College & Career Coach. I help students navigate transitions and discern vocations at https://xitter.cf/t.co/FIBmHDtsYX

Grand Rapids, MI
Joined December 2023
Jane Chamberlain retweeted
Today we are launching ACT Math Fundamentals on Math Academy (905 topics). While building it, we uncovered 88 new "missing middle" topics - skills that appear regularly on the ACT but are rarely taught in a standard curriculum. What's the missing middle? I'm glad you asked... Most people assume that if a student earns A’s in Algebra, Geometry, and Precalculus, they have been taught all the math on the ACT exam. Often, they haven’t. Between standard textbook exercises and the problems that appear on standardized exams sits a large "missing middle": problems where familiar concepts are combined in non-standard ways, disguised in unfamiliar representations, or constrained so that standard textbook scripts fail. With only about a minute per question on average across the ACT math section, encountering these structures for the first time on test day can kill your pacing. If you spend three or four minutes inventing a method on a few unfamiliar problems in the middle of the section, the clock runs out before you even reach the questions at the end. Step one of serious test prep is making sure you never have to invent those methods on the spot. ACT Math Fundamentals spans the entire breadth of the exam - from core algebra, geometry, and statistics up through matrices, 2D and 3D vectors, complex numbers, conic sections, logarithms, and full trigonometry - and integrates all of these "missing middle" skills directly into our knowledge graph. Students begin with an adaptive diagnostic and work through the lessons untimed (with periodic quizzes to verify retention), first repairing upstream prerequisite gaps and then building fluency across every problem structure the exam tests. And once students complete Fundamentals, they will promote into ACT Math Prep (launching soon) - a dedicated training ground of high-fidelity practice exams designed purely to master the strict timing of the actual test. Over the next week, I’ll share a mini-series unpacking what this "missing middle" looks like and why standard curricula miss it.
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“Demoralized men are not depressed in the clinical sense. They can still enjoy things, still function when motivated, still complete tasks that interest them. What they lack is a felt sense that effort connects to a future worth reaching.” New piece by Bruno Manno: aibm.org/commentary/why-cant…
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People, including donors, don’t trust institutions led by people who are neither just nor truth-seeking.
The reputational destruction of Prof. David Sabatini was one of the worst excesses of the Great Awokening / Me-Too era. @BillAckman acted bravely in offering him support when the entire academic establishment cancelled him. Without his efforts, the complete absence of due process in his treatment by @MIT might never have come to light. The question I am left with: Will those whose misconduct has finally been exposed pay anything like the price they imposed on Sabatini? Will they be fired? Will their reputations be destroyed? They deserve it. He did not.
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I'm pleased to announce that the Clemson U Board of Trustees has just voted to approve the creation of the Clemson Center for the Study of the American Founding. We're going to Make the American Founding Great Again!!! And created by an immigrant to the USA no less! @elonmusk
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“[Considering a college’s political climate] has gone from more than a quarter of students in 2024 to a third of students now in 2026, so that phenomenon is increasing in intensity.”
Students Increasingly Consider Politics in Choosing a College The latest iteration of the Art & Science Group poll finds that more students on both the left and the right are ruling out institutions based on the political climate of their states. bit.ly/4zyspl5
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Jane Chamberlain retweeted
When I surveyed my colleagues on the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard for examples of how a lack of intellectual and political diversity was distorting scholarship & teaching in their fields, 1 example was avoidance of mentioning one of the most robust findings in happiness research: "Married people are happier. Period." | Why Americans Stopped Falling in Love. open.substack.com/pub/derekt…
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“Families deserve to know not simply what PLNU’s mission statement says, but what students will actually encounter in classrooms, chapel, spiritual formation, and student life.” …PLNU’s refusal to recognize a Turning Point USA chapter…divergence from its evangelical roots.”
The Dean of Students' dissertation was titled “Raging Waters of Whiteness: Addressing White Evangelical Racism in Higher Education.” It's all downhill from there. thecollegefix.com/in-christ-…
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Jane Chamberlain retweeted
I hope more conservative Christians get to voting. Here are two unnecessary obstacles I see preventing that. Then there is a third which I find hard to fix. 1. Perceived Powerlessness: The Christian feels that there's no point or that voting and taking action are basically ineffective so why bother. This is easily fixed as thinking of it as a stewardship before God, to contribute your vote and advocacy for love of neighbor as obedience to Christ rather than saying that if you can't singlehandedly change everything there's no need to bother yourself with it. Yes, your vote counts as faithfulness, which is what God asks of you. 2. Inability to Choose Suboptimal Candidates: This is just the way it is. It's not just a "lesser of two evils" choice but a "make things better than they otherwise would be" choice. When choosing a school for your kids you do it. When choosing where to live you do it. When choosing a church you do it. It is the nature of limited choices that causes us angst about non-optimal choices. Just make things better. I no longer ring my hands at this now that I see my job as not maintaining my own purity but as benefiting my neighbors the best I can within the available options. 3. Misinformation and Tribalism: Yeah. I don't currently know how to address this in a wide way. Do your research. Fact check the people you TRUST (that's probably the single best piece of advice I have). And try to keep your priorities in order. Still, those impacted by misinformation and tribalism will likely think it's only other people who have that problem. So, I reiterate, fact check the people you trust and not just by getting Grok to agree with you. Vote like it matters.
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Jane Chamberlain retweeted
Peter Thiel on how you should think about your future: "What you end up doing when you think of the future as indefinite is you pick a job that you think will look good on your resume, because it will lead to a different job later on. There's even a credentialing version where you go to grad school, you get a consulting job, and you think of it as this branching tree diagram where you never really do something that you want to do. You can think of the future on three horizons. Very short-term is: are you going to be happy, and will you be learning a lot? Medium-term is: how good is it on your resume? And very long-term is: are you working on something important or meaningful? We're in a skewed world where we overweight the medium-term and underweight some combination of the short-term and the long-term. I would recalibrate to focus on the short-term and the long-term, and forget about the medium-term."
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Parents - this is a great data source for you and your college bound students. No it should not be the only valid data source, but it’s good information.
Where does your college stand? The university map covers 1,557 four-year schools on two questions: how well each could absorb a hit to enrollment or revenue, and how its graduates do. Refreshed this week with the newest IPEDS and College Scorecard data. kylesaunders.com/university-…
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Next year, LSU is “opening up its cadet corps to students who aren’t in ROTC…A “National Security Battalion” will consist of students who want to serve in government and business and learn leadership through a military structure, he said.
Hegseth: Hillsdale, Liberty, LSU, Miss. State, Tuskegee Will Develop Cadet Corps The defense secretary criticized Ivy League & liberal arts institutions as “anti-American, DEI-worshipping woke factories” while announcing partnerships with 5 universities. bit.ly/4yoXEP9
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Jane Chamberlain retweeted
Michael McDonald: "I think it's amazing tribute that adoption is a wonderful option."
This is one of the most amazing stories you’ll sea this year. Adopted Man discovers his biological father is… MICHAEL MCDONALD! Thanks to KFYR TV for reporting. #YachtRockRadio #YachtRock
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Jane Chamberlain retweeted
Pro-tip about 3-year college degrees. The ones that lop a year off the bottom (freshman year) are good. The ones that lop a year off the top (senior year) are bad. Ask first, before you hire one!
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Jane Chamberlain retweeted
Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed helped lead a 2007 University of Michigan protest against an event featuring three self-described former Muslim terrorists who said they had left extremist organizations and converted to Christianity, with El-Sayed celebrating a student walkout by declaring: “We’ve done something good today, and we need to keep that going in the future.” The speakers were Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Anani and Kamal Saleem, who were touring U.S. campuses discussing what they described as their former involvement with the Palestine Liberation Organization and Muslim Brotherhood before becoming Christians. Organizers said the event was intended to educate students about the dangers of Islamist extremism, while protesters argued it generalized Muslims as a group. El-Sayed was then vice president of the University of Michigan Muslim Students Association. Recent congressional testimony from extremism researcher Lara Burns described how Muslim Brotherhood members established a U.S. presence beginning in the 1960s and operated particularly through Muslim student associations on college campuses.
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So the family asks two things of us that look like opposites and are not, writes @lukeburgis It asks us to become persons: to meet resistance, to hold our convictions under pressure, to refuse the lies that buy a fragile peace. And it asks us to stay bound to one another through all of it. The family is the first place we learn to be both the one and the many—fully ourselves, and fully someone else's. If we cannot learn it there, we will struggle to find it anywhere.
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Buyer’s Beware
Here's my absolute favorite genre of public relations spin. When a university HAS to release it's 10th day enrollment numbers. But, those numbers are catastrophically bad. So they issue a 1,000 word press release that is full of nothing but fluff. They released the first version of the article on September 3, which didn't contain the actual enrollment number. Then they update that exact same press release a week later that buries the most important number at the bottom. Actual enrollment. I highlighted it in the screenshot below. You can barely see it. And they also don't include previous year's enrollment numbers so a person has to go Googling to see actually how bad it is. Western Illinois had 5,337 students enrolled in the Fall of 2025. This year, it's 4,447. That's a 16.7% decrease. Which is, like I said above, catastrophically bad. In 2008, WIU's enrollment was 13,175. They have lost two-thirds of their students in less than 20 years.
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“This digital platform is designed exclusively for use by teachers and parents—not students. All planning tools, instructional resources, and community features live online, while student learning remains grounded in physical books, in person discussion, and written work.”
The Official Golden Thread Curriculum is here. Developed in exclusive partnership with @Hillsdale College, it brings the story of the Western tradition into the classroom with rigor, coherence, and a commitment to truth. Volume I is now available—giving teachers the tools to help students encounter the figures, faiths, and ideas that shaped the West. The thread begins here. 🧵 Learn more: goldenthreadacademic.com
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“We find that not taking calculus decreases an applicant’s probability of receiving an admit recommendation by 16 percentage points”
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Jane Chamberlain retweeted
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances. What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation. Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture. It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off. Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle. It starts with METR. Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models. He proposes METR for this purpose. But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock. Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio. And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem. This stock was worth $500 million early last year. It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later. METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth. Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well. But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much. The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all. The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll. If this were the end of it, that's bad. But that isn't all. The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom. The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others. They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's. All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile. As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder. Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created. From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts. This itself is an objective fact. The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it. But the problem also goes in the other direction: If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die. Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen. Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly. They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic. And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly. What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations. The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture. And that feedback loop is winning. That's what Jacob Coxon is. China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China. America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level. Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences. Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully. It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America. Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear. Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers. Congress must investigate. Evidence and Github in next post. Then some supplementary figures.
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