Are Fun And Excellence Mutually Exclusive?

The stereotypical "smart" kid is quiet, serious, and always studying. So why does he get rejected from HYPSM (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT)?

It is an understandable misconception of how the very top students appear; we see lots of bright students who do fit this stereotype, so it's natural to assume that the even better students fit this stereotype that much more. But as someone who has spent decades intimately interacting with some of the most brilliant minds of my generation, and currently has the incredible privilege of teaching once-in-a-lifetime caliber of students every day, I have extensive firsthand insights into top intellectuals and their attitudes towards learning.

The best students don’t just study hard; they play with their intelligence. Their learning is not a pain; it is a joy. The child who gets 100% on all his tests at school, participates in five or six different academic extracurriculars, and spends every waking moment studying for tests, does not get accepted into the top schools. Rather, the student who hosts international conferences, wins national competitions, or leads cutting edge research (while generally getting A's in the background) is both more academically skilled and more qualified for top universities. I know countless kids in both categories. And it is not possible to be in the latter category while hating the journey.

One area of academic play that I personally love is Certamen. This is a competition that tests knowledge of Latin and Ancient Rome, and the international competitions that I host gathers particularly impressive players.

Here is an example conversation that occurred during a competition among a team of top players who are friends across different schools from one of the most competitive states:

Me (as moderator): Bonus Question 1 for Team M only! Which member of the Seven against Thebes--

Player 2: Adrastus!

Player 1: <Nods in agreement>

Player 2: Sorry continue, continue... <lots of laughter>

Me: Which member of the Seven against Thebes was the only one to survive the expedition?

Player 2: Okay, it is Adrastus!

Player 1: It is Adrastus!

Player 2: Yeah, it is Adrastus!

Player 1: I read about this yesterday.

Player 2: Good talk. <lots more laughing players>

Player 1: Final answer, Adrastus.

(That was the correct answer.)

This is what playful mastery looks like: the confidence to enjoy knowledge out loud, not just quietly ace a test. Certamen permits (and in fact, encourages) interrupting questions early, and students on a team may say whatever they like to one another during the bonus questions. Underneath the laughter is a world-class level of preparation, pattern recognition, and recall. Multiple players not only knew the Seven against Thebes story from Greek mythology, but had practiced buzzing in for questions on that topic so many times that they both accurately predicted the rest of the question and knew the answer.

Nearly every question of the three-hour event received a similarly impressive response in multiple breakout rooms at once, across a very wide range of fair game topics. Feel free to explore some summary reels from my Certamen events here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCijgKeT5JZSLvwjxoWkgfkw. Notice how throughout each of the videos, you can see that the children are laughing, exchanging inside jokes about obscure trivia facts, and having a great time while answering extremely impressive questions.

Academic playfulness is not only for children; it is the start, not the end, of the journey. I met my husband at Stanford in the math department, as we were both pursuing honors math degrees. For my honors thesis, I conducted "time travel research." More precisely, I built on a specific computer science oracle I read about in an academic, yet intentionally entertaining paper. That oracle was motivated by closed timelike curves (a type of limited time travel allowed by certain solutions to Einstein's equations when the universe is modeled as a Lorentzian manifold). While the science fiction angle of the project made my research especially fun, I still proved two original theorems, and I would love an interested student to expand upon my results involving P vs. LOGSPACE in the future.

Yet with as much fun as I had with that paper, my husband enjoys pondering unsolved math problems even more. Ever since he was a small child, he has been attempting unsolved math problems as a hobby. Literallly yesterday, I found him sitting in an armchair drawing graphs for hours. ("Graph" in the context of a network of nodes and edges, not a coordinate grid plot.) We have been out of college for years, and this research was unrelated to any class, career advancement, or published paper. His genuine love for the material and ability to play around with different graphs as a source of entertainment is why he won the best math honors thesis award, and I did not; this level of joy in the process of playing with different nodes and edges, and his habit of doing this for a lifetime led to the best research results.

These are each examples of the cumulation of many years of hard work. But what about the early years of learning? Surely those early years must be serious and focused in order to climb to such a level?

While hard work is obviously essential -- there is no shortcut around it -- even the youngest students can engage in intellectually rigorous play. For example, I had a memorable batch of first and second graders who were both particularly chatty and particulary advanced for their age. We were covering the concept of doubling, and how repeated doubling of numbers grows so much faster than repeated addition. In order to demonstrate this principle, I posed the question of how many times would it take to fold a paper before the thickness of the paper reached from their chair to the moon. Of course, they are initially confused because paper is typically way wider than it is thick, and the paper itself is not close to reaching the moon. But after we folded the paper six times in a row, and I ask the students to measure the thickness of their folded paper, the students now internalize the question. The guesses are what you'd expect from 7-year-olds: "one hundred billion!" "999 quadrillion!"

The answer is actually 42. The students were highly suspicious at first, but we spent the next twenty minutes roughly doubling by hand (with a slideshow of visuals for scale), pausing after each to guess, calculate, and share their delight. With each leap in scale, their excitement grew. Did I ultimately hear small children chanting powers of two at me for weeks thereafter? Absolutely. But not only did this impress upon the children the "speed" difference between multiplication and addition, but also it revealed to them how exciting big academic ideas can be.

Even for students who struggle academically, learning can still become a positive experience -- it just takes more gamification early on in order to win the student's attention when the siren calls of Roblox and TikTok beckon from another tab. One time, I tutored this small group of struggling students who could not consistently write complete sentences. We sang along to Schoolhouse Rock grammar videos, played Blookets to drill the grammar topics further, then played "the essay game" (an invention of mine that involves a student saying a thesis for an essay, each of the three topic sentences of the main body paragraphs, then asking an essay prompt in return before hitting the chess clock). Within two months, I had the entire group writing cohesive, complete essays. Were these students now suddenly inspired to do their own independent musings on grammar? Not at all! But they had become capable of rapidly assembling their own thoughts into an organized essay, and they no longer dreaded the concept of going to class -- both within a relatively short span of time. That is the power of play.

Of course, having the ability to sit still and focus is an essential life skill. For that very reason, I do not gamify every class, or even most classes. Some students benefit from games more than others, especially since so many struggle with severe screen addictions already; other families keep their students primarily off of screens, and have their child take my classes simply with a notebook and pencil. The learning itself should be the fun part, not simply relying on games as a crutch.

Not every moment of learning can be thrilling. Musicians must practice scales regularly; simply playing favorite songs is not enough to improve, and no serious musician has the time to be bribed with a piece of candy for each note played. But a close family friend, who has won international classical piano awards and has spent countless hours quietly preparing behind the scenes, plays the most incredible background music at family gatherings that perfectly fit the conversation -- and does so for love and enjoyment of the music. Similarly, I assure you that my little brother has lost more chess games than you have ever played. Losing when you've worked that hard is decidedly not fun. However, not only did his hard work earn him the meaningful experience of representing the USA as board one for his age division back when he was 16, but he and his other little grandmaster friends spoke speed chess games to each other during our mutual friend board game parties; he and his chess friends genuinely enjoyed pondering the game.

In each of these instances, as well as for every other expert I know personally, the slow, tedious, and sometimes even unpleasant steps build towards those moments of awe and joy.

The best moments of class are fun because of the academic substance itself: a whispered “wow” when Vieta’s formulas make a messy problem suddenly clean, or the eager demonstration of a student who stays after class to demonstrate consistently solving a Rubik’s cube in under fifteen seconds. Instilling the actual love of learning is a critical part of teaching, thus sending students on a journey to learn -- and love learning -- for life.