Stanford student learning without teachers. Writing about education & how to help your kid thrive. I tell you what your kid thinks so you don't have to guess.
Austin, TX
Joined December 2021
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Harvard says AI tutors are better than Harvard professors.
The students who used an AI tutor in a Harvard physics class (instead of the professor’s teaching) learned more than 2X as much.
The best part?
They did it in less time and were more motivated and engaged.
Get ready for some big things this spring 😁
@AustinScholar is spending her Stanford spring quarter “study abroad” time interning at the NYC campus and creating a year-long “Global School” program for Alpha High.
First stop : Northeast.
2nd: Africa
Austin Scholar retweeted
Great (and flattering) write up of my talk on normalcy in childhood, and a tactical application of it to teens, from @AustinScholar.
Austin Scholar retweeted
I’m excited for this talk.
At Alpha School, our fifth pillar—“character, community, classmates, and culture”—is shaped by how we balance freedom, structure, and rules.
One of our students shared her perspective on the book and its trade-offs: [link below].
I’m having @astupple out to north Austin to discuss parenting. Two weeks from today.
I am ~70% extremely sympathetic to what Aaron is doing, and 30% quite critical. So I cannot wait to talk. I expect to learn a lot.
The topic: freedom in childhood. He wrote a book on it.
Austin Scholar retweeted
I talked to the Secretary of Education about:
• how I got a 1600 SAT score without having had a teacher since the 4th grade
• how I use AI to learn
• the skills I learned at Alpha that prepared me to succeed at Stanford
Her response?
"This is the most exciting thing I've seen in education in a long time."
And when I told her about my newsletter, she asked for the link to subscribe.
I talked to the Secretary of Education about:
• how I got a 1600 SAT score without having had a teacher since the 4th grade
• how I use AI to learn
• the skills I learned at Alpha that prepared me to succeed at Stanford
Her response?
"This is the most exciting thing I've seen in education in a long time."
And when I told her about my newsletter, she asked for the link to subscribe.
If you had told me three years ago (when I first launched my newsletter!) that I should ask the Secretary of Education to subscribe to help transform education nationwide, I would have thought it impossible.
Yet here we are.
Education is changing, and I'm proud to be at the forefront.
If you want to learn more about what Secretary McMahon thought about learning with AI, check out my newsletter:
austinscholar.substack.com/p…
Austin Scholar retweeted
I graduated from Alpha School in 2024.
I'm now a sophomore at Stanford.
The skills I learned at Alpha are what allow me to succeed at Stanford.
@patrick_oshag's podcast with @jliemandt will revolutionize education by bringing awareness to Alpha and TimeBack.
I summarized my thoughts on the podcast and discussed my personal experience in my newsletter yesterday.
I graduated from Alpha School in 2024.
I'm now a sophomore at Stanford.
The skills I learned at Alpha are what allow me to succeed at Stanford.
@patrick_oshag's podcast with @jliemandt will revolutionize education by bringing awareness to Alpha and TimeBack.
I summarized my thoughts on the podcast and discussed my personal experience in my newsletter yesterday.
Here is the podcast: xitter.cf/patrick_oshag/status/1…
This is the definitive conversation on Alpha School with @jliemandt, who is the school’s principal and backer.
What if kids could learn in two hours a day, test in the top 1% nationally, spend their afternoons mastering other great skills, AND love school more than vacation?
What sounds impossible is already happening at Alpha. If you are a parent like me, it’s impossible not to wonder how to make sure your kids will benefit from this enormous innovation.
We explore everything in exhaustive detail—the learning science, the role of software and AI, the central role of motivation, the challenges of scaling to ALL kids, and more.
Joe is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history, who has now decided to devote his next two decades to ushering in a new era of education. I hope this becomes a historically important episode.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:54 What Is Alpha School?
4:02 The 200-Year Education Problem
8:06 Two-Hour Learning
16:41 Academic Results & Efficiency
23:51 AI-Generated Personalized Lessons
35:03 EdTech Fails Without Motivation
41:18 Life Skills & Afternoon Workshops
1:13:35 Gamification
1:29:09 Scaling Challenges
1:46:52 Video Games for Education
1:54:07 Joe's Background & Trilogy
2:14:22 Lessons from Mentors
2:32:29 The Kindest Thing
Austin Scholar retweeted
Spent the week in London filming a documentary about why we don’t build beautiful things like we used to.
President Trump just signed an executive order to bring AI into schools.
But @AlphaSchoolATX is ahead of the game.
They've been using AI to teach students all their academic content in just 2 HOURS/day.
The results? Students are in the 90th percentile nationwide.
The education revolution is coming.
I'm in shock.
I believe that kids are capable of a lot more than people think, but this blows my mind.
The way that Mackenzie and this 11 YEAR OLD are having such a mature, thoughtful discussion about how to manage an AirBnB is beyond impressive.
This quoted post is unavailable.
While I think that there are a multitude of issues with "teaching to the test," I totally see how seeing real-time results is motivational for some kids – especially those who are trying to get their SAT/ACT up for colleges.
Something I've personally found motivational is the achievement percentile, not just the raw score.
E.g. taking the NWEA MAP at the beginning of the school year and testing in the 75th percentile for your grade level, locking in, and taking it again at the end of the year and scoring in the 90th percentile for your grade level.
New study challenges the idea that "teaching to the test" (TTT) damages student motivation. In fact, it may actually increase it when used strategically.
There is clearly a broader ethical issue here in the sense that learning is obviously more than easily testable/ decontextualised content but this does challenge negative assumptions about test preparation.
Full paper here: sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
