An OLD 2019 Application Work List

 Application Materials Preparation

As we are on the tight moment when full-scale writing for application materials preparation is going on, here is a list of materials that we need to start preparing during the NEXT TWO Weeks.

1.  Write a CV/Resume where you list your academic credentials and ECA along with your achievements. You need to record everything from Class 9 onwards. Most of the colleges will want this CV/Resume. 
2.  Prepare at least 2 different Why Major Essays based on your interests. Most popular Majors with Intl. Students are (a) Comp Engg. / Science/Studies, (b) Economics / Business/Intl. Studies, (c) Biomed/Premed / Pharmacy / Chemistry, (c) Physics/ Math / Astrophysics, (d) Engineering [Mechanical/ Chemical/ Electrical /Environmental].
3. We also need to start working on a Common App Essay - the most important FLAGSHIP Essay.
4. Prepare at least 2 Research Concepts after consultation with me. (a) One Technical Research Paper based on your Why Major topic, (b) One General Research paper based on a recent book published from USA in the past 6-8 years.
5. Start working on the Financial Aid papers. We shall need the following items for this. (a) Tax Return of this year or Previous year, (b) Filled out ISFAA Form, (c) CSS Profile Account opening. 
6.  If you want to upload any Music/Art Portfolio - talk to me immediately.
7.  If you think that your ECA / Activity List is not strong enough, you are required to ask for ECA placements. Our COMMON Activity list item will be "Fellow, Logophiles Institute of Languages and Critical Thinking." In the description part, you will write different things, based on your reading assignments. Include Poetry, Novels, Philosophy, Cultural History, Political Science etc.  

Student-designed Work List for 5 Days in March-April

 Work Plan for Next Week (27^th March to 2^nd April), 2025

Mathematics

1.       Numbers

i.                 The ordinary process of number manipulation.

ii.                Prime numbers, factors, multiples

iii.               Indices, powers and roots

iv.               Simple manipulation of surds

v.                Rationalizing the denominator

vi.               Natural numbers, integers and rational and irrational numbers

vii.             Weights, measures and money

viii.            Fractions, decimals, ratio, proportion and percentage

ix.               Expressing numbers to a given degree accuracy

x.                Solve problems using upper and lower bounds where values are given to a degree of accuracy

xi.               Numbers in standard form

(All of these are basics of Mathematics but these are places where I make majority of my mistakes, therefore I want to develop a deep understanding of these concepts.)

English Literature

1.      Analyse the characters in “An Inspector Calls”.

2.      Study Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116”.

3.      Study Pip’s psychological development in “Great Expectations”.

Reading Materials:

1.      Wuthering Heights
2.      Never Let Me Go
3.      The Handmaids Tale
4.      Hamlet
5.      Pride and Prejudice

Physics

1.      Forces and Motion

2.      Electricity

Extra Work (out of syllabus):

1.      Started a course on Particle Physics

Link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/particle-physics/home/welcome

Chemistry:

• 1.      Energetics
• 2.      Electrolysis

Biology:

1.      Plant Biology

 Economics:

1.      Economic Growth
2.      Inflation
3.      Unemployment

Bangla:

1.      Read one story from রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুরের “গল্পগুচ্ছ” every WEEK.

2.      Do assigned homework from school. 

Modern Writers' AI Syndrome

It's a striking thing I've noticed watching my students work on their US college application essays this year. In sharp contrast to previous years, this generation wants to produce the finest, final version on their very first draft. They expect not to need a second draft, a third, a fourth, or a fifth — they want to leap straight to the final draft and make it perfect on the first attempt. I'd call this the ChatGPT syndrome, or the AI syndrome: just as AI-generated text appears instantly polished, this generation believes they too can produce a super-perfect essay in one go. Looking back at the earlier days - roughly since 2001 to 2018, 2019, maybe 2020 - students understood they had to go draft after draft after draft until they arrived at something close to a perfect score, a perfect essay. Even then, there was no such thing as perfection; we simply reached a point where perfecting further made no sense because the deadline was too close. 

So I want to tell my students plainly: don't chase the super-perfect essay from the start. There is no such thing as perfection. Instead, start writing draft after draft. Fill your pages with weak drafts, bad drafts, early drafts, pointless drafts, even useless drafts - but drafts nonetheless. Don't reach for perfection on attempt one.

And I'll say this knowing it may invite criticism, even resentment: until a student has produced at least three drafts, I won't properly look into the essay, meaning I won't invest real time in it. I'll give it a cursory glance, but I won't read it in the true sense of the word "read." So please take note. Thank you.

For a Spanish Conquest with Arabi

Quixote & Sancho by Picasso 

I had a very interesting evening with my student, Arabi. I have been meaning to write a short piece about how I met him, what my first impression of him was, and how I see him developing — and how, eventually, we shall end our short-lived camaraderie, because these things are all ephemeral in the very end. We began by talking about how we could add Spanish as the third languge on his Common Application portal. That discussion of Spanish as a language soon turned toward the great writers of the Spanish language. I happened to mention the inimitable Cervantes' Don Quixote the knight who wakes into dementia, where the Don represents idealism and his servant Sancho Panza represents a more grounded, down-to-earth attitude. I also mentioned to Arabi that Spain has produced a few other artists of the finest quality, products of a modern world. 

Apart from Cervantes, I brought up Pablo Neruda and the inevitable Federico García Lorca. I also mentioned how Picasso, though not Spanish by birth, lived a long time in Spain, and much of his painting draws on his Spanish experience. I could not help mentioning that Salman Rushdie also wrote a novel called Quichotte, set in modern times, a very funny, very comic novel that tries to mimic the comedy and playfulness of Cervantes' original. I also brought up an important booklet-length study, Myths of Modern Individualism, by Ian Watt, the famous author of The Rise of the Novel. In it, Watt discusses the great individualists of the sixteen, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe, that great singular man of the eighteenth century. None of them married or started a family; all of them lived lonely lives, set against the norms of their societies. 

We discussed all of this, and at the end I told Arabi that the best way to write is to talk without any guard, automatic writing, if you are really ok with the term. In such a writing, you talk without any guard, which gives free play to all the emotions and thought processes that come to a writer. It is sometimes compared with stream-of-consciousness technique, though automated writing is less of a technique than a practice — one I first found genuinely effective with students in a creative writing course, where I had them write their first pieces of fiction. These are some of the things Arabi and I discussed today, and I am very happy to note that he wrote around nine hundred and eighty words in about twenty-five minutes — a real achievement by any standard. 

Shakuntala Ajkal: a few more steps

Lemona's thoughts on Wednesday (26th August) Session at Actomania

I went to Shilpakala Academy with Mamun Bhai (Shahidul Mamun), who brought printed copies of the plays for our reading session, along with snacks for everyone. This was actually my second meeting and orientation at Shilpakala Academy, the first having taken place three or four days earlier. Upon arrival, we met the members of Actomania, and Mamun Bhai gave a brief talk to the group, introducing the profile and works of Choyon Khairul Habib. This was my third interaction in relation to the play itself. We were later joined by Dr Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman Saklaen, Professor of English Literature at IUB and an Ibsen scholar with strong ties to the theatre community. Mamun Bhai introduced him and spoke about his academic and theatrical work before he addressed the group. 

Dr Saklaen had come to give a dramaturgical talk on The Alchemist, the novel that has been adapted into a play now at the final stage of production and rehearsal, and his session offered rich insight into the dramaturgy behind that adaptation. During the visit, he also brought along two books he had edited himself and presented both publications to Mamun Bhai; these will later be handed over to the Actomania Rotating Library. He then conducted a workshop with us, followed by a series of warm-up exercises that helped settle everyone into the afternoon's work. 

During the session, Talha Zubaer, a young theatre performer, introduced me to Elma, a charming young performer from NSU who studies Computer Science and is also a trained dancer and theatre practitioner. We fell into a collaborative conversation about Shakuntala Aajkal, sharing our initial thoughts and getting to know each other's interests, including how we might envision the play being staged, the nature of the performances, and the relationship between its characters and different time periods. We began by reading a scene involving both Shakuntala and Menaka to get a feel for the play, then gradually moved into longer scenes, continuing until Actomania broke for the day, after which I finished the reading with Elma and exchanged contact details with her. 

Towards the end of the meeting, I spoke further with Talha and Elma about my thoughts on staging the play. I explained that, since I have not yet had the chance to examine the play in depth with Choyon Sir, the playwright and my teacher, I haven't formalised my directorial approach. I also felt it would be valuable for Elma, and for any potential performers, to hear directly from the playwright how he has conceived and characterised Shakuntala and Menaka. I shared my interest in playing Shakuntala and directing the production, while also weighing the possibility of directing another pair of performers in those roles, which is why I felt it would help to meet and read with other candidates. 

Talha suggested that forming a small core team would also make the technical side of the production easier to manage. We touched on some of the play's postmodern elements too, particularly the contrasts between its characters, contexts, and differing perceptions of time. I left Mamun Bhai's printed copies of the play with the group so they could read the physical text and share it with future cast members. Before leaving, I asked Talha to connect with me on WhatsApp, as I'm keen to form a group for further discussion and readings; he said he'd get my number from Elma. I also told Elma that once I'm back in the UK, it would be good for us to fix a regular time to meet virtually and keep reading and discussing the play together. Overall, it was a productive first step toward exploring Shakuntala Aajkal practically, understanding its characters, and thinking through the possibilities for its eventual staging. 

Actomania Chief Secretary Talha Zubaer's message: 

আমরা খুব আনন্দের সাথে জানাচ্ছি যে চয়ন স্যারের টেক্সট টা আমরা ফ্লোরে পড়ার সময় টেক্সটের উপর পর্যালোচনা করেছি ও নাট্যকারের ভাবনা নিয়ে বেশ উৎসাহ বোধ করছি। আমাদের দলের কয়েকজন মেম্বার কে ইতিমধ্যেই শহীদুল মামুন এর কাছে রেফার করা হয়েছে। লিমোনার সাথে আমাদের দুদিনের সেশনে টেক্সট রিডিং সম্পন্ন হয়েছে এবং ভবিষ্যতে কিভাবে এগুবো সেটা নিয়ে সল্পালাপ হলো যদিও একটা নতুন প্রযোজনার ক্ষেত্রে যতটা সময় বা প্রস্তুতি প্রয়োজন  আমরা সেটা পাইনি। তবে এই সল্প সময়ে আমরা টেক্সট রিডিং দিয়ে যতটা পসিবল আলাপ করেছি। শেষ দিন লিমোনা এবং এক্টোম্যনিয়া-র সদস্য ইলমা সাথে টেক্সট রিডিং করেছেন। আর আমরা এই সিদ্ধান্তে উপনীত হয়েছি লিমোনা আপু ইউকে-তে ফিরে গেলে আমরা একটা গ্রুপ করে নিয়মিত টেক্সট পড়বো আর দুই দেশে থেকে কাজ টা এগিয়ে নিয়ে যাওয়ার চেষ্টা অব্যাহত থাকবে। আমরা যেন এখানে দুইটা সেট কাস্ট রেডি করে রাখতে চাই। একটা সেটে লিমোনা নিজেই শকুন্তলা করতে আগ্রহ প্রকাশ করেছেন। বাংলাদেশে নিয়মিত শো এর জন্য আমরা সংশ্লিষ্টদের পরামর্শ নিয়ে পরবর্তী পদক্ষেপ নেবো বলে সকলে সিদ্ধান্ত নিয়েছি।

Meeting Of Strangers turned Collaborators

Today, I had a wonderful meeting with Lemona Chanda, a very enthusiastic theatre lover visiting from England. The meeting was occasioned by our common desire to produce a play titled "শকুন্তলা আজকাল" (Shakuntala, nowadays) scripted by Choyon Khairul Habib, a self-exiled Bangladeshi playwright who is living in France for the past couple of decades. Choyon has a few plays to his credit and has famously translated Wole Soyinka in 1990. Notably, his translation রক্তবীজ was later anthologized by Shibnarayan Roy in his celebrated Anthology of African Literature in Bengali. Even so, his writing delves deep into the myths and rituals of the Bengal region, and inevitably draws on the two great Indian epics. Meanwhile, Choyon has been busy inventing a new idiom, a new nomenclature for the Bengali theatre.   

Nandalal Bose's Shakuntala

Lemona is a trained lawyer who completed her bar from Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar, and this legal grounding shaped her deep interest in disadvantaged people, which in turn drew her to the story of Shakuntala. She runs online platforms that work with indigenous and marginalised communities, and she feels deeply motivated by giving voice to the emotions and thoughts of people on the margins. She is also motivated by the idea that this play could be performed in front of audiences living on the periphery of the city, in front of marginalised communities, and that the play should be made available to people whose lives are often treated as unimportant. 

We talked with a lot of passion about our shared goals for theatre, our thoughts on how we see ourselves growing as artists, and how we want our work to stay people-oriented and meaningful.

Later, we were joined by Talha Zubayr, chief secretary of theatre group Actomania. Together we had a great discussion about the new Shakuntala project. Shakuntala is a two-character play featuring the mythical figures Shakuntala and Menoka. It was exciting to talk about how Choyon has given the story a fresh, contemporary interpretation. We also talked about the idea of doing a reading of the play, possibly as early as tomorrow since Lemona will be leaving next week.

During the meeting, Talha also told us about the director's workshop organized by Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy early this year. There, the course teacher, Azad Abdul Kalam, spoke about his very first play. That production, which came out in 1990, was a Bengali translation of Wole Soyinka's "The Strong Breed". The play was staged with support from the British Council and guidance from the English Department of Dhaka University. 

Azad Abdul Kalam talked about how hard it was to bring that play to the stage, and how the whole team had to work with very shoestring budget while still giving their best effort. This was especially exciting for Talha, because instead of talking about a later plays directed at Prachyanat, Azad Abdul Kalam was actually talking about the very first play he worked on, under the guidance of Choyon Khairul Habib, who translated Wole Soyinka's play into Bengali under the title "Roktobeej."

We agreed to meet again tomorrow at 2:30 at Shilpakala Academy, in Floor One, where Actomania usually holds its rehearsals for their upcoming play, The Alchemist.

The Slow Unveiling: 100 Papers That Shaped Our Thinking

There is a pleasure, almost a private one, in watching an institution turn its gaze inward and ask what, across a hundred years, has actually mattered. The Royal Institute of Philosophy is doing precisely this in its centenary year: releasing, four at a time and once every four weeks, a list of 100 Papers That Shaped Our Thinking from a century of its own journals, curated by Royal Institute's President Professor Jo Wolff,. I confess I find something almost devotional in the pacing itself: this refusal to hand over the whole inheritance at once, insisting instead that thought, like translation, like the slow accretion of a play across drafts, cannot be rushed toward its final form. The papers so far range widely: mercy and punishment, machine and mind, the ethics of cloning, the ache of collective guilt — and reading through them, I am reminded, again, that philosophy and literature have never really been separate rooms in the same house I have spent my life wandering between. What follows below is the list as it stands today, incomplete by design, a text still becoming itself, which is, perhaps, the truest condition of any text worth reading. 

Here's a one-line summary for each of the 52 papers released so far:You're right — here's the list again with publication years included:

1. Alexander (1926), Art and Science — Treats artistic creation and scientific inquiry as parallel, equally valid modes of engaging with reality. This essay is my top favourite. 
2. Swinburne (1968), The Argument from Design — Defends a version of the teleological argument for God from the order observed in nature.
3. Smart (1968), Mercy — Asks whether showing mercy in punishment is compatible with justice, or undermines it. 
   
4. Nagel (1998), Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem — Argues our current concepts may simply be too limited to ever solve the mind-body problem.
5. Buxton (2019), Reparative Justice for Climate Refugees — Argues wealthy, high-emitting nations owe reparative obligations to people displaced by climate change.
6. Diamond (1978), Eating Meat and Eating People — Challenges utilitarian animal-rights arguments, grounding our treatment of animals in relationships rather than abstract rights.
7. Lucas (1961), Minds, Machines, and Gödel — Uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem to argue the human mind can't be fully captured by any mechanical system.
8. Wilkes (1980), More Brain Lesions — Uses split-brain and lesion cases to press on assumptions about the unity of consciousness and personal identity.
9. Chadwick (1982), Cloning — Surveys the ethical issues raised by the then-emerging prospect of human cloning.
10. Williams (2000), Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline — Argues philosophy is properly understood as a humanistic inquiry, not a science-like pursuit of absolute truth.
11. Putnam (2001), Reply to Bernard Williams — Pushes back on Williams, defending philosophy's claim to genuine knowledge alongside science.
12. Singer, M. (2004), The Concept of Evil — Analyzes what, if anything, distinguishes "evil" from ordinary wrongdoing.
13. Primoratz (1989), Punishment as Language — Proposes that punishment works as society's symbolic communication of condemnation.
14. Quinton (1962), Spaces and Times — Explores whether there could coherently be multiple, disconnected spaces or times.
15. Coady (1985), The Morality of Terrorism — Examines how terrorism should be defined and morally distinguished from other forms of violence.
16. Ross (1929), The Ethics of Punishment — Weighs retributive against consequentialist justifications for punishing wrongdoers.
17. Geach (1973), Omnipotence — Argues divine omnipotence should mean maximal power within logical limits, addressing puzzles like the "stone" paradox.
18. Russell (1927), Substance — Critiques the traditional metaphysical idea of substance as an underlying bearer of properties.
19. Bodunrin (1981), The Question of African Philosophy — Critically examines debates over whether, and how, a distinctly "African philosophy" can be defined. This is something that will challenge your settled belief. 
20. Skinner (1966), The Limits of Historical Explanations — Argues historians must recover past agents' own intentions and language rather than impose present-day categories.
21. Dunn (1968), The Identity of the History of Ideas — Questions the methodology of intellectual history, favoring contextualist over "timeless idea" approaches.
22. Sorabji (1974), Body and Soul in Aristotle — Explores Aristotle's account of the soul as the form (not substance separate from) the body.
23. Hill (1930), The Philosophy of a Biologist — A working scientist reflects on the philosophical implications of biological research.
24. North (1987), Wrongdoing and Forgiveness — Examines what forgiveness actually is and when it's a fitting response to wrongdoing.
25. Lewis, D. (1969), Lucas against Mechanism — Rebuts Lucas's Gödel-based argument that minds can't be machines.
26. Litwinski (1974), The Psychology of "Mine" — Explores the psychological roots and significance of our sense of ownership.
27. Harris (1975), The Survival Lottery — Proposes a thought experiment where people could be randomly chosen for organ donation to save others, testing utilitarian intuitions.
28. Singer, P. (1977), "Utility" and the Survival Lottery — Responds to Harris, probing the utilitarian assumptions behind the lottery scenario.
29. Taylor (1939), The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes — Offers an influential reading of Hobbes as having a genuine moral (not merely egoistic) ethical theory.
30. Habermas (2004), Religious Tolerance—The Pacemaker for Cultural Rights — Argues the historical emergence of religious tolerance offers a model for accommodating today's cultural pluralism.
31. Austin (1968), Pleasure and Happiness — Distinguishes pleasure from happiness and examines their different roles in a good life.
32. Mays (1952), Can Machines Think? — Examines the philosophical criteria for attributing genuine thought to machines.
33. Polanyi (1966), The Logic of Tacit Inference — Argues much human knowledge is tacit and unarticulated, underlying all explicit knowledge.
34. Strawson (1961), Social Morality and Individual Ideal — Distinguishes the minimal demands of shared social morality from personal ideals of how to live.
35. Collingwood (1928), The Limits of Historical Knowledge — Examines the inherent constraints on what historical inquiry can actually establish about the past.
36. Lowe (2000), Causal Closure Principles and Emergentism — Asks whether physical causal closure really rules out genuine mental causation, defending emergentism.
37. Prior (1959), Thank Goodness That's Over — Uses the experience of tensed relief to argue against theories that reduce time to a tenseless "B-series."
38. Lewis, H.D. (1948), Collective Responsibility — Challenges whether groups, rather than individuals, can coherently bear moral responsibility.
39. Cooper (1968), Collective Responsibility — Revisits the same debate on group moral responsibility.
40. Anscombe (1958), Modern Moral Philosophy — Famously argues moral philosophy should drop "ought"-language tied to a defunct divine-law framework and return to virtue ethics.
41. Annas (1976), Plato's Republic and Feminism — Asks whether Plato's proposal of women guardians genuinely counts as a feminist position.
42. Stebbing (1927), Abstraction and Science — Examines the legitimate role of abstraction in constructing scientific theories.
43. Rorty (1982), From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments — Traces the historical shift in how philosophers have classified and theorized the affective states.
44. Vice (2003), Literature and the Narrative Self — Explores how literary narrative shapes and constitutes our sense of personal identity.
45. Mackie (1978), The Law of the Jungle — Questions whether evolutionary theory really supports crude "might is right" readings of morality.
46. Midgley (1979), Gene-juggling — Critiques reductive sociobiological accounts that treat genes as the true agents behind behavior and morality.
47. Dawkins (1981), In Defence of Selfish Genes — Responds to Midgley, defending the "selfish gene" as a legitimate explanatory metaphor.
48. 
    Kristjánsson (2008), An Aristotelian Critique of Situationism — Defends Aristotelian virtue ethics against psychological claims that character traits don't predict behavior.
49. Ewing (1953), What Would Happen if Everybody Acted like Me? — Examines universalizability as a test for whether an action is morally acceptable.
50. Hacker (2002), Is There Anything it is Like to be a Bat? — Critiques Nagel's famous claim about the irreducibility of subjective experience.
51. Broad (1949), The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy — Asks what, if anything, parapsychological findings might mean for philosophy of mind.
52. Kolnai (1976), Dignity — Examines what human dignity consists in and its place in ethical thought.

Meeting Half-a-dozen

Tanvir - Sadat - Shafayet

Today I sat down with six friends of Naqvi — Rayeed, Waysal, Faraz, Tanvir, Sadat, and Shafayet — for a long, wide-ranging conversation about how they should begin preparing themselves for their futures. It was the kind of meeting I have come to treasure over the years: young people at the threshold of their careers, full of questions they are only beginning to know how to ask. Rayeed, who comes from a business studies background, was particularly engaged, already thinking seriously and enthusiastically about how to move his profession forward. Shafayet, too, brought a real energy to the room, though his is the kind that comes tangled with worry. Since he will be leaving for the United States on the 4th of August, we agreed to meet again before he goes, and hopefully once more after — a tradition I hope continues with this group the way it has with so many others who have sat in this room before them. 

Much of what I offered them came from years of watching students find their way, often by paths no one could have predicted. I told them about a student who once struggled to write even a single coherent page, weak in reading, writing, and interaction, who went on to become a faculty member at a university. I told them about others who moved from one discipline entirely into another after their undergraduate years and thrived precisely because of that shift — one now pursuing doctoral work at Brown 9moving from mechanical engineering to oceanic research), another at Sheffield (moving from CSE to machine learning) and yet another who moved from economics to corporate financing and now want to pursue a career in architecture. These stories matter to me not as inspiration for its own sake but as evidence: the undergraduate years are not meant to lock a person into a single specialization forever. They are meant to build a foundation broad enough to stand on, whatever direction a person eventually chooses to walk in.

Rayeed - Waysal - Faraz

This became the heart of my conversation with Shafayet in particular. He is currently studying engineering, but his real passion has always been finance and business — he has been investing in the share market for some time now, with real success, enough to have bought his own car through it. And yet he carries a quiet fear that turning toward business or entrepreneurship would somehow betray his father's trust, and the investment his father has made in his engineering education. I told him plainly that this fear is misplaced. An undergraduate degree is not a life sentence to a single profession; it is a way of learning to think rigorously. If he carries strong engineering instincts into a business or entrepreneurial career, that is not a betrayal — it is an advantage few of his peers will have. He has been considering an MBA, and I told him I believe this is exactly the right next step for someone in his position. 

To all six of them, I tried to return again and again to a single idea: the most important thing a young person can do right now is find the sector they want to work in, and then build both their academics and their skills deliberately toward it. One of the best ways to do this is to begin writing — a research paper if they are ready for it, but even something smaller and more accessible is a start. I encouraged them to write short, plain-language essays on platforms like Medium, or to start a blog of their own, the way I have kept mine alive for the past thirteen or fourteen years now. I told them to keep something on GitHub, however modest, because a visible record of work speaks louder than a claim of interest ever will. And I was direct about LinkedIn: it matters, but only if the writing is genuinely their own. Platforms are increasingly able to detect AI-generated posts and flag them quietly to page owners, even if readers never see the flag — so the only real strategy is to write honestly, in their own voice, and to engage with people sincerely rather than performing engagement.

I also urged them toward mathematics and toward the newer technological tools reshaping every field they might enter, regardless of discipline. There are excellent free courses available now — from Google, from Andrew Ng, and from other serious educators — and there is no longer any real excuse for a curious student not to explore them. I asked them, too, to read this blog, not because I think it holds any special wisdom, but because thirteen years of writing about books, teaching, and the questions students bring me is itself a kind of case study in staying curious for the long haul. I look forward to sitting with this bunch again soon, and to watching where each of their particular paths leads.

There is so plenty much to work on that can NOT be done in just one sitting. So, let’s meet with clear agenda and get it done before your current semester is over.

Everyone is requested to bring a laptop - I can arrange one additional laptop if necessary. Prior to our meeting it would be great to have a CV including a plan for profession and a description of interests (academic, technical skill, hobbies both creative and recreational) 

 

Quantitative Fluency with ∑ (Twelve Books): An Asymptotic Approach to Not Being Fooled by Data

The above title borrows a mathematical image: an asymptotic curve rises steeply at first, then keeps inching closer and closer to a limit it never quite touches. That's the promise of this reading list. Each of the twelve books moves you meaningfully closer to genuine quantitative fluency — sharper judgment, better instincts for spotting bad statistics — but none of them, nor all twelve together, promise arrival. Fluency with data isn't a finish line you cross once; it's a limit you keep approaching, one book, one dataset, one skeptical question at a time.

We live in an age drowning in numbers — polls, dashboards, A/B tests, model outputs, quarterly reports — and yet fluency in interpreting those numbers remains rare, even among people who use them every day. It’s entirely possible to run a regression, read a p-value, or build a machine learning model without ever pausing to ask the harder questions underneath: Does this correlation actually reflect causation? Am I ignoring the base rate in favor of a compelling anecdote? Is this pattern real, or did my model simply memorize noise? Would this same data tell a different story if I grouped it differently? These aren’t questions that a statistics course alone teaches you to ask — they require a kind of interdisciplinary fluency that spans probability theory, cognitive psychology, causal reasoning, and the philosophy of measurement itself. The twelve books gathered here are an attempt to build exactly that fluency, one deliberate step at a time. They begin with the plainest building blocks — the vocabulary of mean, variance, and significance — before moving into the far more treacherous terrain of human intuition, where our own minds routinely mislead us about probability and evidence. From there, the list pushes into causal inference, the discipline of separating what merely correlates from what actually causes, and into the subtler statistical traps — aggregation artifacts, overfitting — that can make even careful, well-intentioned analysis quietly go wrong. It continues into the mathematics of uncertainty itself: information theory, Markov chains, and Monte Carlo simulation, the tools that let us formally describe randomness and use it to our advantage rather than being ambushed by it. Two books on chaos and nonlinear dynamics then complicate the picture further, showing that unpredictability doesn’t always require randomness at all — sometimes simple, fully deterministic systems generate behavior no one could have forecast. And the list closes with two texts on finding hidden structure in data — factor analysis and latent class analysis — the tools researchers reach for when the real drivers of a phenomenon aren’t directly observable and have to be inferred from patterns in what is observable. Read end to end, this isn’t a haphazard collection of “good books about numbers.” It’s a deliberate sequence, each title handing off an idea to the next, designed to take a curious, motivated reader from basic statistical literacy to genuine quantitative maturity — the kind of thinking that lets you look at a claim, a chart, or a dataset and ask the right skeptical questions before you believe it. 

Read in the following order, the list moves from describing data, to explaining it causally and spotting its traps, to the mathematics of uncertainty and simulation, to modeling change over time, and finally to uncovering hidden structure — a full toolkit for reasoning carefully about data.

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1. Naked Statistics — Charles Wheelan

Every quantitative journey needs a starting point, and Wheelan’s Naked Statistics is one of the friendliest on-ramps available. It strips away the intimidating notation that usually surrounds statistics and replaces it with plain-language explanations of mean, variance, correlation, and significance — the vocabulary every later book in this list quietly assumes you already have. Wheelan’s gift is making abstract ideas concrete through everyday examples: baseball stats, election polling, grade inflation. By the end, you’re not a statistician, but you can finally read a chart or a study without feeling like an outsider.

2. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman

Once you know what a base rate is, the next problem is that your own brain will happily ignore it. Kahneman’s landmark work — the product of decades of research alongside Amos Tversky — divides the mind into two systems: a fast, intuitive one prone to shortcuts, and a slow, deliberate one that rarely gets consulted. The book is full of now-famous experiments showing how we substitute vivid stories for statistical reality, and why “System 1” thinking leads us to overweight anecdotes and underweight the numbers that should matter more. It’s less a statistics book than a user’s manual for your own cognitive blind spots.

3. The Book of Why — Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie

Knowing how common something is doesn’t tell you what caused it — and that’s the gap Pearl spends this book closing. A pioneer of modern causal inference, Pearl argues that decades of statistics avoided the word “cause” almost superstitiously, sticking to correlation because it was easier to measure. The Book of Why introduces the tools that changed that: causal diagrams, the “do-calculus,” and a formal way of asking counterfactual questions like what would have happened if… Co-written with science writer Dana Mackenzie, it manages to make graph theory feel like detective work.

4. How to Lie with Statistics — Darrell Huff

A causal claim can look airtight and still collapse the moment you change how the underlying data is grouped — which is exactly the terrain Huff mapped out in 1954, in what remains one of the most quoted books about statistics ever written. Short, witty, and deceptively simple, it catalogs the tricks — misleading graphs, cherry-picked averages, sneaky sample sizes — that turn honest-looking numbers into propaganda. It reads like satire, but every trick in it is still in active use in advertising, media, and politics today.

5. The Model Thinker — Scott E. Page

Aggregation errors happen when you group data the wrong way; overfitting happens when you trust a model too tightly fit to noise. Page’s The Model Thinker is a tour through dozens of the models scientists and economists actually use — from simple linear models to network models to models of chaos — with a constant, disciplined eye on where each one breaks. His core argument is that no single model tells the truth; using many models, and knowing the failure modes of each, is what separates rigorous thinking from a false sense of certainty.

6. The Information — James Gleick

Before you can talk about signal versus noise, it helps to understand what “information” even means — and that question turns out to have a surprisingly rich history. Gleick traces it from African talking drums through the telegraph to Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper that founded information theory, the mathematical bedrock beneath modern computing, statistics, and machine learning. It’s a sweeping, almost literary history of an idea that quietly underlies everything from DNA to the internet.

7. Introduction to Probability — Joseph K. Blitzstein & Jessica Hwang

With a handle on information and uncertainty, the next step is describing how a system evolves — and Markov chains are the simplest, most elegant tool for that. Based on Blitzstein’s popular Harvard course (Stat 110), this textbook is prized for its intuition-first approach: story proofs, vivid examples, and a genuine effort to make probability feel like common sense rather than symbol manipulation. Its treatment of Markov chains gives you the machinery to model systems that only “remember” their current state — a deceptively powerful idea used everywhere from Google’s PageRank to weather forecasting.

8. The Drunkard’s Walk — Leonard Mlodinow

Once you can describe a system’s random walk step by step, the next trick is to run that walk thousands of times and see what emerges — the core idea behind Monte Carlo simulation. Mlodinow’s book isn’t a simulation manual so much as a meditation on how deeply randomness shapes success, failure, and everyday judgment — in sports, in markets, in careers we like to attribute entirely to skill. It’s an accessible reminder that simulating many possible worlds often reveals patterns invisible from any single outcome.

9. Chaos: Making a New Science — James Gleick

Simulation embraces randomness; chaos theory shows that you don’t even need randomness to lose predictability. Gleick’s other entry on this list tells the story of the scientists — Lorenz, Feigenbaum, Mandelbrot — who discovered that simple, entirely deterministic equations could produce wildly unpredictable behavior: the “butterfly effect” born from a weather model, fractals born from a stock-price puzzle. It remains the definitive popular account of a scientific revolution that reshaped physics, biology, and economics alike.

10. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos — Steven Strogatz

Gleick gives you the story; Strogatz gives you the tools to actually work the problems. This textbook — widely used in university courses — takes the same territory as Chaos and equips you with the mathematics to model bifurcations, strange attractors, and nonlinear systems directly. It’s the natural next step for anyone who read Gleick’s book and wanted more than the narrative.

11. Using Multivariate Statistics — Barbara G. Tabachnick & Linda S. Fidell

Shifting from change over time to structure within a single dataset, factor analysis asks a different kind of question: why do dozens of observed variables seem to move together? This long-standing graduate-level reference walks through factor analysis and related multivariate techniques with detailed, real-world examples, making it a staple on research methods syllabi across the social sciences. It’s dense, but it’s the book researchers actually keep on their desks.

12. Applied Latent Class Analysis — edited by Jacques A. Hagenaars & Allan L. McCutcheon

Factor analysis looks for hidden continuous dimensions; latent class analysis asks the parallel question for hidden categories — are the people or units in your data secretly made up of distinct, unobserved subgroups? This edited volume brings together leading researchers to explain the theory and application of latent class models, closing out the list with a technique built for spotting structure that no single variable could reveal on its own.

Global Language Bridge Team Meeting — Post-Meeting Review

Overview

On Friday, July 24, 2026, from 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM, members and teachers of Global Language Bridge gathered at Cafe 8 Days a Week, Lalmatia, Dhanmondi, Dhaka. In spite of incessant rain, our honorable teachers arrived from Savar and Bonosri to attend the meeting. It was an offline team meeting bringing together branch teachers and coordination staff to discuss ongoing classroom work, communication tools, teacher incentives, and ways to strengthen resource-sharing across branches, called by Project Coordinator Shatabdi Biswas.

Attendance

The session was attended in person by two teachers from the Dhaka branch — Sadman and Zinia — along with Project Coordinator Shatabdi Biswas. Three teachers joined online: Nadia (Chittagong branch), Ishmam (Cox's Bazar branch), and Sadman (substitute teacher). In total, five teachers took part in the discussion. Shahidul Mamun attended as the teacher lead.

Mateo Bilbao, Head of GLB, briefly joined the online portion of the meeting to offer his full support before having to leave for other commitments. He will be formally briefed on the outcomes of the discussion afterward. 

Key Discussion Points

1. Incentivizing Engagement with Online Teaching Materials

Teachers raised a concern that local branch teachers don't always have strong incentive to engage with the online materials and model classes being shared centrally. The group discussed building some form of incentive or recognition structure for teachers who actively review and apply these shared materials.

2. Technical Inconsistency and Choice of Communication Platform

One of the most significant challenges teachers face is technical inconsistency, particularly around the platforms currently used for communication and training. The group agreed that WhatsApp is no longer sufficient and discussed alternatives:

•        Google Meet: a workable option, though its time restrictions on free calls are a limitation.

•        Zoom: considered the most stable option, and the group leaned in its favor — though teachers will need training to adapt to it.

•        Google Classroom: seen as a strong option for organizing and sharing materials in a structured way.

It was also suggested that sessions be recorded for future reference and training purposes.

3. Teacher Incentives 

As a way to further engage local teachers, the group discussed small tokens of appreciation — such as a notebook branded with the GLB logo, or a jute tote bag, dictionaries, stationaries such as pens and board markers — as low-cost, meaningful ways to build teacher engagement and a sense of belonging to GLB.

4. Building a Volunteer Pool Beyond Teaching

The group discussed forming a larger pool of young volunteers to support GLB beyond the classroom — for example, as marketing volunteers who help spread awareness of GLB's work, or as social platform developers and storytellers who write about the schools and the broader GLB venture. Not every volunteer needs to be a teacher; there is room for varied skills and contributions.

5. A Blog for Sharing Classroom Ideas and Activities

Mamun proposed that individual teachers' classroom experiences — workshops, activities, and ideas that emerge organically in teaching — be documented and shared on the GLB blog. Zinia, from the Dhaka branch, noted that she often develops her own classroom ideas and welcomed the opportunity to share them this way. 

Building on this, the group discussed a structured activity-sharing pool: if each teacher contributes four activities per month, a group of six teachers would generate 24 activities in the first month alone. Teachers would then be encouraged to mix and match activities from this shared pool in their own classrooms, wherever applicable.

Mamun also noted that blog posts paired with strong visuals — graphics or real photographs from classrooms — tend to draw significantly more engagement, and the group agreed this should shape how future blog content is presented.

6. Aligning Study Materials with the NCTB Curriculum

One of the central themes of the discussion was how to use the National Curriculum and Textbook Board's (NCTB) textbooks as a basis for developing GLB's own study materials. Sadman (Dhaka branch), present at the venue, suggested engaging outside curriculum experts for this work. Mamun offered a different view — that GLB's own teachers are the organization's first line of experts, and that they should be the ones proposing changes and ideas for how the material is delivered.

7. GLB Marketing Process

The meeting also touched on how GLB approaches marketing and outreach for the organization, tying into the earlier discussion about building a wider volunteer pool to help spread GLB's work.

8. Redesigning the Classroom Model: Input and Output Classes

A structural idea discussed was reframing classes into input classes and output classes, alongside a broader redesign of the classroom setup and syllabus.

9. Lesson Plans and an Activity Bank

The group discussed developing a formal teacher lesson plan and activity BANK— a natural companion to the activity-sharing pool discussed above, giving teachers a structured, ready reference alongside the shared pool of classroom activities.

10. A Dedicated Website for Teacher Blogging

Building on the blog idea discussed earlier, the group proposed a dedicated website where teachers can write blog posts about their class activities and plans, giving the activity-sharing and storytelling ideas a permanent home.

11. Teacher Performance Awards

As a further way to recognize and motivate teachers, the group proposed a teacher's performance award, to be given out on a monthly or yearly basis — complementing the earlier discussion on incentives such as branded notebooks and jute bags.

12. In-Person Workshops Across Branches

The group also discussed the need to arrange in-person workshops at every branch, to support teacher training and development on the ground.

A Future Meeting: Zinia’s Savar Residence

While we discussed future such in-person meetings Zinia was kind enough to invite us to her residence located in Savar, a place known for its lush greeneries. We all hailed the suggestion as an excellent opportunity to connect more with our teachers. Hopefully, we will be able to arrange one such day in the next month.