were also comfortable with going slow and making sure they understood and believed each step before moving on. While they’re not quite all the way there yet (they still miss points and little details), it’s clear that they understand what math is really about (in contrast with classes like calculus). I really admire Cauliflower’s ability to foster question-asking and slow thinking about all the problems.

Evan

Classes are so much more fun when it’s not just a lecture. From the teacher point of view, I think it’s pretty boring to just drone on at students for an hour without a break. And for students, it’s even more boring — trying to concentrate on someone talking at you for hours on end is incredibly difficult. But when there’s interactivity — something to get you out of your seat, a cool demonstration, problems that make you participate — suddenly, the class is far more engaging.

Some of the best fun in my own teaching experiences has come from the interactive activities that I’ve created for students. For the last 2 weeks of my GTL experience, I taught statistics to 4 different classes. These students were in years 3 and 4 of high school, which means that any activities needed to strike a balance between usefulness, non-cheesiness, and actually being engaging. Throughout the different classes, I tried a couple of different interactive segments, and wanted to share how I thought they went!

(This point of view has been slightly shaped by my experiences running teacher orientations for ESP, sharing many tips, including some on interactive techniques. We’ve modified our own handout from the one here.)

Guts Round

Those of you who did math competitions in high school might remember something called a “guts round” – a team-based competition to answer questions quickly. I first tried writing a guts round as a review session for a summer camp 2 years ago and found that it worked amazingly. It’s become my review session activity-of-choice, especially for groups that I have very limited time with.

My guts round consists of 15 questions divided into 5 sets of 3 questions. Each team (of 3-4 people) only gets 3 questions at a time, and in order to see the next 3 questions, they have to submit their final answers to the previous 3 questions. Each question has a certain number of points, and the point value (and difficulty) increases as time goes on. As students submit their answers, I grade them in real-time and project the team’s point progress onto the board.

A team that strategizes well will try and speed through the first sets of questions to spend time on the far more difficult later sets that are worth more points. However, going too fast can lead to careless errors, losing out on “easy points”.

From what I’ve seen, guts rounds are incredibly fun. Students like working together and competing against each other to be the best team. But they’re also invaluable learning tools.

• Students get to work with each other, and so have a chance to learn from each other. For most questions, at least one person on the team knows how to do the problem. Team sizes are also small enough that everyone works together on every problem, meaning that the knowledge gets shared with everyone.
• The difficulty gradient allows students to directly review of problems that they’ve seen before and also see questions that they haven’t seen, pushing their knowledge even further.
• The live grading lets me see if there are any questions that most groups are having trouble on, letting me review specific problems and concepts with them.

Of course, they’re not perfect, as teams might be uneven and so the “losers” learn less. As a whole, though, guts rounds are probably my favorite activity to run.

Height and Standard Deviation

I was at the end of my lecture on measures of variation – range, variance, and standard deviation – and managed to run out of content with 20 minutes left. To fill the rest of the time, I decided that I wanted to show them why we care about standard deviation as a measure using a live demonstration of the standard deviation and the normal distribution!

I had each student tell me their height in centimeters. I wrote them all out on the board and used my computer to calculate the mean and standard deviation. Then, calculating the mean plus or minus one standard deviation, we found that 11/16, or 68.75% of students, were within that range. Supposing that human height is normally distributed, statistics predicts that 68.3% of people should be within this range – very, very close to what we found!

The point of this demonstration is to show that the standard deviation has interesting properties that relate to how far away numbers are from the mean. The definition of standard deviation seems pretty arbitrary, especially when you see the content for the first time. Why are you squaring things? Why the square root? Why not just the variance?
But when students see the most useful property of standard deviation, its relevance to the normal curve, even if the definition isn’t completely clear yet, they see why it is used.

The activity also led to lots of fantastic questions from students. Why 68.3%? What does “normal” mean? How far away from 68.3% can it be? The fact that these questions get asked means two things: first, students actually understood the activity; second, that it was an interesting enough activity to pique their curiosity.

In hindsight, one thing I should have done was predict 68.3% before getting their results. I had never done this activity, so wasn’t sure how well it would work. But for the future, I now know to put faith in height being normal.

Mental Math

I really like mental math – squaring and multiplying numbers in my head, calculating days of the week across any year, and more. The actual math content of mental math is not difficult, as it’s simply learning the tricks to keep numbers organized in your head. With lots of practice, the math becomes second nature, and it can seem like “mathemagic”.

Students in years 3 and 4 are already immensely familiar with algebra and variables – but the jump from arithmetic to algebra often leaves people wondering about the connection back to reality. Mental math lets me do that in a very “practical” way.

One example is with squaring numbers, and the difference of squares. Students have had this factoring ingrained into them: .

Calculating in your head seems like a daunting task, until cleverly seeing is as part of a difference of squares.

Adding 25 to both sides, we can then find that is simply !

The trick works any square ending in 5 – for 2 digit numbers, it’s as simple as taking the tens digit, multiplying it by one more than itself, and then sticking “25” at the end of that number. With some more explaining on the board and a few extra examples, I can get students to do in their heads without me saying anything!

Throughout GTL, I did a few examples of mental math during my introductions to showcase things I do for fun. (Wow, what a nerd, Paolo.) My main goal in demonstrating mental math to them was so I could promise them to teach the tricks to them later in the week, I think I also earned a little respect by doing math faster than they could type it into their calculators 😛

Exercise Pairing

This isn’t so much an “activity” that I did, but instead a small technique I used in lessons to make it less boring. I get tired of lecturing, and students get tired of listening. Oftentimes, when I had an example that I wanted to work through, I used a technique that I love telling people about during ESP Teacher Orientations – Think-Pair-Share (#100 on the link above!).

I’d write the problem on the board, then let students copy it down, try to understand it, and think about how they’d solve it by themselves for a little bit. After a minute or so, I’d have them talk to their neighbors about their different approaches, then work together to find a solution. When it seemed that most people had worked through it, I brought everyone back together to talk about the different ways that they got to the answer.

Think-Pair-Share is fantastic for breaking up the monotony of lectures without having to plan out an entire activity. I just need to prepare different exercises, and students get the chance to work through problems individually and collaborating.

I know for a fact that I’m still not a perfect teacher. I made mistakes in explaining content, bored students occasionally, and used inefficient or ineffective ways of explaining material. There are always things to improve, and so here’s to improving during future ESP programs and maybe future GTLs 🙂

Much like Sarah, this post was truly a “Splash on Planes” for me – sitting in JFK waiting for my flight to BOS. I’ve got a few final thoughts on everything that I learned during GTL, teaching and otherwise (mostly the latter), that I’m very excited to share in my last Splash on Planes blog post.

I first started drafting this in an Edinburgh hostel, halfway through our first weekend trip – first to Edinburgh and then to Glasgow. Now as I’m waiting for my Aberdeen to London flight (after which I’ll be doing some travel around Europe), I’ll try to finish this post up – since my flights been delayed almost 3 hours :(.

I’ll give an overview of impressions of Scotland and Aberdeen and my host school. This was eventually one long post but I’m going to split it.

Scotland and Aberdeen

Aberdeen is located in Northeast Scotland – and it is is *really* north. It lies just above 57 N, placing it just at a higher latitude than Kodiak Island, and just around the northern border of Newfoundland and Labrador – (thanks Wikipedia). It’s industry is quite reliant on the North Sea oil and gas industry – you see this as soon as you land in the ads for random oil/gas industrial services as you go to baggage claim.

Aberdeen is the 3rd largest Scottish city by population, behind Glasgow and Edinburgh (“pronounced edinbruh as I figured out”). People from Aberdeen are called Aberdonians, similar to the Dundonians of Dundee to the south, and different from the Glaswegians of Glasgow. I asked one of the CS teachers what Edinbrugh-ians? were called and she didn’t know :P. Update – wikipedia says “Edinburgher”.

The first thing I noticed about Aberdeen was that it was really gray (sorry, grey). Scottish weather seems to oscillate between clear + sunny, and damp + drizzly. And it always feels just slightly damp here, so it seems like winters here are very wet. Aberdeen in general is surprisingly several degrees C warmer than Boston, despite being 15 degrees north. The architecture in Aberdeen has grown on me! It’s quite pretty – even though the gray Aberdeen granite is a bit lacking in color (see pics below)

Random fact: HTML <center> tags throw off British people because here, it’s spelt <centre>. My host teacher has actually converted to defaulting to the American spelling because he uses these so often. Same goes for stuff like color vs colour. Hmm I wonder how universally US/English-centric programming languages syntax is. I wonder if there are any examples of non-English/non American-English syntax programming languages. If you’re bored check out the wikipedia page on esoteric programming languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language#Examples. And I just realized I should have done a lesson in one of these. But Lolcode tho:

HAI 
CAN HAS STDIO? 
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

And regarding food – according to my host teacher – Scottish food is very “stodgy” (read: unhealthy but filling). Stuff like butteries – which are like really lard-y/salty croissants, haggis, meat pies, sausage rolls, etc. I’ll write more about food later! I’ll leave you with some food pictures from my first week.