Father, teacher, San Jose State football fan since 1968.
Novato, CA
Joined April 2012
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Matt Hamilton retweeted
In this incredible, Meet the Expert, Reading Rockets video Dr. Louisa Cook Moats shares that,
"Spelling is a visible record of language processing. It is language written down. If we know how to look at a child’s spelling, we can tell what a child understands about speech sounds, about how we use letters to represent those and, as it turns out, anything that is going to cause trouble with a child’s reading will show up even more dramatically in the child’s spelling and writing." (You can watch the video here: youtube.com/watch?v=SoX21V8-…
Language written down! I love that statement! Spelling, whether a correct, or incorrect spelling, is a linguistic window offering us the opportunity to engage in effective, efficient, informed instruction and intervention.
Which is why I am so honored to spend an entire year with Michigan educators focused on spelling!
Today we finished our third session, and I could not be more grateful for the commitment, dedication, and enthusiasm the Michigan educators joining me for this year-long series have embraced this series!!
A big thank you to Dr. Kim St. Martin and the MiMTSS team for this honor! @MiMTSSTACenter
Matt Hamilton retweeted
Most people treat prayer like a substitute for action.
But God can do things that you cannot do, and God will not do things that you can do.
I saw @StephenCaggiano say this on X, and I can't stop thinking about it. Thanks Stephen for inspiring this post!
I’m a brain surgeon.
I’ve spent three decades watching what actually changes a brain and a body, and I’ve learned that the same principle holds in the operating room and in ordinary life.
Here's how to stop waiting for God to do the part he already gave you the ability to do.
1. God can do what you cannot.
He heals what no surgeon can reach. He changes hearts no effort can force. He carries what is too heavy for you.
Those are the things you pray for and leave with Him.
2. God will not do what you can.
He will not exercise for you. He will not choose the next thought for you. He will not lower your blood sugar or build your habits while you stay in bed.
Those are the things He designed your brain and body to handle.
3. He works in you so you can work.
Philippians 2:13 says it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.
The desire and the power come from Him. The operating still belongs to you.
4. This is self-help, not self-reliance.
You are not on your own. You are not the source, you are the surgeon who has been given a functioning brain, a body that responds to choices, and the help of the One who designed both.
5. Operate on the part that is yours.
Stop praying for flat abs while refusing to move. Stop asking God to quiet your mind while you keep feeding it the same loop.
Pick up the scalpel. Do the next right thing your brain and body can actually do. Then trust him with everything that remains beyond you.
This isn’t self-reliance.
It’s self-brain surgery under the God who both enables and expects you to operate.
Philippians 2:13 has been saying this longer than any productivity system has.
Follow for daily connections between neuroscience and faith to help you flourish in your life.
Save this for the next time you've been begging God to do something so that you remember the parts that he expects you to do. And share this with a friend, because we can always use a reminder.
Click the link in my bio to learn more about self-brain surgery.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
Un terapeuta iraní dibujó la anatomía de los músculos y los huesos humanos en la espalda de una modelo para ilustrar las técnicas de masaje
Matt Hamilton retweeted
Here's a link to the YouTube video that the children are using. 🎉
youtu.be/IsHoLGk0ETc?si=7cvn…
Matt Hamilton retweeted
A community college professor named Marty Lobdell taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years. The video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings online, with over 10 million views.
He spent his career watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because no one had taught them how their brain actually works when learning something difficult.
The lecture, “Study Less Study Smart,” contains a powerful framework.
Your brain cannot sustain focus the way most people believe. Studies show the average learner hits a wall between 25 and 30 minutes. After that, efficiency collapses. You’re still sitting there, but almost nothing is being absorbed.
Lobdell told the story of a student who planned to study 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week. Thirty hours total. She failed every class. She was not lacking effort. She was confusing time near books with actual learning. The fix is simple: when focus drops, stop, take a 5 minute rewarding break, then return. That reset makes a massive difference.
He also destroyed the myth of highlighting and re reading. Recognition is not the same as recall. To prove it, he read 13 random letters. Almost no one remembered them. Then he turned them into “Happy Thursday.” The entire room recalled them instantly. The brain stores meaning, not repetition.
This is why elaborative encoding works so well.
Finally, he shared the most important principle: 80 percent of study time should be active recitation. Close the book and explain the material in your own words. Teach it to someone else or an empty chair. Retrieval is where real learning happens.
His closing line stuck with me: If this information does not change your
behaviour, you have not actually learned it.
The best students do not study more hours. They stop confusing the feeling of studying with the reality of learning.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.
Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.
Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.
Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.
You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.
The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
Gabriel García Márquez şunları söyledi:
Altmış yaşına ulaştıysanız, paraları saymayı bırakın ve anları saymaya başlayın.
Çünkü siz "her ihtimale karşı" tasarruf etmeye devam ederken, "her ihtimale karşı" durumlar dişlerini bileyliyor, yorulmanızı bekliyorlar ki kendinize izin vermediğiniz şeylerden faydalanabilsinler.
Zaten çalıştınız, çocuklarınızı büyüttünüz, acı çektiniz.
Şimdi sıra sende; şafağı sakin bir şekilde izle, hep ertelediğin şeyleri kendine ısmarla, en pahalı kahveyi vicdan azabı çekmeden ve gülümseyerek iç.
Çılgın girişimlere bulaşmayın ve her zaman "harika bir fikri" olan ama asla fatura ödemeyen "girişimci" oğlunuza kanmayın.
Ve lütfen: çocuklarınızla birlikte yaşamayın. Onları ziyaret edin, onlara sarılın, ama kapınızı ve huzurunuzu koruyun.
Kimsenin sorunlarını omuzlamayın. Torunlar gülmek için vardır, büyütülmek için değil; çocuklar sevilmek için vardır, ihtiyaçlarının karşılanması için değil.
Bu yaşta vücudunuza, ama özellikle de zihninize iyi bakın. Hastalıklar veya ilaçlar hakkında çok fazla konuşmayın; seyahatlerden, şarkılardan, mutlu anılardan bahsedin.
Ve eğer biri size "artık işe yaramazsın" derse, zarifçe gülümseyin... ve henüz kimsenin ne olduğunu anlamadığını hatırlayın.
Eğer biri size "artık işe yaramazsın" derse, zarifçe gülümseyin... ve bu kişinin henüz kimseye borçlu olmadan çok yol kat etmenin ne demek olduğunu anlamadığını hatırlayın. Gülün, yaşayın ve başkalarının istedikleri gibi kırgınlaşmalarına izin verin.
Zaten kazandınız: hâlâ buradasınız, dimdik ayakta duruyorsunuz, bir hikayeniz ve tarzınız var.
Ve bu, gerçekten de bir ayrıcalık!
Gabriel García Márquez
Edebiyat Ödülü sahibi dünyaca ünlü Kolombiyalı yazar
Matt Hamilton retweeted
I know I repeat myself on here, but I need to reiterate this routine. I have found explicitly teaching words in pairs to be quite effective. An example pair would be shortage & surplus. Here is the routine I use on a daily basis.
1. Say the word
2. Students chorally repeat the word
This is the beginning of mapping a word into long-term memory.
3. Provide a student friendly defintion
4. Provide examples of this word in context
Pictures/Visuals can be used as an aid. For example, sweeping your hand up for the word ascend and then down for descend would most likely aid the process of mapping words into memory.
5. Repeat the first 4 steps for the antonym (unrelated word)
Mapping words into long-term memory is aided by saying the word, spelling the word, and learning the meaning of the word.
6. Have students differentiate between the pair. Provide an example sentence & students have to decide if that is an example of say the word shortage or surplus. They do this on mini white boards so they get practice spelling the words right away. Spelling words aids in mapping words into long-term memory.
7. Then encourage students to write other words that are synonyms or related to the word in some way. This builds semantic connections through categorization.
8. Grab a students white board and ask how all of these words are related? Extending learning here.
All of this moves quickly. You can teach a pair in 4 minutes. Only 4 minutes.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
We actually have some very close friends at the College Board and apparently the executive team is in full panic mode that this video is spreading on the Internet. Sorry, not sorry.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
As a medical school professor, I was taught that lost cartilage is gone forever.
Stanford just proved that wrong.
Researchers discovered that blocking a single protein (15-PGDH) -- which rises as we age -- can actually REGROW joint cartilage in aging mice.
The results:
- Two injections per week for 4 weeks dramatically thickened knee cartilage
- An oral pill version worked too
- Chondrocyte cells reprogrammed to a more youthful state
- Human cartilage samples from knee replacements also began regenerating
No stem cells needed. Just reversing an age-related enzyme.
The Phase 1 clinical trial for the oral version is already underway.
This could make knee and hip replacements obsolete.
What excites me most: 15-PGDH is a "gerozyme" -- an enzyme that accumulates with aging and drives tissue decline. Blocking it doesn't just treat symptoms. It addresses the metabolic root cause.
Full breakdown coming on the Health Longevity Secrets podcast.
Source: sciencedaily.com/releases/20…
#Longevity #Arthritis #MetabolicHealth #AntiAging #HealthLongevitySecrets
Matt Hamilton retweeted
To: Admitted Students on Ivy Decision Day
From: UATX
Congratulations. Getting in was hard and you should be proud. Now here’s some unsolicited advice so you don’t waste the next four years.
Go to class. We know this sounds obvious. But as the New York Times reported recently, Harvard students routinely skip class, rarely speak up when they're there, and focus on their devices instead of the discussion. Faculty say few students do enough preparation to contribute meaningfully. The average college student spends about 20 hours a week on class and studying combined. At UATX, we aim for 50. That’s the difference between a part-time commitment and a full-time job. You (or your parents) are about to spend upwards of $90K a year. If you don't show up, you're paying roughly $250 per skipped lecture for the privilege of sleeping in.
Read the books yourself. Your generation is the first to arrive at college post-literate — raised on short-form video, dependent on algorithms, and increasingly incapable of sitting with a difficult text long enough to let it change your mind. Ninety percent of college students use AI academically. This makes you more reliant on the authority of others. Most professors will also stand between you and the text. They’ll tell you what Marx “really meant,” what Aristotle “failed to see,” as though an academic in 2026 has outsmarted minds that shaped civilizations. The good professors do the opposite: they put you in front of the book and they work with you to find what a great mind has to teach us directly. Find those professors, and read everything yourself.
Say what you actually think. Seventy-three percent of conservative students report withholding their political views in class out of fear their grades will suffer. Our advice isn't political; it's intellectual. If you spend four years learning to say what's expected instead of what's true, you’ll graduate roughly where you started — just older, more credentialed, and more practiced at self-censorship. One study finds that nearly half of students show no measurable gains in “critical thinking” after two years in college. Keep this in mind as you make decisions about which professors to take and how to do your assignments. Taking a small hit on your paper to gain integrity and wisdom is usually worth it.
Ask for real grades. Sixty percent of Harvard undergraduate grades are now A’s. Twenty-five years ago, it was 20%. It got so bad that the legendary Harvard professor, Harvey Mansfield, started giving students two grades: the official one for their transcript, and a private one reflecting what they actually earned. He called the official grades “ironic.” So here's a suggestion: Take your A, but also ask your professors for a “Mansfield grade” so that you know where you stand. And don’t avoid difficult courses to keep your transcript clean for law school.
Get work experience before you graduate. Forty-two percent of recent college graduates are working jobs that don't require a degree. Many employers are projecting the next few years to be the worst college grad job market in years. A degree alone — even from an Ivy — is not a job guarantee. Seek out apprenticeships, internships, and real work starting freshman year. The students at UATX are connected with entrepreneurs and business leaders from day one. Many will graduate with four years of work experience alongside their degree. You can build something similar at your school, but you'll have to do it yourself.
Understand how debt shapes your life. If you're paying full freight or even half, do the math with your eyes open. Your decision to take on debt will quietly reshape the trajectory of your adult life through countless small surrenders: the job you take because it’s safe instead of starting the company. The city you choose to live in. The relationship you delay and the kids you don’t have. For women, a $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the odds of marriage by 2% per month in the first four years after graduation. None of that shows up in the college brochure. If you're going to take on debt, treat it like the constraint it is from day one: save aggressively and make sure every dollar is buying something that will actually compound in your favor.
Find the people who take school seriously. The best thing about a great school isn't the lectures or the library. It's the handful of professors and students who are genuinely there to learn — who read ahead, argue in good faith, and push you to be sharper. Find them. UATX is a small community of those who seek a serious education. At a larger university, you have to build this community yourself.
*
The most dangerous thing about an elite university is that it is very easy to do nothing for four years and still come out looking successful. The transcript will say you excelled. The diploma with the fancy crest will open certain doors. Your parents will be proud. And yet you will have coasted — through inflated grades, unread books, and borrowed opinions.
Getting in is an accomplishment. Making the next four years worth it will be harder, and the right decisions will change everything.
We wish you luck.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
As a teacher myself, I can confirm that the best teacher-mentor-role models and colleagues I have ever had were, without exception, independent-minded mavericks who never bought into whatever fads were ruling schools of education. Nowadays, this paints a target on your back.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
When brilliant teachers emerge, they disappear. Jaime Escalante created one of the finest AP calculus programs in the country. He could not scale it. Marva Collins founded an exceptional school. She could not replicate her excellence across ten other schools.
The question is not why these teachers are geniuses. The question is why we have no system to transmit their genius.
If Escalante had been a martial arts master, he would have founded a school. His best students would open branches displaying their lineage. Over generations, a coherent tradition would spread. This happens in martial arts, music, dance, and craft traditions.
It does not happen in education.
I call this absence The Missing Institution. In the absence of government monopoly, we would have seen the spontaneous creation of hundreds of pedagogical lineages, each designed to transmit the artistry of a master teacher.
Instead, teacher training is controlled by education professors who publish research papers, not by virtuoso teachers who practice their craft daily.
Montessori and Waldorf escaped the system. They created their own teacher training lineages outside government control. KIPP Academies created an internal leadership program. Hi Tech High licensed its own teachers. The moment schools escape government domination, they spontaneously create The Missing Institution.
For underprivileged children, this absence is catastrophic. They need schools that transmit cultural capital through immersion in a living tradition.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
A professor of engineering who failed math all through school built one of the most popular online courses in history by figuring out exactly why her brain had been working against her the whole time.
Her name is Barbara Oakley, and she did not teach herself how to learn until she was in her mid-twenties, after leaving the military with a head full of Russian and almost no useful science knowledge. What she discovered about her own brain eventually became a Coursera course that over 4 million people have taken, and the core insight she teaches has been sitting in neuroscience research for decades waiting for someone to explain it in plain language.
Here is the framework that changed how I think about every hard thing I am trying to learn.
Your working memory is an octopus sitting in your prefrontal cortex with exactly four arms. Those four arms reach out and grab pieces of information, hold them in place, and manipulate them while you are actively thinking through a problem. Four is the limit.
When you try to hold more than four things in conscious awareness at once, the arms start dropping things and everything becomes a scramble which is exactly what you experience as confusion when learning something genuinely difficult.
This is not a flaw. It is a design feature. And the entire game of becoming expert at anything is learning how to game this constraint.
The mechanism is something neuroscientists call chunking, and it is the most underexplained concept in all of learning.
When you practice something enough times that it becomes automatic a guitar chord, a grammatical structure, a mathematical procedure, a debugging pattern in code your brain compresses it into a single neural package stored in long-term memory. That compressed package now fits in just one of your four working memory slots instead of filling all of them.
Which means once you have built enough chunks, your octopus can reach down into long-term memory, pull up an entire complex procedure in a single grab, and still have three arms free to work with new information on top of it.
This is what expertise actually is. Not raw intelligence. Not natural talent. A library of compressed patterns that can be retrieved quickly and stacked together to solve problems that would overwhelm a beginner whose working memory is still occupied with fundamentals.
The finding that Oakley emphasizes most forcefully is the one that sounds backward until you understand the mechanism. People with smaller working memory capacity those who can only hold two or three items at once rather than four are often forced to develop stronger chunking habits earlier and more aggressively than people with larger working memories, because they have no choice. Their constraint becomes their training. Over time, that aggressive chunking practice can produce more robust expertise than a larger working memory that never had to be disciplined in the same way.
The most powerful practical implication is this: when you feel completely overwhelmed trying to learn something, that feeling is almost always your four-slot octopus running out of arms. The solution is not to concentrate harder. The solution is to stop, isolate one small piece of the problem, practice it until it compresses into a single chunk, and only then pick up the next piece.
You cannot learn everything at once because your brain was never designed to hold everything at once. It was designed to build libraries of compressed knowledge and retrieve them on demand.
Every expert you have ever admired is not smarter than you. They just have a bigger library.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
A Harvard neuroscience professor who teaches at Harvard Summer School said something that completely changed how I think about memory.
She wasn't talking to journalists. She was answering a student question about why smart people still forget everything they study.
Her name is Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, and she has spent decades researching how the brain actually encodes and retrieves information.
Here's what she said: "The ultimate litmus test of learning is using the information in a new context, not just remembering it for a test."
That one sentence exposes why most people's study habits are completely broken.
Here's the actual system she teaches Harvard students to retain what they learn.
The first thing she kills immediately is the myth that you have one learning style. The idea that you're a "visual learner" or an "auditory learner" is not supported by modern neuroscience. Your brain wants to learn through as many senses as possible at once, because each sense creates a separate neural pathway to the same knowledge. More pathways means faster and stronger recall.
The second technique is spaced repetition, but she explains the mechanism in a way most people never hear. Every time you retrieve a memory, you physically thicken the myelin sheath around that neural connection, which makes the electrical signal travel faster. You aren't just reviewing information you are literally rewiring your brain to access it more quickly.
The third technique floored me. She tells students to teach what they just learned to someone else within 24 hours, because teaching forces you to find the gaps in your own understanding before the exam does it for you.
The fourth is what she calls "feed-forward" instead of feedback. When you get something wrong, don't treat it as a failure. Ask only one question: what would I do differently next time? That reframe keeps the brain in a learning state instead of a defensive one.
But the most underrated insight she shared was this: the single biggest factor in long-term retention is whether you can make the material personally meaningful to your own life. Your brain prioritizes storing things that feel relevant and discards things that feel abstract.
The students who remember everything aren't studying harder. They're studying in a way that the brain was actually designed to absorb.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
Struggling readers don’t catch up with easier books.
In fact, they often fall further behind.
Less complex text =
• less vocabulary exposure
• less syntax development
• less knowledge building
The gap doesn’t close. It widens.
Better inputs → better readers.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
The weight room is the most influential room in a school.
It’s not a place to hang out — it’s a classroom.
A place where habits are built, standards are set, and character is developed.
Matt Hamilton retweeted
Study:
A brain region specialized for recognizing text is smaller or absent in kids with dyslexia. Tutoring that improves their reading partly closes the gap.
‘“In kids with persistent reading struggles, we see that this key part of the brain involved in rapid word recognition is either missing or much smaller.”
Among kids who had a detectable VWFA, the region was smaller on average in children with dyslexia than in typical readers. The size of each child’s VWFA was linked to his or her reading ability: Kids with a smaller VWFA had weaker reading skills. The neural response to seeing words — how strongly the region “lit up” during reading — was also weaker in kids with dyslexia than in typical readers.
After the initial brain scans, some children with dyslexia received the reading intervention, an intensive program that enabled them to improve their reading levels by about one grade level over eight weeks. This group’s reading scores improve significantly, while over the same period, kids with and without dyslexia who did not receive tutoring showed no change in reading ability.
After the reading intervention, the researchers could detect the VWFA in more children with dyslexia, while the chance of detecting this area in kids who had dyslexia but had not gone through the reading program was unchanged. “It’s as if evidence-based intervention builds this region in the dyslexic brain,” Yeatman said. The VWFA also grew larger in children who had completed the reading intervention; it did not grow larger in the control group.’
