Agency

Sometimes my OTIS students suggest features or things for the OTIS website, and I reply “submit a pull request”. I’m usually half-joking when I say this, because I acknowledge that I’m essentially saying “please do the work for me”.

But part of me isn’t joking. Because, one of the things I’ve grown to most value in gifted education is developing self-agency for my students.

If you’re reading this blog post, you’re likely to have good thinking abilities. You have the capacity to go from point A to point B, to teach yourself geometry from online resources (or a certain print textbook, I suppose), to put two and two together unsupervised, and so on. This gift is rarer than you think.

So let me tell you a secret: if you don’t know how to submit a pull request, you can teach yourself.

I have to be careful about how I deliver this message, because there are some wrong versions of this message floating around. The wrong version of this message is that, you can do anything if you try; and because you can, you must. That’s not quite what I want to say; in fact I think the opposite is true:

To me, it feels very empowering to say “I can improve, but I don’t want to.” (From Two Corollaries to Growth Mindset)

I would instead say this: you don’t need anyone’s permission to learn skills or build things any more. To me, one of the most important benefits of gifted education is that you’re able to work hard on new projects, without needing nearly as much direct guidance as someone that was raised on a normal K-12 school. Which things you decide to chase after is up to you. But I want you to explicitly realize you have this superpower, because it may be the case that nobody told you yet.

This is the real reason for the programming task in this year’s OTIS application homework. I wasn’t trying to see who already knew how to code. I was hoping that I could convince at least a few students, instead of just saying “oh, I can’t code, I give up”, to instead say, “this can’t be that hard, guess I’ll spend an afternoon learning Python”. (To me, if math olympiads students can’t teach themselves a beginner-level task in a field directly adjacent to math, then math olympiads have failed. Listen to more Le Sserafim, kids.)

So the next time you think, “I wish I could do X because it seems super cool”, just remember — this is what search engines were born for. You can learn a new language, or construct your own. Or learn competitive Hanabi. Or try digital art. Or implement Set. And if you’re an OTIS student that wants a new feature, submit a pull request; I pay in spades.

Not all, or even most, of these projects are going to be successful. For me personally, I’d often realize I was more interested in the end result and didn’t actually enjoy the work itself, which was 100% a sign of doom. And that’s okay! No one needs to know about those. (Don’t ask me about all the unfinished novel ideas I have scattered around my hard drive.)

But to put things in perspective, the cost of finding out you’re not interested in something is relatively small; at least for me when things fizzle out, they fizzle out quickly. Whereas the list of “things Evan tried one day because they seemed neat” includes EGMO, Napkin, and OTIS. So, yeah.