Link to Podcast

0:00 - What Would a Tutor Do, If Their Life Depended On It? (Part 1)
5:47 - Find Your North Star: Why Justin Quit His Data Science Job to do Math Tutoring Full Time
11:23 - Getting "Inside the Trade"
19:31 - What Would a Tutor Do, If Their Life Depended On It? (Part 2)
27:28 - Efficient Learning Techniques are Obvious if You Think About Athletics
33:45 - Enjoyment is a Second-Order Optimization
39:50 - We Need to Stay Hardcore, But Become Less Harsh
51:14 - Math Academy is Like "Yuri's Gym"
59:06 - Vision for the Future of Math Academy
1:14:23 - Goal Setting/Advising and Communicating Progress
1:24:58 - If All You Show Up With is AP Calculus, You're Probably Outgunned
1:51:08 - The Meta-Skills that Kids Need to Work Effectively on Math Academy
2:08:54 - How to Help Students Maintain Successful Learning Habits While Working Independently
2:32:29 - Overhelping: A Common Failure Mode of Well-Intentioned Parents/Tutors

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Link to Podcast

The raw transcript is provided below. Please understand that there may be typos.

Justin (00:00) okay,

so I was thinking about this last night, actually, like, what should we start with on this podcast? And I think, so last time we talked about breadth-first development, which was a really core thing, core to our like philosophy of development as a company. But I think the, I think we should just go ahead and hit on the most core thing. ⁓

of this whole operation, our whole attitudes, which is… ⁓

Jason (00:26) I have no idea what you’re, I have no idea what it is you’re going to bring up. Like I don’t know what is the

most important thing. I really have no idea.

Justin (00:32) Well, there’s two parts

to it. It is, what would a tutor do, that’s part one. Part two, if their life depended on it. Because there’s so many things, so many confusions in education come from like just not behaving as though you were like actually a tutor sitting next to the kid whose life depended on the kid learning the material. It’s like, this is like the first principle from which everything else follows.

assuming you have a realistic view, like you know what it means to be a tutor, you know what it means to be held accountable. Like you’ve been in that situation before, you know what you’re going to do. So I think we should just like really hammer in, like what does that mean? Because you mentioned that in the past, in last podcast, what would a tutor do? And I think we really need hammer in, this is not just a something that like you just

thought off the top of your head last podcast. This is a question that we ask ourselves every week, if not every couple of days, and really dig in to what it means in this situation or that situation.

Jason (01:44) Yeah, yeah. It’d be interesting. We should, we might want to try and dig into the history of this because I don’t really remember, but I do, I do know, I do remember a number of times when we were trying to figure out what the system should do in some circumstance. And I remember I would say to you, right, well, what would a tutor do? What would you do? We just, you you.

Justin (01:50) Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, right. Cause

yeah, cause we were like, we started like implementing all this stuff in the system and like pretty soon, like as everything goes when you’re implementing software, right? It’s like you get into the, these edge cases that you just wouldn’t ever have, like you don’t think you’ve ever encountered that in, in, in reality, or at least you can’t remember at the time. So you have to think like, wait, what? This is, this is not a muscle reflex. ⁓ and you have to just like actually think.

Jason (02:20) Right.

Justin (02:36) Like instead of thinking fast, think slow from the principle, what would a tutor do? And then that’s how you kind of figure out what to do in that situation, in that edge case.

Jason (02:46) Yeah, because we would start, know, I mean, obviously a lot of it had to do with, some of it was designed with the UI, but a lot of it was has to do with what our task processor would do in terms of what task to assign and how much credit to give for certain things and just scheduling things and prioritizing. you know, we’d be sitting there thinking about like, well, should I do this or should I that?

Justin (03:02) Yeah.

Jason (03:15) And then I’d end up going, OK, well, what would you do if you were sitting there with a kid? You’re tutoring. What would you do? mean, you have logged thousands of hours tutoring students. high school and college, you tutored independently, but you also worked at a Mathnasium for many, years for younger kids.

Justin (03:34) Yeah, yeah, that’s

right.

Jason (03:36) and you had tutored older students and high school, maybe college, whatever, you would really spend a lot of time tutoring. And so when I would pose it to you in that way, you’d be like, yeah, well, I wouldn’t do that, or I would do this. I’m like, OK, well, then obviously that’s what we should do, right? Because you know what you’re doing, and you are highly incentivized to do the right thing in that situation. OK, so let’s get in this example.

Family hires you, can you help our son out with his Algebra 2? Okay, just an example. And you’d go, and you’re working with him, kid is struggling or whatever, you make some adjustments, you’re like, if the student does not make progress, cannot learn how to factor a quadratic or something,

then this engagement is going to end. They’re going to give you a few weeks, like, okay, our kid is, our son is not doing any better in school, the teacher is still struggling, he’s frustrated, we need to find someone else. You, you’re out of a job, you need this to pay, you supported yourself actually for a while when you first moved out to California.

Justin (04:44) Yeah, you’re out of a job.

Yeah.

Jason (04:53) This was your income. This wasn’t just like, well, hey, I tutor in my spare time in high school and college to get some pizza money or something. This is like, I need this to work. So I need to achieve results. The student needs to be successful. And so I’m going to do whatever I can to make this student successful in this situation. OK, so you are.

Justin (05:03) Yeah.

Yeah, quit

my tech job. was like just full on tutoring. That’s all eggs in that basket. Yeah.

Jason (05:21) Right, because you were in college, you worked for several years as a machine learning practitioner, right, for like a data analytics company.

Justin (05:29) Yeah,

yeah, yeah, data scientist for a couple of years, yeah.

Jason (05:33) And

then you decided you were gonna move to California, that’s a whole nother story. And you’re like, well, I don’t really have anything lined up. And so the first thing you can do is like, I can just tutor, right? mean, you can.

Justin (05:38) Yep.

Yeah, well, it was actually like a conscious decision to just like, that’s, that’s what I wanted to do. Just tutor. Like that’s, ⁓ it was less like I didn’t have anything lined up and I was like, okay, might as well tutor. It was like, I’m going to, I, I need to find my fit, my career fit in life. And I felt like I was kind of like hitting a wall in data science. Like where it’s just, it was like,

I learned a lot. It was fun. like the kinds of stuff that I was working on, the kinds of analytics projects and like it just, it was like a small, small regional banks and, and like digital news companies. It’s like, it just wasn’t something that that like spoke to me. And where I was tutoring was something like I felt like it was just like really aligned with my interests. And so I was like, well, I’m just gonna like,

go pursue this and just take like, take out all the opportunities I can get in a big city and then just see what happens. So, yeah.

Jason (06:52) Well, I mean, that’s a whole other lesson too, which is

that in life, if you’re not, if your life is not an A, it’s a B, B minus or whatever, you’re like, it’s fine. It’s okay. It’s good. I’m mixing money. Well, if you really want your life to be an A, you’re like, I want my life to be awesome. And even if you don’t have an absolute specific plan, get closer to doing the thing.

Justin (07:05) Yeah.

Jason (07:18) that makes you happy or that you feel aligned or whatever, what terminology you want to use. Like this is the thing that I like, I enjoy doing. which in tutoring, teaching, that kind of was closer to, mean, you like, you love math, you love machine learning, but the teaching aspect of it’s more.

Justin (07:21) Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

That was a thing that I just really didn’t want to give up was like the teaching aspect. was like, kind of just always figured that like, okay, in high school, was like a temporary thing, like working at my Mathnesium like 20 hours a week. Then I kept doing that during college too. And like even when I was like working 40 hours a week in data science, like afterwards, after work, I’d be at Mathnesium. On the weekends, I’d be at Mathnesium. I just like, couldn’t, I didn’t want to stop it.

Jason (07:50) Right. Right.

Justin (08:06) ⁓ so, and this was like on top of like classes and everything, but I had so much work to do. I was. Any reasonable person would be like, dude, just like drop the Mathnasium job. Just like, why are you doing this to yourself? no, not at all. It was like, it might as well have been like charity work, but it was like, I, I just, I loved it so much. ⁓ so yeah. So I, I figured that like, you know, if.

Jason (08:18) They could have been paying nearly as well as the data scientists.

All right.

Justin (08:33) If I have this amount of motivation towards it, that I just cannot rip myself away from it. And there’s nothing, there’s no rational reason why I should have kept on doing it. But it’s like, well, then go in that direction because clearly I have some serious rocket fuel there that will take me somewhere.

Jason (08:55) Right.

yeah, I mean, that’s the thing is people, when people make decisions purely for the money.

it often leads you in the wrong direction. You end up in a place like why, why, why do I, why am I so dissatisfied with my life? Why am I so frustrated? It’s like, you’re not doing what you really, really want to be doing. I mean, this stuff can be overplayed. mean, obviously you have to make a living. You have to be realistic about what you can do to actually pay for, rent or mortgage or, you know, get by. but it’s important to just, to really always be thinking,

Justin (09:03) Yeah.

Jason (09:33) in turn, you know, looking at your North Star or your individual North Stars, like, what is it that I really, really want to do? And if you have something you’re lucky enough to have some love people just can’t really find that thing. ⁓ And your thing was like, well, I love teaching and tutoring math. It’s just so rewarding. Go do that. That’s smart. So so let’s let’s just go on. ⁓

Justin (09:50) Yeah. Yeah.

Well,

just to connect to the previous ⁓ episode that we did, again, it just comes down to playing the long game, right? Like, breadth-first development is about playing the long game. It’s about like short-term, I mean, you need to be making some progress in the short-term, but your goal is not to optimize the short-term outcome of salary, of prestige or whatever. Like, your goal is to just…

Do the short term well enough that you can continue playing the long game. That you don’t like die in the short term or like run out of money or like you’re on the street or whatever. But like in the long game, like that’s what you always want to be optimizing towards. Even if it’s like, if it feels slow in the short term or there’s some pain in the short term, it’s like, whatever, as long as you’re making progress towards the long game, ⁓ then you’re good.

Jason (10:49) Yeah, well, yeah, 100%. I mean, the the

The thing about it is you get too distracted with the short term and you can lose sight of the long term goal, right? And you get these short term dopamine hits, hey, I made some, I made more money or whatever. Right. And then you look up a year or two years, 10 years later, and you’re like, where am I? And it’s like, well, I mean, you’re making pretty good money and you got a pretty good situation, but you don’t, you’re not really happy with it. And so,

Justin (11:07) It’s like shiny object syndrome, all this.

Yeah.

Jason (11:23) That’s key. mean, I know we’re a little off ⁓ topic, but you know, so let’s just, let’s just drive it back to the, to the tutoring. So like, what would a tutor do? So one thing that we talk a lot about is, and I’m gonna use terminology, we’re gonna have to explain, cause we’re gonna understand what I’m talking about is you got to get inside the trade. Okay. So, ⁓ what that means is I came from a world of high frequency trading. writing,

algorithms and building systems that would trade stocks, futures, you other types of financial instruments automatically and oftentimes at incredibly high speed. So you’re looking at statistical relationships between movements and you’re trying to figure out, okay, when this and this this happens, we want to buy when this happens, this happens, want to sell. And obviously it’s way more complicated than that, but

What would happen is some of these companies that would try and do this, would hire really, really highly educated, smart people with PhDs in physics and computer science and math and things. And they would get a group of these people and they would say, here’s our, here’s our, massive historical database of historical time series data of all the trades that happened every minute or every second or every hundred over the second for the last 10 years, go write some algorithms that can predict

what’s going to happen, where the price is going to go in the next 30 seconds or minute or 10 minutes or whatever. And they were almost doomed to fail. Now there are stories of this working, but typically what would work better is if you’d have a professional trader who would spend years and years trading this stuff manually and understood how you made money.

with a particular kind of trade. It’s like, look, when you’re trading this, when you do this kind of trade, these are the factors to consider. These are the forces that are at play. These are the things you’re to watch out for. This is how you can lose a lot of money. Here’s the, you know, whatever. And that’s this hard, hard won experience from a lot, from winning and, know, losing on a lot of trades and learning and understanding. And just having an emotional reaction, an emotional instinctual reaction to, yeah, I would not buy at that point. You’re like, why?

up it’s like look here’s the thing ding ding ding you happen and you talk to this PhD in physics and they’d be like oh yeah I guess I can see that would be yeah see look right I understand you have statistical measures that are saying we’re outside this band of trades and volume but look here’s what’s about to happen because you know and

This PhD is just not aware of these other factors. They have a keyhole. They can throw a keyhole at this time series data. And so my experience has been, if you have been the domain expert yourself, you understand exactly how this works. And you also have the technical expertise. So you can say, look, I can automate this because I actually understand how to characterize this situation.

bring in all the factors at play and, and mathematize them in a way that we can have strong buy and sell signals, whatever. That tends to work because you can start out with something that is maybe giving trade suggestions to the trader. Hey, here’s a buying opportunity. Hey, look, here’s selling opportunity. And then it becomes more and more automated and you can kind of.

you know, get closer and closer to this holy grail, this system that just like buys and sells automatically and doesn’t need human just makes money, right? Like that’s, that’s the shooting for it’s really, really hard to do, but it’s doable. I’ve been in that world. know people who’ve made tons of money doing it over long periods of time. So it’s not just luck or whatever, but ⁓ anyway, so I, we would always use this phrase. I can’t introduce it to you because that’s, that’s.

My current, background, get inside the trade. get it. Don’t, don’t just automate it. Like do the thing and to understand what the hell is going on. Really understand it. Have, emotional scars from it. Then automate it. Right. And that’s the same thing with you as being a tutor. You had spent years and years and years tutoring all different levels. So I could say, well, would this work? Would that work? You’re like, no, that wouldn’t work at

Justin (15:18) Yeah. Yeah, and I remember the…

There is some.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you know, the first time you told me about get inside the trade, there was some imagery that you said that I think really brought it home. And it was about how, I think you mentioned you were like sitting next to a trader and you had like this just the spreadsheet up with like just tons of like numbers in it. like, I don’t know if it was like real numbers or numbers you generated or what, ⁓ but yeah, and then they were.

Jason (16:13) yeah.

Justin (16:17) It was just like to you, was just like, it’s just like, okay, there’s a lot of numbers in here. And I guess like, yeah, right.

Jason (16:20) It was like the Matrix. was just like all the gigantic

grid of theoretical option values and risk numbers that, again, if you like the movie The Matrix, where they’re at this, like, all this streaming pixels, and you’re like, somehow this person can interpret that and go, this is what’s happening.

Justin (16:28) You

Yeah

Yeah, yeah, you’re like, well, I guess we better run some analyses on this to figure out what’s happening. the other person is like, it’s just that the trader is like, they’re looking at like a painting or picture from a movie playing out. They’re just like narrating it to you like, oh, that’s, oh, that’s weird. That’s, that’s not good. Oh, that’s really good over there. Like, just tell, and you’re just like, what, as did you learn this, a language? Did you take this language in school? Cause it seems like there’s a language here that I don’t know. And it’s like, it’s just made out of numbers. Yeah.

Jason (17:05) Yeah,

so the guy who was sitting next to his owner of this trading firm, and he was like a super successful, super wealthy guy. yeah, this guy was like, he’s like in his sixties and he just did…

Justin (17:13) Okay. yeah, so he really knows his shit, yeah.

Jason (17:21) years and years on the options trading pits at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. And I was showing, and we had built like a simulated trading environment, kind of like a flight simulator, but for options trading. This is my first company many years ago. And I had this, I think I had some printout of a bunch of these values or some screen of all these values that my simulated environment was generating.

that would, think of it like, you know, any flight simulator, it’s like simulating mountains and air and where the planes are going, whatever. You have to create all these algorithms to generate these somewhat realistic terrain and flight controls or whatever. And he’s looking at it he goes, and he kind of points out some values that don’t make sense. How the hell are you?

How can you just look at this ginormous grid of things and just see? But he understood the structure that was supposed to be there, right? There was structure. It’s like, well, these straddles are misplaced. You see these months, like this straddle and the strike prices. And he’s looking, he kind of explained it to me. And you’re just like, it’s like if, it’s like, you know, they’ve shown, they’ve done these studies where they could take like these expert chess players and they could just see a random chess board. You could just show it to them.

and they could like reconstruct it from memory. because they just see the structure. have a much emotional connection to all these positions. if you showed them on a chessboard where the chess pieces were placed at random, they were no better than the average person at reconstructing the position of the pieces. Because there was no sensible structure to it, right? There was just, it was chaos. It was random.

So this guy was looking at these, this giant grid of numbers like a chessboard that was supposed to make sense. And it made most, mostly made sense, but there were some things errors in my code or my assumptions that I put into the code that he could detect and point out to me. I was just like, wow, okay. And I just took some notes and went and I fixed this stuff. It was incredible, right? And so we bring it back to tutoring.

Justin (19:24) Thank

Jason (19:37) you spent years doing this, so you had that instinct. I could put you any situation, I go, okay, here’s a situation, da da da, what would you do? And you’d be like, well, I’d probably do this, this, this. And that would be kind of our go-to move any time we were trying to.

develop the heuristic that we’re gonna try and characterize and automate in the system. And we have just hundreds of those things that are largely the fruit of hard-won experience combined, of course, with a lot of deep introspection in terms of using what you and I sometimes refer to as street fighting math.

Justin (20:28) Yeah.

Jason (20:28) Sometimes it’s really elegant differential equations and stuff. Sometimes it’s just

statistical, know, back of the envelope things that we’re able to put together. But ⁓ that’s one of the key things. So it’s always, and I think it’s important because what we’re trying to do, like what are we trying to do? We’re trying to create the ultimate.

online learning system, basically what that would do is replicate the effectiveness of the best possible human tutor that you can imagine that has almost superhuman abilities to ⁓ understand exactly what you know and don’t know and what you should be working on. Okay, if that’s what you’re trying to do, then you need to continually keep that person in mind and try and mimic.

their behavior in that situation. And this is a long process and we’re getting closer all the time, but still we have a lot we can do, but you know.

Justin (21:23) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it seems like if you’re really serious about playing the long game like this, building up a system that leverages tons and tons of hard-won expertise that aligns with all the science and everything, it’s kind of like you really got to build it up in a bottom-up sort of way. It’s not like you just take some buzzword in education.

Jason (21:38) Okay.

Right.

Justin (21:50) slap that on, go top down. Yeah, good enough. No, like you have to like start

from first principle. What would a tutor do if their life depended on it? If their job depended on it? Like you if you can’t make students learn, you’re not gonna get paid. You’re not gonna eat. You’re not gonna like say you’re working for like a mafia boss and like they’re gonna like actually like kill you if their kid doesn’t learn the material. Like what do do? ⁓ Yeah, it really forces you to

that start at those core tenets, those core intuitions and build upwards from there.

Jason (22:30) Well, it brings us to the other thing you brought up, like your life depends on it. So that was an idea, a silly little, what would you call it, like a thought experiment or something that I came up with. And so the way this started was when I first started teaching.

Justin (22:36) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jason (22:54) the proto math academy class at the Pia and the Pasadena Unified School District when these kids were in fourth and fifth grade or fifth grade as a pullout advanced enrichment math class three days a week for a bunch of fifth graders. And I was trying to teach them algebra. I’d already taught them about pre algebra the previous year as part of a math team thing. And so I was really pushing the envelope with like, you teach algebra to fifth graders?

I mean, a lot of people thought that sounded crazy. then, you know, of course it went beyond that to trigonometry and other more advanced things, but, ⁓ I used to play, play this game with myself. said, okay, if I imagine, I would imagine myself as if I were the tutor for this bloodthirsty king for his kids. And he was this very erudite guy. And so, and he really cared a lot about the education for his kids. And he had already executed the previous two tutors.

I cared a lot about it. Like I said, like your life depends, all right? So I was like, okay, imagine you’re in that situation. You’re the new tutor and you have these two kids that say they come in and you know there’s a decent chance that he might, after the session’s done, he’d be like, come here, what’d you learn today? And then they say, we learned about that. And then he starts to quiz them on.

this thing that they said they learned. And if he was unimpressed, it would not take long before he would decide that you are not doing your job and he was gonna have your head taken off. Okay, so if you’re in that situation, how would you teach? You’re like, my God, okay, so I’m teaching them how to solve linear equations or something. You’re like, okay, am I going to just talk at them for an hour? No.

with no practice. They’ll totally, because if he asks them to do some, some linear equations and they can’t solve it, I’m dead. So I’m like, okay, here’s what I’m gonna do. Here’s what a linear equation is. This is what it represents. Here’s how you solve it. Now let’s, I’ll go through a couple examples, then I’m gonna have you guys do a couple of examples. And then I’m going to give you progressively more.

challenging ones, negative numbers or fractions or whatever, and we’re gonna kind of build on it, progressive them, we get a lot of practice, but I’m gonna keep raising the level. But it’s always going to be you going through, as a student going through the process, the procedure of performing the skill that I’m trying to get you to acquire. This would be the same situation we go on of your tennis lesson or.

learning how to play the violin or whatever, you know, you’re the coach, the instructor, the teacher is going to have you performing the skill and giving you feedback on what needs to be improved, what you got right, what needs to be adjusted to correctly execute the skill. And so that’s what I did. and, and of course, when you take that attitude and sort of, it’s a way of defining, of describing in a sort of elaborate.

in maybe somewhat bizarre deranged way of extreme accountability. If your ass is on the line, your life is on the line, how are you going to do this thing? Well, you’re probably going to be a lot more serious about it. And you’re probably going to do it a different way than if it just didn’t really matter. There’s no accountability. I’m just going to talk for an hour. Because it’s fun to talk and then I’ll just come home and think it’s easier, a lot easier. Then OK, now got to have the problems and I go back.

fourth of them and then I got to check them and then I got, you know, that’s just some more exhaustive process. But as we know, when you hire a, like say like tennis or golf coach or music teacher, whatever, they’re going to do this thing because I know that they just sat there and talked at you and just demonstrated stuff and you didn’t practice your feedback. It’s not gonna work. Right. The version one is the expert just demonstrates the thing over and over and over and talks about it. And the student doesn’t get any practice on it. That’s a fail. ⁓

Cause you don’t really learn by watching somebody else. You can become familiar with something, but you don’t learn it until you actually start performing it. Or two, I’m not going to tell them how to do it. I’m to just say, go and do this stuff. I don’t want to give them any feedback and they’re just flopping around. That’s highly inefficient.

Justin (27:28) Yeah, and it becomes so obvious when you think of it ⁓ in terms of sports, like a tennis coach, I think is the usual analogy that we make for this. Like, imagine you sign up for lessons with a tennis coach and the whole time they’re just, they’re showing you all these techniques and stuff. And then like, and then it’s done. Hour passes, like you haven’t, you’re just holding your tennis racket the whole time. You haven’t hit a ball or anything. You haven’t even swung it. You’re just like standing there, like watching them. And then you’re like,

Jason (27:54) Right.

Justin (27:56) Really? Like, that’s it? Like, I could have just watched a YouTube video to see somebody do this. Like, the point is for me to be doing stuff and you to be coaching me. But then the other failure mode is the the tennis player just like has, or the tennis coach has maybe a group of students in a lesson and then they just say like, okay, you two versus you two, go play each other and I’m going to go run an errand. I’ll be back in an hour. And then like what, like you’re not giving feedback to them. You’re not like…

See, there’s the middle ground, yeah.

Jason (28:26) Yeah. Imagine

you’re a parent, you you drop your 10, 12 year old kid off of her tennis lesson and you pick them up an hour later, you go take the other kid to their thing and then you come back, you pick them up, you’re like, so how’d go? And they’re like, good. And you’re like, wow, don’t look sweaty at all. It was hot out there. Like, oh, I didn’t play tennis. I’m like, what do you mean? What’d you do? He’s like, well, he just talked. Wait, he just talked. What do you mean? What’d he talk about? He talked about tennis.

Like for an hour? Yeah. You’d be like, you’d immediately like go to the pro shop and talk to like, what is this guy doing? This is not how you get good at tennis. This is a waste. I want my money back. They would instinctively know that that’s not gonna work. You know, I’m paying real money for this. I want my kid to learn how to play tennis, right? Secondly, can’t you pick it up and you’re like, how’d it go? Like, oh.

Yeah, it was fun. What’d do? Well, you know, he played tennis. So what did the work on anything particular? He no, we were just hitting back and forth with the coach. No, just with this other kid. What was the coach doing? he went back to the pro shop. Well, what do you mean? Like he, the coach wasn’t there. Well, he was over talking to another, to a mom for a while. And then he went up to the pro shop and then he came down. I think he was on his phone. You’d be like, what the, you’d go to the pro shop. I give my money back.

This is a dereliction of duty. This is not doing your job. Right? So why in a math class would we expect the situation of the teacher just talking and then saying, ⁓ you know, and then I have any kid do any work, which the lecture, right? Which, know, from universities in particular, but typically most schools have done with this sort of a lecture teacher gets up and just talks. Sometimes they cold call on people. Sometimes they’re younger. They give them worksheets and stuff to do, but

They would, and if they assign homework, it’s like, okay, I’m gonna give you, I’m gonna talk about tennis for an hour and then I want you to go practice by yourself.

You know, and maybe I’ll have you take a video of a couple things, I’ll give feedback. Like that, no, that is stupid. Like I’m right here, you know? anyway, anyone who has actually tried to acquire, seriously tried to acquire skills in something, sports, music, art, anything like that, where it was important to develop these skills.

They understand that this is basically how it’s done. I mean, there’s a little variation. You can change things up a little bit and whatever, but that’s the core of what the learning process and a super efficient learning process would be. Because if you say, well, someone says, that just feels really, I don’t know, restrictive or this and that. It’s like, OK, well, I have one group of kids and you know, ⁓

One group of kids goes does that and other kids they just go and they hit around. The rich kids go and they get an instructor. In fact, they have like a bunch of instructors all working with them and pushing them through drills and working with them getting feedback. Other kids they just kind of go to the park and hit around. You’d be like that’s not fair. What I just thought you said.

Justin (31:43) Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you put those two scenarios side by side and have people choose. They’ll always choose the one that involves like guided instruction with rapid feedback cycles of explicit direct instruction on what the student is supposed to be doing.

⁓ what’s the proper technique, followed immediately after the minimum effective dose of explicit instruction where the student is actually going and hitting the ball, going through their reps, getting really solid on the skill. They do that on some more skills. ⁓ The next session, they pull some of those skills together, compound movements. Like it’s just, several weeks of this, they’re gonna blow those other kids out of the park. Regardless of the other kids,

Jason (32:29) No question.

I mean,

Justin (32:34) like initial skill level, their slope of learning is gonna be so high through this deliberate practice ⁓ setting that they’re just gonna blow them out of the water. It’s only a matter of time.

Jason (32:42) Yes.

Yeah. mean,

is the, yeah. And if you, we compared it to, and you said, one group gets to do it and one doesn’t, they would be like, totally unfair. Why did the rich kids get, you know, private tutors and private coaches? It’s like, why? I thought you said it doesn’t matter. Well, okay. Like, you know, it matters. Obviously you’d be, you’d be furious if the rich kids got

Justin (32:53) Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason (33:11) this and you’re, yeah, kids didn’t, or, know, right. So, but right. And, and, and, and the more those, those, those expert instructors, teachers are incentivized for the outcome to be effective, the better it’s going to be, you know, if it’s like, cause if you’re an independent coach or independent music teacher, whatever you’re really, you’re trying to make the, the learning process as efficient as possible while being enjoyable.

Right? But not, at least not being unenjoyable. Right?

Justin (33:44) Yeah, right.

Enjoyment is a second order optimization. First is performance improvement. Like, get that right. And then just, like, without lowering your rate of improvement of progress, just try to make it as enjoyable as possible. Yeah.

Jason (34:00) And

why that is such a great model too is because when somebody, when a parent is spending their own money, or an adult if they were doing it themselves, and you’re paying for guitar lessons or something.

Like that money matters, right? Like the accountability, if it’s not working, you’re going to, it’s one lesson or two of just, you’re going to be like, this is bullshit. You know, this is the guy’s not doing anything. He’s just sitting there on his phone or something, right? Um, but if you sign them up for a summer, summer camp or summer class, and it’s kind like, well, it’s not that expensive. And, you know, it’s just one of a few things they’re doing. And, you know, I got, you know, we got to get them out of the house. Otherwise you’re sitting watching, you know, TV all day or whatever. And so.

Justin (34:24) Yeah.

Jason (34:41) You’re less sensitive to the seriousness of it because there’s not that much money on it, right?

Justin (34:43) Yeah.

Is it like an activity that the kids doing or is it like actually training to acquire skills that you’re paying for? you paying for somebody to keep the kids occupied or are you paying for the kids to get skills? Totally separate thing.

Jason (34:59) Yeah, it’s like one of three,

it’s like one of three or five class. we’re doing canoeing and archery and we do some crafts or tennis. You’re like, sounds great. You know, like I’m not, yeah.

Justin (35:03) Yeah.

Yeah, do you have fun, honey? Like when they come through the

door? That’s all that matters. If you had a good day, I had a good day. Yeah.

Jason (35:13) sure you learned a few things. I’m not paying for you to become

a tennis star or an equestrian when you did some horseback riding lessons, it’s just all about exposure and enrichment.

Sounds great, you know, and also you’re out of my hair so I could actually go to work. So good. I’m glad everybody’s happy. Um, but the, know, and, and, and in a situations like that, can have coaches and instructors who are not so serious. Cause that doesn’t matter. Right. You know, we’re just, I have like 20 kids out here. We’re doing archery and you know, they’re kind of, I kind of show them stuff and they’re kind of.

Justin (35:25) Yeah.

Jason (35:43) you they’re getting a little better and you know, it’s accountability is not high. They are tennis, you know, the tennis instructors. I got a bunch of kids and they run around, okay, I kind of put them in groups and kind of hit and I kind of show them little stuff and that’s, that’s good enough. But yeah, so anyway, it’s all, extreme accountability is really important if you, you know, in terms of like understanding of what would I do in that situation? Cause that means you’re focused on a result. And, and the result, when we talk about, you know, is a combination of two things. It’s getting better at the thing, but also not making

it’s so painful that the kid does, or the kid or the adult doesn’t want to do it anymore. It’s like, well, you you know, you hire a trainer and the guy is just like a maniac. And you’re like, man, I mean, look, I mean, I’m getting in better shape, but it’s just too painful. mean, the guy’s like an ex-seal or something. He’s just crazy. You know, I can’t. It’s still too much for me or whatever. That’s fine. You know? So, but you’re not going to find a lot of trainers like that because it’s not good business.

Justin (36:43) Yeah.

Jason (36:43) Right?

If you hire a trainer to get you in shape, the trainer’s thinking, okay, well, I need to keep you consistent, making progress, showing you that you’re making progress and closer to the goals and making it so that it’s not so painful you don’t want to come back tomorrow or next week. Right? Now, if either of those things are false, if it’s too painful, it’s a fail. They’re going to stop coming after a week or two or three or depending on how much…

pain they’re willing to take or how much suffering they’re willing to endure or how stubborn they are. But eventually it’d be like, uh, or two if they, there’s like, man, I’ve been working out with this guy for like three months and I think I’ve lost a pound.

And I actually now I have like tendonitis and stuff like this isn’t moving things in the right direction for I don’t know why I need to find someone to get some results because it’s got a lot of money. It’s a lot of time, you know, whatever. And even if it’s fun, he’s like, oh, he’s like funny guy. All these crazy seal stories from his time at the seals. And be like, are you getting any stronger? No, you lose your weight? No. OK, well.

Justin (37:47) So it’s like it.

is like an optimization problem. Maximize progress subject to the constraint that the pain is less than the quitting threshold. And you just run that over and over. And the quitting threshold, that can vary over time too. Once you start seeing progress, you’re much more willing.

Jason (38:01) Yes.

Justin (38:11) to endure some pain for even more progress improvement. It’s like the Bloom stage is a talent development stage, one stage too.

Jason (38:16) Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it’s like a.

Right, mean, this is Blooms to Sigma. That’s maybe another discussion go into, but the key is, I want to say that. should say something. It’s like, I feel like we’ve been focused more on the primary goal, which is efficient, effective learning. And in part of making

Justin (38:38) Mm-hmm.

Jason (38:45) that successful is that the students can learn at a good rate and be successful learning. So that makes you feel good. OK, I’m acquiring the skill. I learned this thing I didn’t know how to do, and I did it again and again and said, OK, well, let’s work. Even for a kid, they’re like, OK, well, that works. ⁓ What we do need to work on is making it a little more enjoyable. We can make it. We’ve reduced on making it.

not painful, but that doesn’t mean that there’s room to make it more engaging, more fun. we’ve, we’ve, we almost purposefully ignored that because you know, that’s kind of the easy part. You know, there’s a lot you can do.

Justin (39:13) right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s the part

It’s like, if you start out with that, that doesn’t, that doesn’t work. Like you can’t have that and not have performance improvement. You can have performance improvement and not really have so much enjoyment. And it’s like, it’s a real thing. People will benefit from it.

but you’re gonna increase your surface area and make people have a better time if you focus on the enjoyment part after. But the enjoyment part is like the icing on the cake there. ⁓ Yeah, I know we’re kind of hardcore, right? It’s like you complete a…

Jason (39:48) 100%. Yeah. And so we’ve kind of, you know, kind of hardcore and, know, it’s almost funny

how hardcore it’s like a little ridiculous. mean, you know, I remember, know, I got an email from a friend of mine, Jeff, and he’s like, this is like a couple of years ago. He said, you made my daughter cry. I’m like, what?

Justin (39:57) Yeah.

Jason (40:08) It’s like, got like negative XP on something. And I was like, yeah, we got to work on, there’s some things we can do. mean, not that we, not that negative XP needs to be a thing. It needs to be a thing, but there needs to be probably warnings about it. The, be careful. You can get negative penalty if you keep guessing or you’re rushing or you miss, you fail 20 lessons in a row or something like that. And we make more positive feedback and there’s things we can do to make it a little more engaged, a little more fun, a little more game like that. Won’t take away from learning.

Justin (40:10) Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jason (40:38) at all. It’ll just, it’s like, let’s put a little sugar on the, on the medicine, you know.

Justin (40:43) Why

don’t we talk about some of those specific things? Cause we, we’ve got a lot of ideas on that front. And, ⁓ I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s one, actually a common question, ⁓ that, that, we get, ⁓ on, on, on Twitter X is, is kind of like, how, how, like, do do think you can make the experience like more enjoyable for, for, for learners without. Like becoming like one of those edutainment companies, like what.

Jason (41:11) Yeah, because

that’s the risk, right? You optimize too much for the fun and then you’ve taught the students that things are fun and they can’t really be hard. It’s like one of the rules for becoming an effective teacher is, and it’s kind of a joke, but it’s say don’t smile until Christmas break.

Justin (41:13) How do we thread the needle? Yeah.

Jason (41:38) I like, you gotta be all business. If you come in, you’re like, hey, we’re all friends. Kids don’t take you seriously. They’re not. It’s a battle all year long.

keep them focused, listening, not talking, not interrupting, know, whatever, doing all misbehaving, taking their homework seriously, you know, whatever. And, you you can’t go from being this lax teacher that the kids don’t respect, because that’s what happened. The teachers, sometimes the kids will like, they’re nice, but they also don’t respect teachers like that. They don’t realize, they think we’re all just friends, that they don’t really, they know they’re not really learning and they know you’re not a good teacher.

You can’t say, right, now I’m serious. I come back from Christmas break, like maybe the principal came down and said, look, I mean, I’m looking at these tests. This stuff doesn’t look good. You got to bang, bang. then the teacher’s like, OK. You’re like, teacher, you’re like, decided you’re to be a hard ass or something.

Justin (42:32) Yeah,

there’s a directionality to it. You can’t recover from being a pushover. Once you’re a pushover at the beginning and then you become a hard-ass, like, they just hate you more. Yeah.

Jason (42:41) The kids are like, yeah, right. They just rolled around. I had

happened to me when I was in high school. I can’t remember this teacher. And she, she was like, started out like that. And she’s like, she then she realized she was a young teacher, a first year teacher or something. She just graduated from college and she was going to be our friends and didn’t take her seriously. And because she wasn’t a serious person, you know, and so we didn’t respect her. didn’t like hate her. And then when she started to be like a hard ass, then we hated her. Right.

And she was one of our biology, there were two biology teachers. The other biology teacher who was older, she was all business. There’s no messing around with Susan Radford was her name. She was all business and you’re like, pay attention, you did what you’re supposed to do. And she would lighten up a little as year went on. Occasionally she’d smile a little bit and be like, I I wanna see if she’s mean, but she was, you did not mess with her. And then she could lighten up when she needed to, and then you loved her.

Justin (43:10) Yeah.

Jason (43:40) Right? Because the most important thing for a teacher is not that they love you, is that they respect you and they do what they’re supposed to do and they take their work seriously. That’s the important thing, especially like middle school and high school, because then kids testing boundaries and they’re 15, 16, you don’t want to be in school. You want to go mess, you want to do anything but sit in your fricking biology class. Right? Even if you’re a good student, you’re like, I don’t want to be here. Right? So that model.

Justin (44:03) Yeah.

Jason (44:08) And any really good teacher understands this fundamentally. Not that you can’t do some fun things, but you have to instill respect from day one. I understand you are not to be messed with. And then you can lighten up over time. But there are boundaries, there are expectations, and there are consequences, and there are rewards.

You start out, we’re like, we’re all friends and you know, this isn’t, just a wonderful subject. Found the kids are like, okay, whatever. Okay. We’re going to blow this off. Right. And then, so yeah. So if you, if you, transpose that onto a learning app and you’re like, we’re fine. And this and dance and baloney and, know, and the kids are like, ⁓ you know, whatever. then you’re like, all right, now we’re going to start learning hard. The kids are like, this is stupid. I it used to be fun. No, it. You know, but.

Justin (44:57) Yeah.

Jason (45:01) We can go from the teacher that was a hard ass, and we can lighten it up a little bit. People are like, oh, think my daughter likes it a little more. It’s kind of fun. think these things you added really made it a lot nicer. That’s how it’s going to go, I think. Anyway, that’s just in general. That’s just sort of my analogy. And by the way, for anyone who doesn’t know me, I spend a lot of times going through analogies for whatever reason. just…

Justin (45:19) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason (45:29) everything is analogous to everything else to me. So always like, well, it’s just like this is just like that. ⁓

Justin (45:37) Supplied

isomorphism theory.

Jason (45:40) I do it to a fault. I need to dial it back sometimes. But ⁓ yeah, so when it comes to the app, he’s like, look, we’re not here to just build a goofy, a fake learning app. Like, I got this math app, my kids, and it’s better that they’re doing this than they’re playing.

What are video games? It’s educational, but that kind of stuff, it’s like when they eat food that you know tastes good but isn’t healthy and the parents eventually realize that this is a waste. And then the kid, still not as as video games and they’re not really learning anything. So it’s like, okay, what are we paying for? This is dumb. So, now that’s a short-term win, long-term loss. You can get a lot of users and build up a company and get funding and stuff because you make this sort of engaging, not super serious education app. It’s better than video games.

But you said earlier, we’re playing the long game, is be really, really serious about the educational outcome. And by doing that and be focusing most of our efforts are practically 99 % of our efforts on that and not on making it as engaging, as fun as it could be. It means we’re a little, little harsh, a little stark, you know, there’s a lot we can do, but that’s the easy stuff. think that it’s kind of fun. And that’s the fun stuff. It is actually kind of fun.

Justin (47:00) Yeah. Yeah.

It seems like the first order improvement on just making things a little less…

less hard, less aggressive, less harsh. Yeah, less harsh is really just like adding more communication about like, what are the rules? What’s happening? Like, I’m just thinking about the negative XP story, like making the daughter cry. Like we added a honeymoon phase, right? I think that was when like you were like, okay, we gotta kind of ramp up these XP penalties over time. Like start out.

Jason (47:17) was hardcore, it was harsh.

Yeah.

right? You can come in and guess and

get backhanded in the first week and people like, you can have some success first and parents like, Oh, my daughter is actually really learning. And then and then it’s a month later, two months later, they get negative XP. And they’re like, and not everybody on this. What is where this happens? Terrible thing. My daughter kind of upset. It’s like, okay, now this thing is really good. Okay, sweetheart. Why do think you got negative XP? Oh, it looks like a guest on all these. My mom’s like, Okay, look, I’m going to give the little

Justin (47:44) Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jason (48:12) credibility or little bit of space for this app. It’s trying and know it’s effective. Now, the question is, of course, can we still have it be as effective by just even minimizing that even? Can we thread the needle even more?

Justin (48:25) Well, see,

I think ⁓ before we worry about even toning down negative penalties even more, I think part of it is just communicating to people, like, hey, you’re in the honeymoon phase. You lucked out just getting a zero on this task. ⁓ If you keep this up, this is going to be a minus 10. Just telling you now.

Jason (48:49) It’s gonna have been worth it.

Justin (48:55) And we get people like lots and lots of ⁓ time to kind of get adjusted to this. It’s like, I think your first three negative penalties get capped, just goes down to zero. And then the next three are like at negative one, and then the next three are at negative two. So you’ve got this slow ramp up. I don’t think people ⁓ realize like just like what they’re getting into. well, like if you’re getting negative XP and it’s starting to ramp up like,

They need to know, hey, this is bad. We are artificially capping your penalties at this point. think the kids especially, right? They’re not really paying attention that much. They’re

Jason (49:25) Yeah.

Well.

Justin (49:39) like…

Jason (49:41) Think about the teacher. Use the analogy of the teacher. So the serious teacher, class is over. You got a C on your test or quiz. And you walk out and the teacher goes, Jason. You’re like, come here. I need to talk to for a second. You’re like, yeah. And he’s like, you know, I shouldn’t give you any credit. I should have gotten you a zero on this. You’re like, I told you to put a circle around all your ant, or whatever. His instructions were on. I just ignored them.

Justin (49:56) Yeah.

Jason (50:09) Next time you’re getting a zero. You’re like, OK. Now, if he’d give me a zero the first time, I’d be like, really? mean, got most of the questions right. I mean, I got a C or C plus. I mean, I could have done better. But a zero? Because I didn’t put a box or a circle around my answers? And he gave us explicit instructions. Put a circle or box or answer. I’m not going to count it. He gave me a pass. They warned me. Next time.

And I can’t really get mad, right? And that’s kind of it. It’s like, OK, I’m telling you these are the rules. And I’m going tell my expectations. I’m going give you a little bit past first time, but I’m reminding you. So I think that’s kind of the analogy is that we do that kind of thing. And of course, we can do it a little more. We can make it a little more of a thing. But the other analogy I use, if you’ll give me the people.

Justin (50:51) Yeah.

Yeah, let’s do it. Go to the analogy zoo. I’m there.

I’m there like every day on our phone calls. So might as well bring everyone else there too.

Jason (51:08) Let’s go another one.

If you’ll humor me. Okay. So I say that our Math Academy right now is like, I would say it’s like Yuri’s gym where Yuri is some strength conditioning coach from, I’ll say Russia who used to coach Olympic athletes and has like this basement gym where a lot of very serious people go to workout. Like, let’s say

Justin (51:15) Okay.

Jason (51:38) You’re walking down the street and you see a buddy you haven’t seen in eight or nine months. And you’re like, dude, you look amazing. Well, what happened? You lost like, looks like you’d lost like 30 pounds. I mean, you look like you’re, you know, you’re jacked and you’re like, he’s like, man, I started working at Yuri’s. I’m like, what’s Yuri’s? He’s like, well, he’s this strength conditioning coach. He’s got this, he’s this Russian guy. He’s the used to work with the Olympic hockey team or weightlifting team or something. And you’re like,

And like, man, I should, he’s like, well, if you want to, if you want to join, I mean, it’s just down the street, just go, it’s underground. Doesn’t really, it’s not a sign there. It’s seven. It’s not going to, you know, go in. And so you’re like, hell yeah. So then you, you go there. You’re like, I want those results. And you walk in and there’s like, it’s just a door and like a hallway and then opens up and it’s just like this.

Justin (52:19) Snack on the door.

Jason (52:31) bunch of benches and weights. There’s no like front desk. There’s no juice bar. There’s no little place where can buy clothes. There’s no membership director. In fact there’s not even any air conditioning. There’s no Pilates. There’s no yoga room. It’s just a bunch of weights and some other open areas that people work with kettlebells and dumbbells or whatever other painful looking instruments. and someone walks up to you and they’re like,

Hey, know, what are you doing here? So, ⁓ my buddy, so and so said, he said, okay, look, I’ll tell you what, just show up next, next week. You know, it’s a hundred bucks a month or whatever. ⁓ Those are, that’s the workout. Actually, let me just, let me come here. Let me just take a look at you. You’re gonna try this, try this. He goes, think it puts you through some things. He says, all right, there’s a workout on the board. You’re falling into this group. You’re in group seven.

based on your strength, do this. And you go do it. And then Yuri is this old crusty old guy who’s just sitting there. And Yuri doesn’t even talk to you. And he’s like, should I talk to Yuri? And he’s like, Yuri will talk to you when he’s ready to talk to you. And I go, OK. And so a few months go by, you’re getting fit. You’re looking for something from Yuri. You’re looking for a good job or keep up the good work or.

You know, he doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t care. He’s like, you have not proven yourself yet. And then you like, you go up and hold another level. And finally he comes up and he’s like, add more weight. You’re like, okay. And someone else goes, that’s, that’s about as good as it gets from Yuri. You’re like, okay. But you look at everybody in there and everyone that looks like they’re about to audition to for a superhero role. Like everybody, men, women, everybody looks super fit. You’re like, okay.

Justin (54:23) Yeah.

Jason (54:29) I mean, it works. It’s a little harsh. There’s no air conditioning in here. There’s no heater. There’s no front desk, you know, whatever, but this, they have this custom fit workout protocol or whatever. And, you know, so we, we’re kind of Yuri’s right now. We’re the basement gym. We’re harsh, harsher than we need to be. It’s darker than we need to be, but it works. And I think, you know,

All things being equal. It’s not a, probably is like, I don’t, it doesn’t have to be like this all I could afford. he was just like, I just need to get this gym going. And if he had a business partner and say, Hey, why don’t we get a bigger space? We actually have some air conditioning and we can have, we can have both. mean, we can have air conditioning. We can actually have a locker room instead of just this.

Justin (55:16) Yes. None of

those things impede performance. This is not a… It isn’t completely orthogonal. We can do that.

Jason (55:19) None of those are computer clouds.

Yeah, I mean, you don’t

I mean, we just had this tiny little bathroom people to change in. Like one bathroom, right? It’s like we can and then you’re there. it’s whatever. So but that builds a better business. People stick around longer because, hey, you know, I love working out with Yuri’s. I can actually go from work and change there. And because sometimes I have to go somewhere after their business things. And so now it’s easier, you know, whatever.

So might be going a little long with the analogy, but all I’ll just say is that I’m fully aware of how many niceties we might be lacking and that we could and should add and we will add. But the important thing was getting a result, which at Yuri’s, you’re going to get a result. No question about it. You’re going to get a huge result. And people are going to come up to you and go, man, what the hell?

You look like you’re going off the Olympic team. I have a of weeks ago. thought you’re pre-diabetic and I look at you. You’re like, you know, shit works. know, it works. Just got to, you just got to show up and put in a full effort on the workout and it’ll happen. pretty much all it’s, but it’s all you got to do. So anyway.

Justin (56:24) Yeah.

So this is one component of the ultimate math platform. Our vision is the ultimate math platform. What does that entail? Well, that entails ⁓ maximizing performance improvement, which we have been optimizing up to this point. ⁓ And it entails making it as enjoyable as possible along that orthogonal axis that doesn’t detract from…

from performance improvement. So not the edutainment access, but the like, let’s get air conditioning in this gym. Maybe Yuri can say something a little bit more positive to you. Yeah, a little bit more motivational. He can say, not just add more weight, not just here’s the plate, but actually like.

Jason (57:16) or positive for once in a while.

Justin (57:28) Good job. Look how far you’ve come. This was you like last month. Now you’re this far. Like this is what you were doing. Like when you first joined, you first walked in here. This is, we took a picture of you and this is what you look like. Now look at you. Like all that sort of stuff. So what other axes do you think there are in this ultimate, ultimate math learning platform?

Jason (57:46) What?

Well, one thing I wanted to say about this, but you have to be careful when you make the transition that you don’t lose your soul and become corporate. So if you go to Yuri’s, like, man, back in the day, Yuri’s was hardcore now. It’s like, I don’t even, Yuri’s not even here anymore. It’s not what it was. So you can’t sacrifice or give up the essence, which when things become about the money,

Justin (58:00) You

Jason (58:19) and you’re just trying to make everybody feel good, can turn into that. So we just have to say, look, we’re not about maximizing financial outcome. The money will come if you deliver value for people. It’s as simple as that. And since we don’t have any outside investors, we can make that choice, that conscious choice. So we’re not going to give in to…

easy shortcuts and things to just make it nice for, but that while sacrificing results, quality of the education. So yeah, so you’re asking is what else can we do in terms of, why don’t you leave? What do you think?

Justin (59:04) Yeah, what else? Yeah, yeah.

So another question that we got was just what is the long-term vision beyond even more course development for Math Academy? ⁓ What’s the next leap for Math Academy? What would make it twice as effective? Not just twice as like efficient in terms of ⁓ performance optimization, but also in terms of like getting people to stick around longer, getting more people to skill up on math. Like what’s…

What are the big needle movers ⁓ you think? Like, I mean, for example, one of them that we’ve talked about ⁓ before was like just filling out the rest of an undergrad math degree. Like that’s, if there’s going to be the ultimate math learning platform, like let’s have an undergrad math degree on it, where you can learn everything, like any, anything you want to learn in college, you can do in our system.

Jason (59:56) Go! Go! Go!

Yeah, so I would, I mean, obviously there’s a number of things we could do. One would be ⁓ more projects integrated. So not to get, this is a whole nother discussion, but. ⁓

The whole project-based learning can be taken way too far. Projects are built on a foundation of skills. You can’t do projects without skills and have it be efficient at all. mean, you can. It’s just going to be incredibly inefficient because the students don’t really know what they’re doing. So you’re trying to get them put together a bunch of component skills into this bigger thing. ⁓

You know, one thing that we realized while doing the machine learning course that we needed serious high quality projects. And I think doing more of those at every mathematical level would be, I’ll just run through without getting too deep on any of these automaticity training. Right? So starting with math facts, multiplication, addition of multiplication tables.

You know, things like that, you know, as you could hire up, it’d be like calculating percents or square roots or things in your head really quickly. There’s lots of sort of just mental tricks. And I don’t mean like any complicated, but things where people can say, well, what’s, you know, it’s 25 % of, know, I don’t know.

800 or something or I mean that’s easy, but I mean something really if people have to work it out and I do just do this this this right so when you’re really good at that then you can your your your You can think through mathematical problems faster because you can just kind of do a lot of stuff in your head without even really putting an effort into it as opposed to like having to stop and do stuff, but we are but we know that you know we’ve heard from a lot of families tutors people that kids are and teachers that kids are not

have not mastered their math facts. They don’t know the multiplication tables. They’re finger counting. Not finger counting in fourth or fifth grade. They’re finger counting in 10th grade. And if you can’t do, you know, even multiplication, if you don’t know multiplication tables, you’re gonna really struggle even without basic algebra. So we gotta do automaticity training. We’ve talked a little bit about… ⁓

having historical or context or applications, like what is this, what would this be used for? Or how would this be cool? That could be more integrated with projects as well.

Justin (1:02:34) Yeah, kind of goes back to the, like, if you imagine like the top tier best quality tutor sitting next to you, like in addition to teaching you all the material, probably gonna be like just adding tidbits that they know you’re interested in. Yeah.

Jason (1:02:48) Hey, know, they do this,

this is how, ⁓ cool. You know, they kind of like really bring it alive. Sometimes just those historical notes, the applications, like, here’s how, this is how they traffic control. This is traffic control systems, how they calculate this, this, this. And you’re like, really? Yeah, well, that’s how we know. If you can bring some of that to life for students. ⁓

I think that helps them understand this because because you know a lot of like more basic math they’re like they’re like why do I need to know trigonometry or something or why do I you know I mean a lot of high school teachers would would struggle with that and most people would struggle with that unless they had really done some research on it and and it’s you know it’s just not a status well you’re need this you know in pre-cal because we need this in college because we need this in college kids you’re like okay you know

It’s not super motivating. It’s not as motivating. I some kids are like, they’re just fine. They like enjoy learning it and getting an A or getting into a really good school or whatever. That’s motivation for them enough. They’re like ads. Other kids, they need more. They need a little more. They’re not buying what you’re selling, you know? And so you need to work a little harder.

What I’m always sort of trying to do in terms of like the North Star is periodically closing my eyes and go, what would the ultimate online learning system do? you just forget about math, can’t forget about anything, close your eyes. Short of the matrix where they jack something in the back of your head and you learn like, learn Kung Fu or a foreign language in 15 minutes just because they inject it in your brain somehow.

some magical way. Okay, short of that, what would it look like? What would you do? And so if you do that every once in a while, you can be like, you can start thinking like, oh, you know, it would be really awesome. And this is how some of this stuff happens. But another one would be for would be challenge problems.

You know, really difficult. mean, this is people say in textbooks, the star problem, the double star, you know, we can add some of those things, you know, for, especially to the honors courses.

Justin (1:04:55) You

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And one thing that we we’ve been realizing recently is that a lot of these SAT problems, ACT problems, competition math problems make for really, really good challenge problems. And they cover the whole curriculum. ⁓ They’re not just concentrated in one area. So, yeah, we could potentially get some

some double whammies, like, not to bird that with one stone. Not only are you doing some challenge problems, it’s deepening your understanding of the material. And if you’re a particular kind of student, it might actually be fun too. But you’re also, you may not realize it at the time, but you’re actually also prepping for like the SAT or the ACT. You can come out of a course actually scoring decently on AMC exam, like that’d be cool.

Jason (1:05:55) Yeah, because if you can imagine, for instance, if you sent your kid to something like Bronx Science or one of these elite, ⁓ magnet math and science schools, and you took a pre-calculus course, what do think that pre-calculus course would look like or should look like? It’s like, well, it’s probably some pretty tough teacher who’s really good.

And they’re not only teaching the standard precalculus curriculum, it’s probably a layer of more advanced material layered on top, probably some really interesting projects that we do every once in a while. He or she probably knows all kinds of stories. Like, when I used to work at NASA, or when we used to do this, and we did research, be like, oh, wow, know, I’ll tell him all these cool stories. And Matthew would be like, that would make it really cool. And by the way,

This teacher runs the math team, so he’s always kind of recruiting, or she’s always recruiting for the math team. And they’re like, OK, well, so he’s trying to build everybody up. He’s kind of killing two birds with one stone. So the more I get done on a pre-calculus course, the less I have to train after school. So he’s getting a lot of this stuff done in class, doing a lot more challenging problems, trying to incentivize and challenge the kids to do.

harder things to say, this is fun, Like, seeing what you can do and stuff. you know, I think that’s, you know, looking at a model, I reckon, excellent. Like you said, what are like the top five or 10 pre-calculus courses in the country? How are they taught? What is the experience like? Or the best 10 that ever been taught?

There was a guy in 1975 who worked at such and such high school and whatever, they would be a finalist in the national math team. What was that guy doing? I guarantee you, was probably doing a lot more than your normal math class. And so, you know, do try and imagine what that person was doing. Or if there stories about him, try and read about him. Say, what were you doing?

Justin (1:07:55) yeah, for sure.

Jason (1:08:06) You know, what were they doing? were, they were probably working. The kids were probably working really hard. It was probably known to be a really challenging class, but, um, at high expectations, but challenged them, kept them motivated, you know, all sorts of things. So that’s the kind of stuff that we, we needed to sort of use as inspiration as, or as models for what we’re

ultimate doing and it’s easy for us to get caught in the day to day like, well, we’ve to get this fixed or that fixed. where are we going? Like what, what does this need to be? And, you know, another one would be integrating coding into it. So that would be super cool. I mean, one thing that you and I would always talk about would be, you know, we’re building what we wish we had when we were in middle school or high school or college, you know? And it’s like, man, can you imagine if you were coding?

Justin (1:08:52) Exactly.

Yeah.

Jason (1:08:59) like you had Python coding in your pre-calculus course and instead of doing written class, like you would do the normal problems, you’ve written stuff, but then it would culminate in some coding. You’d have to like, you know, have a bunch of cool projects that leveraged all that and you had to write the Python and make it work. I mean, that would be awesome. That would be super fun. And a of guys or girls, even who, you know, like code too, is who would have been

Justin (1:09:13) Yeah.

Jason (1:09:29) Just they’re better pretty good at math or good at math, but they’re just like, I don’t you know, but they love coding and Now they get to do they would brought it to life for them They were just you got a whole you brought in a whole nother crowd. They’re like, this is cool Now I can do some cool stuff with this math

Justin (1:09:45) Yeah.

You know, that’s something that I think a lot of people realize later, who go into software engineering, like they don’t really care about math in school, but they love coding. at some point, I mean, they don’t start coding young necessarily. They find coding eventually later, ⁓ like late in high school or in college or whatever. And then eventually they build up the foundations of coding and then they realize…

that if they just knew all their math, then they could be doing so much more. And it’s like the earlier you make this happen, somebody like gets interested in coding, sees how important math is to doing non-trivial coding. ⁓ The earlier in life, they get the motivation to skill up on both fronts. you if you graduate, like just imagine like a kid graduating high school.

knows like they went through they not only do they know pre-calculus with like coding applications but also calculus with coding applications and the instruction was so efficient that they also learned linear algebra and multivariable calc and some differential equations like they learned like basically your core engineering math and ⁓ of coding applications and they come into college and they are just like they’re just blowing the socks off of

anybody who gives them an opportunity to do some research, to do whatever, an internship, like everything, they already get the basics of everything. They’re ready to actually make ⁓ some kind of serious impact, which is like, it’s so rare to see in like an undergraduate researcher or an intern, right? Like it’s always like, you just, you can’t count on them making like a serious impact. You just like throw them a toy problem.

whatever, but like if you can actually make a serious impact at a young age, because you have the skills to do so, then you can just compound that into just such a massive ⁓ compression of time and figuring out what you’re interested in and everything.

Jason (1:11:55) Yeah,

yeah, 100%. I mean, sometimes this happens with technology too, is you get a lot of people, coders who, they get interested in certain categories of work that are highly mathematical and they realize they don’t have the math for it. And then they have to go back and clean that up and learn all that later, which we have a lot of customers who fit that. I guess if they had their preference, like man, I wish I had…

wish I had done this in high school or college, you know, and I just knew all this stuff and I could just do all this stuff and instead I have to kind of do it now. ⁓ Yeah, get it done. But yeah, I think for me coding too, like for math, like when I write something in code, in a way I encode it in my brain in a more comprehensive way.

And that could be just me or maybe certain types of people. It just sticks with me. Once I write code to do something, I feel like I of intellectually own it, cognitively own it. I know it, really know it, because I can see the code. I can see the structure of the code. I’m like, OK, yeah. So if you’re OK, well, this is what a surface-centered role is, or this is what an eigenvalue is. And you kind of do stuff mathematically. But if you’re writing code that does all that yourself, you’re like, yeah, yeah, let’s write the code.

whoop and then figure, I remember that, right? It’s just that, for my brain in particular, it’s just the more procedural way. I think, other people might be a little different, but it adds in ⁓ another way of encoding the knowledge. So if you can encode the same knowledge, but coming at it completely different directions, it sticks more, right?

Justin (1:13:43) Yeah,

more, more connection. You’re, layering more. I mean, it’s basically just layering, right? Like you’re just layering more advanced applications and more advanced content, whatever more advanced, anything that requires this knowledge as a component skill is going to get more deeply ingrained. You’re going to develop a kind of structural integrity. If there’s any, any sort of weaknesses in the component skill and you keep layering on top of it, they’re going to get exposed. ⁓ you’re going to see that you, you struggle.

with some, some element of coding it up because you have a weakness in the component skill that forces you to really make it more robust. And then, yeah.

Jason (1:14:21) Right.

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know, was there anything else that we’ve talked about that I haven’t mentioned in terms of the types of things that we want to add to the system that we haven’t added that are more about not features, but just more adding elements that would improve the overall learning experience?

Justin (1:14:49) ⁓ well, okay. I think one part that we, you and I have talked about, but we haven’t mentioned yet on, on the podcast is that, the idea of, ⁓ goal setting, like why, why are you, why are you coming? What do you want to get out of using the system? And also showing progress towards that goal. mean, there’s progress in completing courses and stuff, but there’s also progress of like,

Jason (1:15:02) Yeah.

Justin (1:15:17) when somebody signs up for the system, what is their North Star? What do they want? Sometimes they don’t even know what they want. Like that’s part of the challenge. Like help me help you, help me understand like what you want so I can help you get there. And we can show to you that you’re getting there in a reasonable timeframe. And you can look back also, ⁓ goal setting is kind of the…

Jason (1:15:24) Right.

Right.

Justin (1:15:45) forward idea here, but there’s also a backward idea, which is like looking at progress. So you come like 25 % of the way to your goal or whatever, and you look back at the types of math or where you were, what course you placed into, whatever. There’s like various ways of measuring, problems that you got wrong in your initial diagnostic. And then you look back three months later and you’re like, wow, like I know how to…

all that stuff, I struggled with that stuff, really? That was, so this was something back when we were developing the URISCO sequence, the super advanced math and computer science sequence that we made within the, original math academy school program, where the kids were like, doing all this machine learning, reproducing the Blondie 24 research program in high school. Like that was, that was a lot of intense work. And one thing that,

Jason (1:16:26) Mm-hmm.

Justin (1:16:43) ⁓ I remember you and I would talk about sometimes is that like, because if they don’t really appreciate like just how far they were coming, like they would, it’s like almost, they would show up like day after day, week after week and be like, Justin’s going to make me like implement another really hard thing. then like, so they go initially linear regression is this really hard thing. Just like fitting a line to a dataset. Cause they have to, they’ve never done this before, right? Like what’s a loss function? What’s a…

Jason (1:16:59) You step really hard. Yeah.

Justin (1:17:12) What do you mean, like have the model ingest the data? There’s like lingo and kind of like just the frame of what’s the game that we’re playing here, fitting a model to a data. And then it increases. They’re like, okay, linear regression, like we move on to logistic regression. Like we’re just laying more stuff. Eventually they’re doing back prop and neural nets. it’s just the feeling every day is like, just like, man, this is brutal. This is hard. I mean, I…

They know on some level, but like, okay, I’m doing a hard thing and I’m not sure I’m able to do it at the beginning, but then we actually get through it like reasonably quickly and now I can do it and that’s really cool. So I like that. But also like, do things ever stop getting hard? Like when’s it going to become easy? Like, is this really like, they don’t see their law. They don’t, what they see is the short game.

And the short game is on loop, being like, it’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard. Okay, it’s a little bit easier. They don’t always see the compounding of like, from it’s hard to it became a little bit easier. And then, so what I would have to do sometimes is like, ⁓ by the time they’re implementing like decision trees and whatever, like we’re a semester in, and I show them like the next assignment and they’re just like, that looks hard.

And then I show them like, do you remember like back when we did like logistic regression, linear regression, like breadth first search and in a graph and you had that same reaction right there. What’s your reaction to this now? And they’re like, no, I could like, that’s a component of this. could, I could code that up in like 10 minutes. Like, what’s the big deal? Like, no, no, no. Remember you were saying just like three or four months ago that you were, you were groaning in the same exact way. And I guarantee you.

three or four months from now, this back propagation, this Dijkstra’s algorithm, whatever, you’re have the same reaction. It’s gonna be like, it’s just, it’s gonna be muscle memory. You’re gonna have new superpowers and you’re not gonna realize that you have them until I show them to you.

Jason (1:19:19) ⁓ So

when I was teaching the math academy courses in the middle school, back early, early days, and I had the initial group, the initial guinea pig group who were eighth graders, and I had like the seventh graders, they were doing pre-calculus. Eighth graders were doing ⁓ BC calculus.

And I had this one student, Clara, and she was just stellar. Stellar student. ⁓ And funny thing was that she was not only the best math student, she was also captain of the cheerleading team. was just like two of the top kids in there were two cheerleaders, which was just so funny. And… ⁓

Justin (1:20:06) you

Jason (1:20:09) You know, they’d their cheerleading outfit on Fridays because they had practice, you know what mean? And they’re just like, laughing people, you know? Anyway, so Clara would always get frustrated when I’d introduce her on a topic. I’d be like, OK, we’re doing completing the square or something or whatever it was, right? And she’d be like. And the thing with Clara is when Clara’s unhappy, we’re all unhappy because Clara had this really big personality, right?

And so when Clara’s like, and I’m like, Clara, what’s wrong? And she’s like, I’m confused. And I’m like, I’m like, yeah, well, I’m just explaining it. You you understand. She’s just like, much confused. I’m like, Clara, have I ever taught you something that you didn’t ultimately learn and find easy? She’s like, no. I’m like, well, then let’s just take it down a notch. Just relax.

Trust me, I’m going to get you through this. Okay? This is going to be, you are not going to be confused for very long, right? Jesus, fine, you know, whatever. It was just, it was one of these things. was like every time she just frustrated, you know? And, you know, but it’s like you just, had to remind her, just look at what we’ve done, right? Look at, look at what you’ve done. You’re, you’re, you’re, you’re gonna be fine, right? You’re gonna do great.

And, ⁓ and I, but I, I really, I do like what you’re, what you’re saying here about, know, you want to not only show them what they’re going to be able to do, but you need to show them where they, how much progress they’ve made. like a couple of times when I’ve had trainers, I remember going to this one woman and she was, ⁓

performance coach and what she would do, you’d meet with her once a month, she’d in and do a, she’d measure your whole, your body, you’d do this whole body composition analysis, like how much body fat and muscle and everything and.

And I can’t even remember how I found her. Somebody must have recommended her to me. And they would take this body fat analysis, company composition analysis, and then there’d be this multi-page printout that would show all the numbers and would actually like an image of your body. And it would kind of like the fatter you were, the figure it was, it would kind of show almost the muscle and the fat.

And then you’d go in every month and you’d see the progress and you’d be like, you know, 25%, 23%, 21 % body fat, 18%, whatever it was. you know, and I’m getting further and further down and she’d be like, good job. And she’d be like, here’s how much protein, here’s the calories I want you to hit every day. Here’s your protein, here’s your carbohydrate, you know, whatever. had the whole thing. And I’d tell her what my workout was. She’s like, okay, that’s great. But here’s what I want you to do from the.

from the diet side and it worked really well and I loved looking at the sort of performance report but also just looking at the history and seeing how far I’ve come. Now the one thing that she didn’t do which would be awesome, she’s enough, you keep going for six more months, okay that’s great, this is where you’re be, right? You’re looking at this, you’re like holy crap, I really will look like a superhero.

You know what mean? It’s like, how do you get from here to here? It’s like, okay, six more months, we’re gonna take you down from whatever was 17 or 16 % body fat down to 10 % or 11%, we’re gonna be the most, whatever it was. And you’d be like, hell yeah, I’m gonna keep going. Right, so look, you can do this. Look at how much progress you’ve made. You should feel good about it. And this should demonstrate to you that what we’re doing here is working. So even some days, you don’t.

Justin (1:23:34) Mm-hmm.

Jason (1:24:01) You want to eat stuff that you shouldn’t eat, or you don’t want to work out, whatever. Just remember, it works. And this is the result. This is what you’ve got to enjoy from that. Now, look the next step. And I think that’s definitely what we want to build into the system. want more of a, not just a snapshot, but look how far you’ve come, but then also where you could go if you just keep it up.

You know, and if we have that sort of projected onto the path that they’re setting, because, you know, like, you know, we have certain adults who have very specific goals related to machine learning, or maybe they’re at a university or master’s program. But we have parents who have kids and like, well, what, you know, my student, if she finishes calculus in eighth or ninth or 10th grade, then what is she going to do?

Justin (1:24:58) Yeah, people don’t always see the possibilities. I think the end of the road is calculus when really that’s just table stakes. You just arrived at the big race. Calculus, that was your entry ticket.

Jason (1:25:12) Yeah, and if you could make some context, if you could put some like, okay, like, because if you’re not a math person, you might think, well.

I don’t know, I never took calculus. Only the smart kids took calculus. You just wouldn’t really know. And if your kid is like, well, I want to go to MIT or Stanford, and I’m going to be this thing. And they’d be like, oh, that sounds great. Just keep getting A’s. It’s OK. Well, getting A’s and taking the honors and AP classes and that kind of stuff is necessary, but it’s not sufficient, as we like to say in math. The conditions are necessary, but insufficient.

You know, our story, some kids, it’s like, didn’t take calculus and I went to Harvard, MIT and I majored in head, but yet you had to fight really hard to catch up. It was a bear was not.

Justin (1:26:00) Yeah, there

are always exceptions that prove the rule, right?

Jason (1:26:04) Yeah,

I mean there are exceptions, but the majority of those students took calculus year. They didn’t take it their senior year. They probably didn’t take it their junior year. They might have taken it even before that and they were taking classes at the local state university. They were doing summer math camps. They were on the math team. They were doing all kinds of extra stuff. So you show up and say, well, I got A’s all through math and I was an AP cog and I got a five. You’d be like, ⁓ that’s…

That’s cute. You know what mean? You don’t realize how outgunned you are. it’s like, you didn’t realize, you know, and that happened to me in college. I didn’t quite realize how much more math these other people had. And you just thought, man, I guess, I guess I’m not as smart as they are. Like, okay, like they got a cheat code, right? They got a cheat code. So.

Justin (1:26:36) Yeah, good for

Yeah.

Jason (1:26:58) And if you want to be on a, you want to be a fair fight, right? Like, because these people are also super smart and really working hard. So it’s not like, oh, they’re ahead, but they’re just lazy and no, no, no, they’re all business. They’re good. And they’re naturally very good. So you got to shorten the gap so that you can get through these classes and not get completely torched. You have to drop the major and do something that might be a little easier or whatever.

So, but if you could use this instance, this context to say, well, we’re talking to some parent whose kids are in middle school or high school and you lay out and you say, if your student wants to go to an elite school or at least a selective school and they want to major in some STEM field and okay, well, here’s where you want to be. Like this is good, great.

Amazing. Like this is something like here are the four results or here adequate. OK, this is bare minimum. Bare minimum. Let’s say bare minimum is you do really well in AP calculus in high school, A and Bc. Probably would do more, but you get it. How about we do a year of introduction proofs? So they really have strong proofs. Maybe do a linear algebra and multivariable calculus. Really good.

We do another, actually we do that, but we also do differential equations and we do like real analysis or abstract algebra. Now you’re like, come in, you’re like, okay, it’s like, this stuff is like, a lot of it is review for you. It’s easy. Everybody, you feel like a genius. You know, I think we’ve talked a little about this in a previous show, but that’s, but really being able, I’m less trying to explain why you need to do this, but laying out like,

Here is the path. Here’s where you would want to be. And if you keep going at this rate, here’s where you can be. So just keep doing it. Because otherwise, it’s just sort of like, well, what am I doing? Or have I done enough math? And it’s like, well, I don’t know. What do you want to do? I if you want to major in art history, then you’re probably done. Don’t worry about it. You’re good. Take Algebra II or whatever, and then you won’t really care. You go, I’m going to go to film school. OK, nobody cares. Unless you just like it.

Justin (1:29:14) Yeah.

Yeah, it’s like there’s the opportunity to not only bring people through the pipeline, but also to advise them what is the pipeline. Because there’s so many people who don’t. mean, typically, parents don’t know, most students don’t know either, even if they have their sights set on some big time goal that they need to be super prepared for. They often don’t really know ⁓ what constitutes good preparation for it.

It’s like, sometimes I get like, it’s almost like you get invited to some like Olympic judo training or something. you, the summer before, like everyone just tells you like, just like, just be able to do like a few pull-ups, like 20 push-ups and run a mile in seven minutes and you’re good. And like, you don’t understand what you’re about to show up to.

You come in. So what you do is you’re like, okay, the bar, where’s the bar at? It’s, it’s not like three pushups or three pull ups, 20 pushups and seven minute mile. Okay. I’m going to do five pull ups and 30 pushups and run a six 50 mile. And, and, and, and you don’t understand that the people that you’re going to, going to be up against are just order of magnitude stronger than that. And, and they’re like, they’re going to be throwing you across the room, like every, every single time.

And so just like making this known to everyone, like what, what is the truth? What is the truth of the matter? Like not everybody has the same pipeline, the same goals. What is your goal? Let’s help you get.

Jason (1:30:55) I remember this, so my oldest who’s now a senior in college when he was in Little League Baseball, he was like nine or 10. And this dad, you you’re sitting in the bleachers and you get to know some of their parents and the dad, I he was like an in-house counselor, some pretty senior counselor at Disney. And he was talking about…

He knew about the math thing for we mentioned because I would do a little math Academy stuff that conversation came. He’s like, yeah, you know, he’s like, you know, everyone’s name is Carlos and he’s like, I was I was really good at math and I was taking my senior year. I was taking and what he was taking like linear multivariable character was something at USC or something. He said USC.

And he’s like, but I was applying to Stanford and the math teacher was like, he’s like, Carlos thinks he’s good as math. He’s like, when he gets to Stanford, he’s going to find out. He’s like, I didn’t know he’s talking about. He’s like, my God, did I find out? Right. You know, you’re laughing like I was, holy crap, you know. ⁓ And now USC and USC is a really, really good school. And I think it was USC, but it was like he was was already like he’s doing something. It’s pretty, pretty damn impressive.

Justin (1:31:54) Yeah.

Jason (1:32:11) But okay, you’re gonna do that, you’re gonna be a math major at Stanford. It’s like I’m gonna be a basketball player at Duke. It’s like okay, well. Okay.

There is good and there’s good and there’s really, I mean it’s like, okay, I wanna play college basketball, okay, I wanna play division one college basketball. I’m playing at North Dakota State or West Virginia, you know, these places that are ranked in the top 100 or 200 schools. Okay, now you’re talking about Maduke, say, these guys are gonna go play pro or whatever. It is ridiculous. And you just have no idea. And so if you’re talking about, I’m gonna go, if you have a coach who’s like, listen, hey kid.

I know you’re all state, you’re really good. I don’t know if Duke’s gonna be the right option for you. I think you could do D.Y. get a scholarship, I think you said, but just telling you, I mean, if you wanna do it, just understand this is the level and you’re gonna have to do all these things. Actually, I had that conversation happen to me in high school. I wanted, in basketball, I wanted to play college basketball.

And I didn’t pick up high, I was a late comer. didn’t start basketball until I was in ⁓ freshman high school. So super late. I was an athletic kid and so I was ambitious and I got good quickly and I made the varsity my junior years, which is pretty, pretty cool. And the assistant coach said to me, like, you heard my senior that I was really going to try and play college ball. And he’s like, Jason, he’s like, look, you’re fast. You get good.

He had a lot of good guard skills and dribbling. He’s like, but you need a really, really good three point shot and the card at your height, know, five, 10, half, five, 11. He’s like, five, 11 point guards. You gotta be dangerous from three point, because otherwise they’re just gonna pack the lane and you can’t, you’re gonna be rendered sort of ⁓ useless. And so I was like, yeah, yeah, okay. So he told me.

I mean, he brought me in, he took it upon himself, said, Jason, I think you have what it takes, but you gotta do this thing. And I said, And you know what I did? Not that. I did not go and work on my jump shot. Every time I’d go to the gym or the court, I’d always end up playing pickup games for three hours and I would never work on my jump shot.

And I was the last guy cut from the basketball team at the end of preseason. You know what the head coach said to me? He’s a Jason, good athlete, had like really good ball handling passing, but you just don’t have a good enough three point shot.

I was warned. I was warned. I was told and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do because I was a dumb kid and I just wanted to have fun. didn’t have enough self-discipline to go work on the thing that somebody who knew what they were talking about, you know, and so I suffered the result. I got cut from the basketball, which was my cause, really kind of heartbroken. was like, God, you know, that was, you know.

So it’s important when you’re in a position where you know how things work to tell younger people, this is the situation. This is the level of talent, the level of skill you’re gonna have to have if this is the thing you want to do. Now if you don’t wanna do it, that’s fine. There’s a place for everyone, everyone has a place. Not everybody has to be a math genius. Not everybody has to learn abstract algebra.

But if you want to do the things that you say you want to do or from this list, then okay, let, let us lay out a plan to help you be on schedule to get that. So you don’t find yourself in a situation where you’re getting blown out of the water or your first semester in college or, you know, or like a my student coaches, you know, Jason, you just don’t have the three point shot. You know what mean? So

That’s why I think it’s also like, it’d be really helpful to us. Cause sometimes adults, there’s a lot of adults just don’t know, right? Cause they’re just there. If you were not a, like my parents weren’t, my dad was a golfer. He wasn’t a basketball player. He, I think he saw like one of my basketball games my entire high school career. And he couldn’t say, you know, Jason, need to work in a shop. He never said anything. He’s like, why aren’t you playing golf? That’s basically his, you know.

He’s like, you’re in the wrong sport. To me, but, but, uh, you know, I didn’t have anyone to tell me until the last minute. mean, I did, I was told I ignored it, but it would much more helpful if I had an adult telling you when I was 13, 14, not, you know, 18 and saying, you need to be working on this now.

Justin (1:36:49) Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally. And most students are in the same situation where they’re like, the parents have not gone super deep in whatever domain they’re interested in. And the parents just don’t know where’s the bar for what levels of skill and talent do you need ⁓ to train up in order to keep pursuing this thing that you want to do. And I’m just thinking about my own parents. great, I had a good childhood.

Jason (1:37:36) Yeah,

your mom was an art major. She was like an art major, right? She was really good at art.

Justin (1:37:37) Love me very much. Yeah, she was an art major.

Yeah, art major. My dad was a business marketing major. yeah, so I was super into math. so I don’t have nobody else in my family. I don’t have this uncle who’s like a mathematician. I don’t even have anyone who like codes or anything. Like there’s nobody technical, nobody scientific. There’s no researchers or like, no, none of that.

Jason (1:37:45) So where does this math genius coming from, right?

Justin (1:38:05) So I had no idea where the bar was.

Jason (1:38:06) And here’s the thing, it is not

that your parents didn’t care about me, your dad is great. Your mom is lovely. She is a loveliest woman I’ve ever met. Is so, I can see just being amazing mom, but she’s just totally clueless about your math. Like she’s just like, they don’t know what to tell you, right?

Justin (1:38:10) Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

that was the thing. it’s like, and they, they kind of knew this too. Or it’s like they like, they were they were trying to, they were trying to do all that they could, like to, to help me just launch into my college and adulthood. Well, just like any good parent does, right? But, ⁓ but they just, yeah, they weren’t really sure.

Jason (1:38:28) They knew they didn’t know.

Justin (1:38:50) what that meant. And so what they ended up doing is just looking at like, what’s the typical advice that you get from your high school guidance counselor at just a standard high school in South Bend, Indiana. ⁓ The advice is just like, ⁓ just take a few AP classes and get like a 700 or more on the SAT. And so like, for instance, like, ⁓ so my parents, ⁓

Jason (1:39:09) Right. Yeah, yeah, take anything else. That’ll be good.

Justin (1:39:18) got like really like they kind of just figured that like, if you’re if you get a good SAT score, like you’re good, right? Like you took a few APs and I don’t know. So, okay, I guess maybe they didn’t fully know what they didn’t know. they like they knew that they should reach out to like or they should try and like read a bit online or reach out to like a guidance counselor. They didn’t know that so many other people also don’t know what they don’t know.

So it’s kind of like the blind leading the blind. yeah, Luck, luck. Yeah.

Jason (1:39:49) Nobody knows. And a kid doesn’t know. And this is like,

really, for the internet, was probably a little… mean, you had access to some shit. You worked your way through the MIT OpenCourseWare on your own, completely.

Justin (1:40:01) Yeah,

yeah, Yeah, luck, luckily, I mean, this, this wasn’t because I thought that it was necessary for, for college. It was just because I, I was just interested, it was just a, yeah, interested in math. And, and I was like, well, it just felt like the best use of my time. It kind of felt like I just kind of, in high school, it was just kind of like a loop of like, just having like,

Jason (1:40:12) We’re just interested in it.

Justin (1:40:27) extra time that wasn’t being put towards the best possible use. So I was just kind of like, what’s the best use of my time? am I really enjoying? What’s going to help with the long game? Like I guess, okay, I knew that this all, like all this math stuff is going to be part of the long game, right? Like you got to learn it eventually. If you want to be like a serious like scientist or, or technologists or whatever, like it is, if it’s like a hardcore technical profession like that, you’re going to have to learn serious math and coding. So you might as well learn it now.

I didn’t realize ⁓ just how ⁓ helpful it is in the short game too. I totally lucked out on that, ⁓ but it is, it really is.

Jason (1:41:03) Yeah.

Yeah, so yeah, because I think some kids get lucky. They just find their way there. And some get point in the right direction by their parent or a knowing adult who wants to help them out and say, hey, kid, come here. This is what you need to be doing. lot of kids don’t really have that. And so they don’t do it, or they don’t do it enough, or they don’t quite get it. And as more recently,

So my youngest who’s a senior in high school, she’s trying to get a Division I scholarship in gymnastics. That’s her goal. And she was another, like me, she was a late comer. So she’s kind of just really fighting to get the attention and get the thing. And so we hired a consultant who was a former Division I coach, and this is what she does. she, you know,

helps them understand the recruiting process and how to approach that and how to get in front of the programs and all these things. so Sandy and I have spent a lot of time trying to understand this college gymnastics game, because we’re not gymnast. We don’t know how this works.

And so, and it’s kind of a world of its own. And she’s like, well, should I hire this person? mean, they’re kind of, it’s kind of expensive. said, I just want to know the answer to questions. Like how, I mean, how many official visits do they get? Like how many, when they give you an offer, I mean, is it like, do you have like 48 hours? It’s like exploding hours, like mission impossible answer now, or this thing’s going to detonate in 10 seconds. Or do you have like a month? mean, what, how does this work? How does a transfer portal work? How does.

I don’t know, we don’t know these things. You know, how many of these girls who are being recruited, when they give an official visit, like how many girls are given an official visit and how many spots? So let’s say they give roster of 20, they get five for freshmen, five spots, they get official visits to seven, to 10, to 20?

And what, how, what, how, what does that mean? I mean, is it official visit mean your, your regrets almost as good as an offer or is that not even close and how many offers do they get? You know, I don’t know. I mean, so we don’t know answering these things. And so it’s like, I want to know what all how the inner game of what’s going on is that they feel like there’s this dark matter that we can detect, but we can’t.

Indirectly, but we can’t we can’t measure it directly like how how many spots who’s been recruited? What’s you know this game? I keep hitting my Microphone anyway the ⁓ Just trying to understand the game Because if we screw this up it can have really detrimental effects, right so

You need to understand. If you’re trying to, look, there’s a lot of things you can do in life that are just not super competitive. It’s not that hard and just kinda go in and just do your thing and it’ll be fine. But there are other things that are just super, super hard. And there’s a lot of competition. Being a Division I gymnast, going major in STEM at a place like MIT or Stanford, these are crazy hard. And the competition is off the charts.

So you better know what the game is. Now, if you don’t care, then fine. But if you care, then you want to know, right? I don’t want to tell anyone you care about something you don’t care about. And so when it comes to math, I would always say is like, we’re trying to increase optionality for kids. It’s like, look, when they’re 12, 13, 14, even 15, 16, they don’t really know who they are what they want to do.

But you want to keep those options open. As an adult, as a parent, or even as a teacher, you’re trying to help kids keep as many doors open as possible so when they get a better idea of who they are what they want to do, that they can get through the door. Because if the doors start closing because you’re making choices that are causing doors to close, and then later you go, I didn’t know.

Why didn’t know that I had to know multiple years of math to be a computer science or something major or something or whatever. It’s like, Oh, I didn’t know I had need to have a three point shot. It’s like, well, I mean, maybe you should have guessed. mean, your car, you know, I mean, whatever you, you, that’s well.

Justin (1:45:52) There’s levels to it. There’s stuff

that’s clear and then there’s stuff that’s sort of like, might know, maybe if you have a parent who has some sense of it. And then there’s stuff that’s just the last there that’s just like, you just have no idea unless you have really gotten inside the trade over and over. And if you are coming into this for the first time, you have not gotten inside the trade. You need somebody who has seen this play out over and over.

Jason (1:46:18) Yeah, and you know, like, like it’s funny, like the little basketball thing, it’s like, as a kid, you could easily rationalize not doing things, right? It’s so easy. Someone tells you something, oh yeah, okay, I’ll do the thing. Like, no. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, because typically this thing that you’re supposed to do, it’s not one thing, it’s a whole bunch of things, and it’s gonna take a lot of work and a lot of time. You know, you don’t just go work for a few weekends and you figured it out, you know, or something, you’re.

Justin (1:46:27) yeah.

Jason (1:46:46) take one class and you’re good. ⁓ anyway, think having this information, helping students set longer term goals, mapping that out, like you say, like, because ideally what you would want is say here we have a four or five year game plan. Right? And now they may decide a certain point that like, know what I’m done? I think I’ve done enough math. I’m actually going to decide I’m going to go into production. You’re good. Okay. That we did our job.

Justin (1:47:04) Mm-hmm.

Jason (1:47:16) parents their job, we got you as prepared for some possibilities, things that you might wanna do. And I that’s really what high school is supposed to be about, is it’s supposed to be preparing students so they go in any number of directions when they go into college. Because, know, at least in America, we’re not really expecting like a 14 or 15 or going to high school to know they’re gonna be a doctor or something, you know.

Justin (1:47:40) And even if you end up choosing some direction that doesn’t require a bunch of math, at least you can know you didn’t choose that direction out of because it was ⁓ you couldn’t do something else. You made a conscious choice. I have all these options and this is the one that I want to choose. Not this is the only one that’s left over for me.

Jason (1:47:58) Yeah, it

was the only door I tried though. was blocks. like nine of the doors were locked and one was open. I didn’t. I was like, yeah, there was a lot. Yeah. So yeah. So that’s kind of, that’s kind of what Sandy and I would talk to parents about the math catapult program. that was in the school district. And it’s like, you’re having students have to, it started in the sixth grade. And so students in the school district would have to select to go to one of, one of the three middle schools out of the seven and.

Justin (1:48:04) Yeah, I guess this is the one I’m going for.

Jason (1:48:28) You know, the parents are like, you know, well, why do they want to do this? We try and explain this as succinctly and as clearly as possible to keep options open. Now, if you know your kid is not a math kid, doesn’t mean they have to love math itself, but they like things in the vicinity of math, you know? They like science, computers, they’re like, you know, something like that, then okay.

You know, they’re kind of in that vicinity, in which case math being good at math is probably going to be a really helpful thing. If your kid’s like, well, my kid hates math, isn’t good at it, and like languages, like, okay, well, don’t waste your time. Go do that. I mean, you know, you should probably learn some math just to be an intelligent, educated adult.

who knows sometimes people do change their minds. So don’t know some math. Like don’t just learn no math and be like, ⁓ I struggle with fractions. Okay, well, that’s not great. No, we don’t have the different equations, but you should at least know basic algebra for crying out loud, basic statistics just to be a functional adult. anyway, so I think you’re right. think that’s right. There’s a lot of…

Justin (1:49:17) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason (1:49:40) lot of payoffs and it really improved the experience of just the student experience and even parent experience of seeing the progress along this longer path of this plan, this goal setting. But I think it also will prove really helpful for students just sort of planning their allocating time along there to get to where they might want to go.

Justin (1:49:54) Yeah.

Jason (1:50:08) Like I said, the decisions, if you don’t make the decisions, the decisions get made for you, right? That’s just how it is, you know? And I had, thought of my middle kid, who’s the, she’s the writer, filmmaker, and I said, you know, and I kept telling her, was like, either you go into the world and you make decisions to make things happen, or decisions will make, be made, and they will happen to you, more or less.

Justin (1:50:13) Right, exactly.

Jason (1:50:37) So you decide, know, turns out if you make things happen, you make intentional decisions, make things happen, you tend to get something that’s much closer to what you really want. And some of this doesn’t just get made for you. It’s like, well, you don’t have a job, you don’t have an education, so this is what you’re doing. This is what’s happening to you. You know, so anyway,

You want to talk about some more stuff?

Justin (1:51:02) I’ve got an idea that we can kind of wrap it back around into a good closing.

Jason (1:51:04) Okay. Yeah. Cause

Justin (1:51:08) we’ve been talking quite a bit about like goal setting and kind of a long game and everything. But there’s also… ⁓

the day to day of a kid using the system, like, we’ve been talking about the longing of advising them into the right goals, making sure that they’re making progress and everything, but ⁓ there’s a lot that we could share about like, as a parent, what do you do when you, like, your kid just starts using the system? And how do you make sure they’re successful? And,

Like, of course you got these goals in mind, right? You’re trying to keep opportunities open for your kid, make sure they’re prepared, get them ⁓ just, you want the best for them in the longterm, but sometimes it’s difficult in the short term, because you just, you can’t just like sit them in front of the computer, like, okay, kid, like do your math and like, let’s check in in about five years and then we can talk about like. ⁓

what you learned. Yeah, yeah. So how do you make this work? How do you make it? Even if you have the perfect plan, something that even the kid is excited about, like that they are excited about learning all this math and the kinds of like life avenues it opens up and they,

Jason (1:52:23) Yeah, well, there are a few kids that I work with, but very few. Yeah.

Justin (1:52:47) Yeah, they’re on board with that, but like they don’t always know how to be productive towards that day to day, you know, using the system.

Jason (1:52:55) Yeah, well,

think, I mean, there’s things to do and then there’s failure modes to avoid, right? And the first thing I’d say is for younger students, when I say younger, mean like students under the age of maybe 13, you’re kind of early middle school and younger.

Justin (1:53:03) Yeah.

Jason (1:53:21) maybe even up slightly older, depending on the personality or maturity of student is you have to model for them how to do math and how to learn math. And what that means is that ⁓ they need to sit down at a desk with paper and pencil, read through the lesson carefully, work through the examples on paper. If they don’t understand something, they can scroll back to the example of the introduction.

you know, not to guess, not to rush, do their work in at least somewhat of an organized fashion, you know, these kinds of things, because because the younger students don’t always know to do this stuff. Right, they just they just go crazy, especially the boys, for some reason, boys, they tend to be made when younger.

Justin (1:54:06) Yeah.

Yeah, back

when I was teaching in the school program, yeah, I remember just getting the new sixth graders. be like, it’s like somebody just like hands you like a crate of puppies and like, okay, have fun. Yeah. They’re just like going everywhere.

Jason (1:54:22) I ran it. You did that. You had a failure

mode. You’re like everybody just do a less or do a thing, right?

Justin (1:54:30) Yeah. Yeah.

Jason (1:54:31) And they just, what

happened?

Justin (1:54:34) Yeah, well, kind of like you’re saying, you get like, maybe one or two students who just like, they just do it the right way. Happens to be typically, not all the girls, but the students who are just like, just fine out of the gate and to be the girls, more conscientious. And they’re also like, sometimes just like paying more attention to what you have asked them to do and trying to make a good impression. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so.

Jason (1:54:49) more conscientious, a little more mature, a more conscious.

Justin (1:55:05) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now there are some, there were definitely some girls who were like that too, but yeah. But okay, so aside from those exceptions to the rule here, ⁓ yeah, all this, it’d be like chaos. I learned that like the very first time that, ⁓ first day of class that we like deployed the system with the sixth graders. ⁓ I know.

I know no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. But I was not prepared. I was not. Even after tutoring and everything, just, cause I guess the thing is like when you’re tutoring, you’re kind of, you’re more in control of the session and you don’t have like, like tens of students that you’re managing at once tutoring. Like it’s just you and one or two kids.

Jason (1:55:35) The enemy, right.

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Justin (1:55:58) get a class of like plenty of sixth graders. Yeah, things go crazy. some of the failure modes are some, well, I guess just I’ll enumerate them, but.

Jason (1:56:06) Well, on that first day, if I remember the

first day, like they blew through and they were just guessing the boys in particular, but they were just guessing everything, trying to get XP. And if they failed, they’re like, fine. And they were just burning through lesson after lesson. You’re like, whoa, what is happening? Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And they did like a bunch of less. They failed a bunch in a row before you even could realize what was going on. And you’re just like, everybody stop, right?

Justin (1:56:25) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

like what is happening? Yeah, right. So there’s, there’s failure modes of, um, right. Guessing through questions, um, not reading the tutorials and worked examples. There’s also the opposite failure mode of stalling out on a question because you haven’t read the tutorial and the worked example. So you just, you, it’s like, you get really excited. You’re like, Oh, I’m going to speed run this task, skip the tutorial work example. Alex easy. You do the quote, you go to the question. You’re like, Whoa, like,

How do you do this? I don’t know how to do this. Like, Justin, why didn’t you teach me how to do this? Aren’t you supposed to be teaching me stuff? so the solution, solution to this problem is that you just sit next to the student and then just model for them what to do. But for some of these students who are particularly hard-headed, you have to model for them in a kind of hard-headed way. Like, you want to be stubborn, I can be stubborn too. Like, okay, let’s go back to the tutorial. ⁓ Read it for me.

What you just, you didn’t read it. just, you just skimmed it. You skipped it again. Like you didn’t actually read it. Like word for word. I want you to read it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’d be like, go, go back. Like read the tutorial. I’ll just sit here while you read it. And then like, like instead of taking like two seconds and then skipping, they take like 10 seconds and skip. I’m like, no, you didn’t actually read it. You just, you just kind of skip. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason (1:57:35) Because they would do that. They would do that, right? They would refuse to read it.

You didn’t even skim it, you just looked at it. The first time you didn’t look at it. The

second time you looked at it. Now you’re going to try skim it. Now you’re to read, now read carefully, right? It’s like, there’s a big difference between, and also like at that age, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade even.

Justin (1:57:59) Yeah, exactly. ⁓

Jason (1:58:12) They mostly have been learning to read, not reading to learn. They’ve never really had to read to learn something. We had reading class, read this book or read this section and we’re gonna answer some questions on it. But everything else was just spoken to them, instructed them in person out loud. So they’ve never really learned, like, do I read this to understand something that I don’t understand so that then I can do something? That’s a different, that’s a new skill for them.

Justin (1:58:21) Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so you get a mix of kids who some kids are just like skipping and stuff because they’re like, they’re just being stubborn. Other kids, they really have no idea what you’re asking them to do. You might as well be asking them to read a book and they don’t even know how to read yet. like, it’s just, yeah, there’s lack of skills. So what you do, what you have to do is, and this works on both.

Jason (1:59:00) ⁓ They just lack the skill. They just don’t have the skill.

Justin (1:59:07) groups of students, students who are stubborn and students who don’t know how to do it, is you just assume that they have no idea how to do this and you help. Yeah. Yeah, it’s mostly true.

Jason (1:59:15) Which is a good assumption because it’s mostly true. Okay. So you have a couple of students

who like, didn’t explain it. That’s fine. It’s just everybody like, this is how we do this.

Justin (1:59:24) Yeah.

And you say, well, let’s just go through it word by word. Read this out loud. Read this out loud to me. We’ll just read it together. I’m not going to read it for you because you need to be the one reading it. So just read it out loud. It’s OK if you stumble on a word or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Just read it out loud for me. Let’s just go through the steps to make sure that you can do this. And then so they’ll go and read it out loud.

And this works great for the kids who really don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing, because you’re effectively teaching them how to do this with ⁓ active practice. You’re the tennis instructor who’s like, this is the movement that I want you to do. Now I’m going to throw some balls at you. You go do that. You hit the balls in this way. That’s what you’re doing. And for the kids who are stubborn, they’re realizing that, ⁓ you know, like,

you’re not gonna give up on them. You’re not gonna go away. They’re not gonna get out of this without doing it the right way. And they can either just do it the right way and not have you come in to be Mr. Helpful to, yeah. Yeah, you can, yeah, yeah. But they know if they don’t perform, they’re gonna get this…

Jason (2:00:32) Well, that’s a whole nother thing we should talk about, right?

Justin (2:00:48) annoying person who comes in and just like harries them to just like, yeah, read word for word. It just becomes kind of painful for them because they’re like, ⁓ because in their mind, they’re like, man, I already know how to do this. Why are you making me do this? And then you’re like, great, great. You know how to do this? Then just do it. Just do it. And then I don’t have to be here. You don’t have to be reading it aloud. This is the deal that will make. You know what you’re supposed to do.

Jason (2:00:52) What are you doing? What’s happening?

Justin (2:01:17) just go do it and then I’m not gonna like be here or making slowing you down in it. so you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why don’t you, you were the one who came up with this analogy. So why don’t you give the background on it? Cause it’s perfect. Yeah.

Jason (2:01:22) Let’s talk a little bit about Mr. Helpful. So.

Well, so when

you were teaching these classes, we first rolled this out, you would come to my house, we were working out of my home, and you would come here after teaching and I would inevitably talk, how did this class go, how did that class go? We would just kind of talk through it. And I remember, you know, a couple things happened. One, I would say, well, when there’s a failure mode, what’s the failure mode? And you’re like, well,

a fair number of fair amount of the time as a student just is not reading carefully. Once you get them over the bar of just reading, once they do read it and like, okay, I got to read it and I got to, okay, substantial and you can even maybe tell them what the proportion of the pie chart is of a time, but the fair mode is they didn’t read carefully and that was what percent would you say of the failure mode? 60, how much? 35, okay.

Justin (2:02:20) 75 % 75 I’d say

three-quarters of the time. Yeah

Jason (2:02:25) And then, so then you would have to come to them and say, ⁓ they would say, Justin, I’m confused. And you’re like, what are you confused about? And they would say, well, it’s confusing. You’re like, ⁓ And then you would come over and you’d say, okay, well, read that first sentence to me in the tutorial. And he’d read it.

You know, I can’t read that. Just, I do understand that. And they’re like, yes. Okay. Now read the second sentence. Do you understand that? Yes. Okay. Okay. I understand. Okay. Right. That was, that was, and then another failure mode that I remember was they would just, um, not, they would copy down information wrong. It was just two and they wrote down a three or they just wouldn’t.

Justin (2:02:58) Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, they

wouldn’t read the problem statement carefully, or they’d be working through the worked example and they wouldn’t be writing this down. They’d just be like looking at it, kind of being like, yeah, sure, that sort of makes sense. Like, no, write it down.

Jason (2:03:14) Right, and that was another.

write it down and be careful. And then another one was that they would just be a little sloppy with their work and make little.

Justin (2:03:26) actually do it, yeah.

yeah, yeah. But again, mostly the boys were just like, I had one kid who ⁓ would use a different sheet of paper for every problem and he would write really, really big. ⁓ And it’s like he write so big that he would have to start carrying over horizontally into the…

Jason (2:03:38) Yes.

Justin (2:03:59) Like Like he’d be solving like just the linear equation. Oh, yeah, he’d get to the end of the paper. He’d writing so big and then he’d be like, oh crap, I ran out of space. Like go to the other side, go horizontally, then start running like diagonally. And then like by the time I come to help him out, I’m like, huh, so where, where did this problem start on your paper? Where’s the next step? And he’s just like, oh, you here, here, then here, then here, then here, here, then then then then then then then then here,

Jason (2:04:01) Like wrapping, that’s the equation.

And this is like basic, this is just like pre-algebra,

right? This is like pre-algebra basic, you know, this isn’t like they’re doing this three page calculus problem, right? I mean, this is really three or four steps of really simple manipulation, short equations. There’s no reason that should happen.

Justin (2:04:32) Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. Yeah, and then some kids will like work all the same, all the problems on the same sheet of paper and run into the same problem. Where it’s like, maybe initially it starts out going, wow, it’s like, okay, this is neat. This is neat. This is neat. This is neat. Okay, time for a new sheet of paper. But they’re like, no, no, I’m gonna just like, there’s some space over here and over here and over here. I’m just kinda like, like, first part of the problem is gonna be in the bottom left and then we’ll move to the top right and then all of the center. Oh, there’s more space in the bottom left that I forgot about, so I’ll put the rest there.

Jason (2:04:48) like jamming in a corner and like.

Justin (2:05:13) And then they get distracted for a sec, then they look back, they look at the bottom left, and they totally forget that they had anything in the top right. And then they start making some incorrect deductions based on their work because they don’t have all the work there. Or sometimes they’re not writing their numbers carefully. That was actually a big issue. sometimes kids would write the ones, like sevens, like a one.

Jason (2:05:42) and they couldn’t read their own handwriting.

Justin (2:05:43) or a seven?

Yeah, exactly. I get confused what it was or…

Jason (2:05:48) Like if you, if

you have not taught fourth through seventh graders, like you have no idea. mean, it is, it is hilariously and exasperating at the same time. Right. It’s like puppies, right? They’re, they’re great, but they’re also on the floor and they chewed up your shoes and their bark. mean, it’s just like, you know, it’s like, puppies are amazing. They’re so fun, but they are also like, they’re, could just be a nightmare and from a different perspective. And I think, I think like dealing with like.

Justin (2:05:59) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason (2:06:17) you know, for me, fourth through seventh graders fell on that, that range. They’re so fun.

Justin (2:06:22) Yeah, yeah. It’s like on

one hand, they’ve got that like young, the puppy excitement about them. They’re excited to do this. They don’t really know exactly what it is, but they’re excited for it. yeah, yeah, yeah. But they just have no idea how to do it. They’re just, and they’re so excited that they’re, sometimes their excitement is kind of preventing them from like just calling down, chill out, listen, read, like slow down. They just want to go.

Jason (2:06:29) They are so.

They’re in for it, they’re up for it. They’re here for it, right?

Slow down, listen to what I’m saying,

do careful.

Justin (2:06:51) Everywhere

fast. Yeah, they want to do everything everywhere all at once. It’s like no no no you can do everything but just like one thing at a time Just finish this one thing then go do the next

Jason (2:06:55) Yes.

So, but I remember, so you got, you quickly got them up over the hump within a week or so, or two weeks of just, although you had to keep checking back in. Some kids would get on the rails and then they would get off the rails.

Justin (2:07:09) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That’s right. Yeah. It doesn’t take a long time to get them on the rails. This is not like, if you really work with them, it just takes a couple of days to get them on the rails and, ⁓ yeah. Yeah.

Jason (2:07:29) They learn how to read, they learn how to do careful, neat work, they learn how to read

the example, they can read the solution and check, I made a mistake on the solution, I forgot this step. They learn how to self-correct, you know, that,

Justin (2:07:42) Because it’s

a very systematic procedure. The lesson is a systematic thing. There’s a tutorial, there’s a worked example, now you’ve got some questions. There’s another worked example, now you’ve got some more questions. Okay, it’s a review. You don’t have a worked example. Try your best to remember this from memory. If you really, you tried your best, you still, you remember part of it, but you can’t remember the whole thing. Okay, just click the brush up on the topic button. just peek. ⁓

peek back at the top, just that one thing that you had kind of forgotten. Okay, now close that tab. Like now we’re back, continue. And you just do this over and over over again. You got some quizzes thrown in, like there’s not, it’s not like every day is a, I mean, it’s a new lesson, but it’s not a new meta game. It’s the same meta strategies going on all the time. So.

Jason (2:08:35) Same meta skill.

They’ve absorbed the meta skill. But some, because it takes a little bit of conscientiousness and discipline to do what they’re supposed to do as opposed to do what they want to do, which is not read it, not write stuff down.

Justin (2:08:39) Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So there’s always a little bit of a drift back. Now, they’re not gonna, it’s not gonna be like you really, you get them solid the first day and then the next day they’re just completely off the rails. No, it’s not like that. And it’s more subtle than that. It’s the next day they are slightly off the rails, slightly, just slightly. There’s some mostly on the rails, but there’s like a wheel that’s kind of starting to just get a little off the tracks. And…

They’re still moving forward pretty well. Like they’re making great progress. Like you don’t really, you don’t know that this is happening yet. But then the next day it happens a little bit more. There’s a little bit more off the rails, but still mostly on they’re still making good progress. But then another day or two later, you kind of notice that like, wait a second. Like what happened? This kid just like failed. Yeah, what happened? It was like, yeah, you’re watching like a little.

Jason (2:09:40) Why did you only get 15 XP today as opposed to 40 or 50? What’s going on?

Justin (2:09:50) It’s like a very slow but steady decrease in the amount of XP or in their accuracy or a slight uptick in the frequency at which they’re failing tasks. And then if you don’t catch it right there, the moment that you observe a very consistent pattern, it’ll spiral off the rails. And before you know it, if you just.

If you teach them this meta skill, how to do things properly, and you say like, okay, I’m gonna check back like in a week or two, a week or two, they’ll be like, just basically back to where they started. So you basically have to do a space repetition on this meta skill. So you teach it to them this first day, you’re giving them some independence, but you’re watching. Couple of days later, you really…

you’re not waiting for problems to come to you. You’re kind of inspecting their tasks, making sure like, if anything looks a little weird, you go and you ask them about it. You talk to them about it. ⁓ You’re not like laying into them or anything, like saying, scolding them. You’re just asking like, hey, what happened on this task? I’m just curious. Was there anything that you needed help on or what? Just so they know that you are watching them.

that if they fall off the rails, you’re gonna be right back there being like, okay, let’s breathe this together. Yeah.

Jason (2:11:16) Yeah, kids have to know their parents.

Students have to know, especially younger students, but in general, that the adults care what they’re doing, whether it’s a teacher or the parent or whatever, that somebody is watching and they’re going to hold me to account or make sure that I do this thing. And if I do well, get recognized. If I don’t do what I’m supposed to be do, I get, you know, a look or a

know, frown or a scold or whatever, depending on severity. adult feedback, presence, doesn’t mean you have to sit there the whole time. Now you have to, depending on the age, mean, you know, might just sit down with a lesson or two, might be like a couple sessions, you have to sit with them a few sessions, but you can give them more more space over time. And then you just kind of check in. You know, every once in a while, maybe you check in.

Justin (2:11:44) Yeah.

Jason (2:12:09) a times a session early, maybe you check in once a day, maybe you’re just kind of watching and then start things go off the rail, you sit down and say, what happened yesterday? It looks like you failed a couple things there. looks like you’re rushing. But one of the things that was, one of the failure modes, or sort of a failure mode, is a student would be, every time they’d get confused, they would say, Justin, I don’t understand.

And initially, you would come over and, oh, well, let’s read this together. they would feel a degree of comfort from that. And then what happens, they get too comfortable. And so every time they’re calling you over, can you explain this? Can you help me with this? And so I had suggested, I said, well, I think you need to make it into a bit of a…

painful for them. Like, what do you mean? I was like, like, there’s the kind of pain where you ask your dad for help. anyone who’s ever is this kind of a dad thing? I mean, moms can do this too. But dads are just like a dad. It’s like dad jokes, right? It’s like, don’t ask your dad for algebra homework or algebra help. Oh, oh, let’s go back to my day, you know, and he started, I was like, can you just

Like you just dad just answer my question, right? And dad’s like, well, why are you doing it this way? You know, you can do it. The dad gets to the big explanation. It’s the whole thing. And you’re like, dad, no, dad, come on. You just you just want to be done with this thing. You just want your dad to answer his question. You’re helping this one thing so you can be done your homework. But that is not doesn’t operate that way. That is well, let’s see here. Well, OK, open your homework. well, you know, here’s a way you want to think about it. And it drives kids crazy.

And so what they do is they learn is don’t ask dad for help unless you absolutely need it. And that’s what you need. There is a cost. so, and I would jokingly refer to it as Mr. Helpful. And I said, what you want to do is be the overenthusiastic dad. Be Mr. Helpful. I think I joke because I would joke with Sandy.

Justin (2:14:05) Yeah, there’s a cost to it.

Yeah.

Jason (2:14:25) about that in the house. Like, hey, you see her putting away the dishes, let me help. And of course, like screw it up. And she’s just like, well, you just cut it out. And I just, it was just kind of a bit I would do just to make her laugh. It just be like kind of overly enthusiastic and helpful, but ultimately more pain than it’s yeah, that would be right. So. ⁓

Justin (2:14:42) Yeah, Clippy the paperclip.

Jason (2:14:49) So you did this. He said, all right, so, you know, just be Mr. Helpful. Go in there and be like, well, let’s, you know, get a new piece of paper. Let’s write everything, you know? And then the kid’s like, ⁓ Right? It’d be so much easier if I just read this and figured out that if I asked Justin to come help me, right?

Justin (2:14:53) Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly, exactly, right? Because it would come back to the like, okay, are you sure you understood the work example? Why don’t we just like look it over once more, just to be sure? And like, why don’t you explain this to me? Like, because just refresh my memory on this. I already know it, but I’m just like, no, I’m gonna make you explain it to me. And then it’s like, okay, go back to the problem. Why don’t you like tell me about what you’ve done here? And walk me through your work so far. I can already see the work on the paper.

I already know where the error is, but I’m not gonna tell them because I’m gonna make them go through their work. then, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if they go past the error, then you know what? I’m not gonna tell them right away. We’re gonna wait until they get to the end and they’re gonna be like, okay, that’s weird. Yeah, I agree that doesn’t make sense. Okay, let’s look back step by step, see where the first.

Jason (2:15:39) I’m going to inject a little pain in this situation.

Justin (2:16:03) the first places where it starts not making sense. And so in addition to being this kind of like Mr. Helpful, just bumbling in and taking up way more time than is necessary. I’m also like helping them develop this meta process of troubleshooting, whatever it is, in a very annoying way, but in a very explicit way, where I’m not, there are things that I’m running in my head of like,

of like, okay, where’s the first error in your work?

Jason (2:16:36) Is the problem they wrote down identical

to the problem in the question? did they even write the problem? Like, that’s 30 % of the time, that’s the problem.

Justin (2:16:40) Yeah, yeah. And I need,

yeah, yeah, exactly. So I need them to notice this though. If I just tell them what the issue is, then they haven’t walked through the process themselves of finding the issue and finding the issue. Like as we know with debugging, that’s like, it’s often like 80 % of the battle.

Jason (2:17:01) Yeah, well, they have to do it

themselves to internalize it. You can’t just tell somebody to do something. They have to go through the process. So you’re making them do this process in front of you, internalizing it. we said, when you were teaching your risk code and you’re teaching in programming classes, teaching kids how to debug code, how to step through code, how to log stuff was a whole, that’s a whole nother discussion, but they were like, what? They would just look at it. They’re like, it doesn’t work. And you’re like, why do you think it doesn’t work? I don’t know. And you’re like, well, what’s the value there? I don’t know. Well, why don’t you lie a

Justin (2:17:05) Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jason (2:17:30) You know, it’s just like, they’re like, huh? You know, this whole thing. Now it’s easy. It’s not hard for us to understand why a 15, 16 year old kid is learning a code doesn’t immediately understand how to troubleshoot an a bug code. But sometimes you forget when you’re teaching a 10, 11 year old, you know, pre-algebra, algebra or something that they don’t, that there is a troubleshooting process there too.

Justin (2:17:32) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason (2:17:58) And it’s so internalized for us adults that you don’t even think to break it down into steps to like, you know, we’re transcribing the problem on the screen to paper, understand, you know, understanding the step by, did I make a mistake? Did I write stuff down? You know, whatever. So, but that’s interesting. I mean, that’s sort of, and you’re teaching these two classes simultaneously. So you’re teaching high school students how to debug their Python code and you’re teaching 11 year olds or whatever.

how to solve their first algebra equation.

Justin (2:18:30) Exactly.

Yeah, it happens. It’s the same situation plays out. It’s like every every time the complexity of the challenge that the kid is faced with increases. You get the same kind of kind of issue where it’s like, well, they learn over and over that that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. You want to go fast? Think through it methodically, step by step. And that’s the way to do it.

And the problem is like, it’s like, they learn this lesson over and over. They learn how to do this with algebra. Then they get really good with algebra and they get to like skip some steps because they’re just so automatic on it, which is great. ⁓ But then ⁓ they run into like some new integrals or some new iconic sections of work that’s kind of forcing a level of like, okay, additional, like this is really complicated.

This is not just solving a linear equation or refactoring a quadratic. You really have to go back to writing everything out step by step again. so every kid also has a different capacity to do a lot of this really quick thinking in their head that may get them. It may be enough to carry them through some levels. There’s some kids who, I’m just remembering the…

Jason (2:19:46) Mm-hmm.

Justin (2:19:56) Some of the particularly like quick, like sharp, quick kids in the class, they would, ⁓ in the sixth grade class, they would get through linear equations pretty well without having to write stuff on paper or at least like one step, two step linear equations. Yeah. Maybe even three step. ⁓ But like at some point ⁓ they would just get to like the load.

Jason (2:20:12) Yeah, they could just see it. They could just.

Justin (2:20:25) the complexity load of the task would exceed their ability to do this all in their head. And it’s kind of unfortunate because it’s like the initially, like you look at these students, oh, they’re doing great on their tasks. just, initially, if you haven’t seen this play out before, you just think like, oh, these students are not gonna be a problem at all. Like they got it, all right, they’re good. But really they are the ones who you’re not gonna break into the right.

⁓ Meta skills in the first week because they have their own they have their own meta skills that are subpar, good enough for the time being that it’s not a drag on progress and performance. But eventually they hit a moment of reckoning where like they don’t want to write everything out and they they they’ve been doing this for a while where they haven’t been writing stuff out. So they’re stubbed, they’re particularly stubborn and they don’t want to start writing stuff out.

⁓ systematically because they’re so used to being able to do it. So it’s like the longer you go the harder it is to break the kids of this.

Jason (2:21:31) Well,

my son was the worst of all time, right? Colby was, I mean, I would say he was probably, had the high, among the most, if not the highest capacity to do stuff as heads, and he’s also the most stubborn.

Justin (2:21:35) my god, yeah.

Yeah, well, because he was able to carry, he was able to continue using this, just do it in your head strategy for absurdly long. Yeah.

Jason (2:21:56) drive me crazy as dude,

what, you know, I remember he would like, he would do these, I’m gonna seventh grade even, doing these, when I first started teaching calculus and he would do these really tricky integral substitutions in his head, the entire thing that normally would take like a half page, but then he’d get the negative side wrong.

I’m like, yeah, but you can’t miss a negative sign. So it’s still kind of impressive, but it’s still wrong. You know, it was just so, it was so frustrating. mean, even as a, even when he got to like end a high school and stuff, I remember, you know, it was still a problem. Right. And that’s a whole nother discussion really, I guess, but

Justin (2:22:26) Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s

a problem because you need to, it’s not enough to get like 95 % of the way there on a problem to continue building on it. You have to be able to do the skill in full. It’s like, can’t, if you can’t land a single backflip like on your feet, like well, if you’re like 95 % of the way there, I can almost do a single backflip. Guess what? You’re not ready to do a double backflip. Like it’s just, it’s not happening. Yeah.

Jason (2:23:11) You still can’t do it back, but you still can’t land it, you know, whatever. It’s

still not a success. Yeah, I mean, I had a kid, so when he was younger, and I already knew that about him, and then I got a kid just like him in the class below him. And I’m teaching them sixth grade, they’re starting to just the pre-algebra stuff, losing basic equations and…

He would just do them in his head. And I’d be like, listen, I was like, it’s going to get harder and you’re not going to able to do it. And he’s like, well, I can do it. And he was stubborn the same way. I’m like, yeah. This is a Groundhog Day. He’s like the same kind of kid. And we get a lot of working memory. do all the stuff in his head, very stubborn, wouldn’t wear anything down. I said, well, I’m telling you, in a few weeks, we’re going to get this. this isn’t going to work anymore because he didn’t believe me.

Sure enough, get to like, you know, I don’t know, whatever, solving quadratic equations or something and they fell apart. I’m like, remember when I told you that you kind of like write down the steps, you know,

You know, but and he was like, okay, well, this is how you have to do it. You can’t. And so then I’m having to teach him, catch him up to everyone else. The meta skills that everyone else had learned about writing step by step, one step per line, keeping your work organized. I learned that with solving one step and two step linear equations and inequalities. And now we’re onto quadratics. And he had been kind of fudging his way through it, doing three or four steps at once and was able to get through it. Now he’s now he lacks his meta skills.

And now I got up like, okay, now let’s, I gotta teach you how to do that. So yeah, it’s, but that’s a big, that’s a big, I mean, certain, you said that there’s a category of kid that struggles with that, right? There’s the category of kid that’s just, and then you have the category of kid who’s afraid to get thing wrong.

Justin (2:25:07) Yeah. Oh yeah. I had a one kid like that. I remember in one of the eighth grade classes. And I remember she would, she would sit there. I mean, she was, she, she actually kind of joined, she, was a new student. So I didn’t really know her failure modes that well, but so I just kind of, uh, figured that like, okay, if she’s not asking me for help on the first day.

And then like, okay, just leave it. She’s an eighth grader. all right, we’ll just give her a day to get settled. And she had, turns out she had stalled out on like the same problem for like 40 minutes. And it’s like, what are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. This is a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Minute, minute and a half at most two to three minutes. If you’re kind of needing to refer back to the worked example a bit.

Jason (2:25:49) Meanwhile, probably should take her like a minute and a half or a minute.

Justin (2:26:04) But yeah, was very much, just kind of like, yeah, she was so afraid to get it wrong. And so what I had to do with her ⁓ is what ended up working out really well was like, she actually had, she was coming at the problem the right way. And it’s just, wasn’t, it’s like she felt like she needed to be 100 % confident in every single step she was taking.

100 % confident in her answer before she submits it. It’s like she was almost like she was like, only submit the answer if I would bet my life on it. And so needless to say, yeah, she’s stalling on that hyperanalyzing. Am I sure? Am I 100 % sure that I got this right? I don’t know. What about this stuff here? Am I like really sure about that? I don’t know. Maybe. And so I would just be like, okay, you know what? Take your best guess. It’s okay if you get it wrong.

Like you’ve worked on this problem, you got to a result and it seems like pretty reasonable the way that you’ve gone about it. You read the tutorial, you followed the same approach that was taught in the worked example. So just go ahead, go submit it. so like 90 % of the time she would get it right. She just wasn’t confident enough to submit the answer.

Temperance at the of the time, she would get it wrong because of some, sometimes it was a silly mistake. Sometimes it was actually just a little, it was a subtle detail that she had kind of glossed over. But the point was like, that’s okay. Like this is part of learning. Sometimes you gloss over a detail. Sometimes you make a silly mistake and that’s all right. Just don’t keep doing that over and over the same detail, the same silly mistake. Just keep that in mind for the next time.

And then you’re not gonna make that mistake. You’re gonna be just fine. And then you keep on making progress. And so at home actually, that was another thing. So we’ve worked this out where during school, she’d be moving along well. But at home, things would kind of fall off the rails again because I am not there to kind of encourage her. And so…

Jason (2:28:24) encourage her to just.

Justin (2:28:29) So what ended up working is just like ⁓ setting a timer. Like if she has spent five minutes on this problem, just submit the answer that you got to. Like even if you’re not confident in it, just submit. There’s a forcing function there. Or if you’re just unsure and you’re pretty sure you got it wrong, you’ve been thinking about this for like three minutes on the same

the same thing and you’re just not sure. You went to the worked example, but like for whatever reason you’re struggling to map this onto your problem at hand. Like if you spent like two or three minutes or you’re thinking real hard about it and you’re not getting anywhere, just take your best approach at it ⁓ and just submit it. And maybe you get it wrong. You’ll see the solution.

Jason (2:29:06) Mm-hmm.

Yeah, because you’ll get an answer. You’ll feel like what you would go, but you’re going to learn. You’re going to see

this. You’re going to learn faster. It’s like, how can I maximize the learning over some set of period of time? Well, you need to put a really solid effort in. If after putting a solid effort,

you can’t figure it out. And that might include a little extra effort going back, referring to example, trying to debug your thing. If you still can’t figure it out, now you’re just burning time. And it’d be easier just give me the answer. And then you can figure out, ⁓ I see, I forgot that step. I need to move the negative sign to the other side of the thing or whatever it is. And it’s all about maximizing learning. So they would shortcut.

Or they would really drop the efficiency of learning because they just wouldn’t get any reps in because they just stall out on one problem, right? Where the opposite side is the kids just blowing through stuff, not learning anything. They’re like, ⁓ and they’re just guessing. so the case we talked about earlier, the kids rushing and not reading carefully, I that’s way, way more common than the overall conscientious. It’s really like the high anxiety students. Students have a really high anxiety, I think coupled with high conscientiousness, meaning they…

Justin (2:30:23) yeah.

Jason (2:30:32) They really care about doing it right, and they really are worried about making a mistake or doing something wrong. If you have those two things, then that’s a situation where you have a student, you have to encourage them to say, making mistake is OK. It’s part of the learning process. OK? Everyone makes mistakes. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re probably not really learning. for those students, you need to pull them back, say like,

It’s okay to Now the kids who make tons of mistakes, you’re like, hey, look, you’re the ones lacking conscientiousness. It’s like, need you to be more conscious. I need you to read carefully. I need you to write things down more carefully. So it’s kind of like getting them into that sweet spot of some reasonable level of conscientiousness.

Um, but it’s, it’s, every, every kid’s different. And of course the battle you’re fighting depends not only on them, but also their level of maturity. you talking about fourth graders or sixth graders? Big difference. The eighth graders. Big difference between eighth graders and sixth graders or high school students. You know, I mean, you can have high school students for sure who lack consciousness, you know, but you’re going to have fewer of, or at least their level of consciousness is not going to be as.

much of a problem is the fifth graders or something, right? That’s a big, really, especially the boys for whatever reason, they just, they’re not, that’s not a thing for them. Most of them, sometimes you get lucky, but most of them are puppies, dogs. And puppy dogs, as we know, are not conscientious at all. So anyway, so those are all failure modes. And I think as a teacher, as a tutor,

As a parent, know, these are all things that you kind of learn after having done this long enough. Like, you know, these are the situations and these are the situations you need to overcome. one failure mode we haven’t talked about, and this tends to happen sometimes with tutors I’ve seen, but definitely with parents, which is if you’re sitting down with your student and helping them,

But by helping them, you’re preventing them from making a mistake. That is a big failure mode. You have to allow the student to get the problem wrong. Because if they don’t get it wrong, if they don’t get it wrong when they really would have gotten it wrong, then the system itself will, first of all, assume that they know the material better than they do.

and it’s going to accelerate the learning process or not slow it down if it needs to be because the system can only see what you’re doing. It doesn’t have a camera on you and go, oh, like, know, mom is doing the work for him. You know, so yeah, doesn’t know that. doesn’t know that. So, you know, and we’ve had this situation or, you know, a friend of mine who’s a dad who’s a smart guy.

engineer from MIT, all that kind of stuff. And he’s like, Jason, he’s like, you know, I’ve noticed that my son that, you know, it’s like, it’s getting harder for him, and he can’t really do it by himself anymore, and he’s my help. And I’m wondering if maybe we need to like go back or I’m not sure why it’s gotten so hard. And I said, let me show you a question. go, are you are you working with him? Are you helping him? He’s like, Yeah, yeah, of course. I go, okay, well.

Like all the time, he’s like, yeah, we sit down and we do it. Okay. When you’re working with him, because he was homeschooled, the son was homeschooled. So when you’re working with him, do you let him get the problems wrong or do you stop when he’s about to make a mistake and say, check your work, I think, you know, or whatever. He’s like, oh, I, I guess I kind of interrupt and I stop and as okay, well, don’t do that. That’s a mistake because.

You’re feeding false information to the system. So system thinks that your son knows the material better than he does, so he’s getting less practice when he’s struggling. Otherwise, he would have to do more problems, which is what he needs, because he’s not getting it right. But also, you’re sort of preventing him from gaining from the learning process, because when you get something wrong, it’s like,

You know, get that wrong, you know, because now I’m not going to get as much XP. I thought I could get bonus XP, but I missed a question or I thought I was going to fool you. So the students like, oh, and then they then the little bit of pain of missing promise. It’s a little bit of pain. That’s OK. It’s OK to miss a question. You know, this is nothing we’re part of. Part of students or kids growing up is they have to learn to fail.

in a controlled environment. We’re not talking about massive life failure. We’re like talking about getting a math problem wrong. But they learn to adapt and go, okay, I got that wrong. What did I do wrong? ⁓ I misread the problem. I forgot about this step. I forgot that my handwriting was messy and I lost whatever. They learn to debug it because the pain helped them remember. But if you just stop them and say, I think you messed something up, you’re removing some of the pain.

and the frustration with the process, removes the learning experiences less strong as an emotional event. Because sometimes learning, we learn, lot of times learning is about doing something and coming up short. And it’s the frustration and disappointment with that experience that then causes you to go, okay, I didn’t like that. Whether it was playing the wrong key on the piano or.

swinging a racket and missing the ball, hitting over the fence or whatever it is, you’re like, ⁓ you know, that was embarrassing. That was terrible. And then you fix it. But if you’re trying to keep the student from making mistakes, they’re not gonna learn as fast and you’re gonna get the system to have a much more optimistic understanding of where your student is at. by the, now,

In a it’s like this is a really great parent, but sometimes a really great parent can do too much. You’re helping, you’re over-helping. Don’t over-help.

Justin (2:36:57) Yeah, the goal is to foster independence in the student. Yes, you probably have to sit with them for a little bit at the beginning, model behavior, like help them, like walk them through these meta skills. But the goal is to wean them off of that. That is just to get them on the rails at the beginning and then you need to gradually step back. ⁓

Maybe like the, after a good session sitting next to them, you say like next time, like, okay, I’m not gonna sit next to you, but I’m gonna check in every now and then as you go work on your own work. And then pretty soon you get into that, like, okay, you do your own session, but I’m gonna check in afterwards and see how it went. And then eventually you get a point where you don’t have to check in on them every single day. Maybe it’s like every week.

Probably you want to keep checking on them every week or so.

Jason (2:37:53) Sure,

yeah, you want to keep an up to, mean, like, look, my youngest is in the SAT, she’s about to finish up the SAT fundamentals course. I check in every day, mostly because I’m just really excited and interested to see her progress, because she’s like a guinea pig. She’s going be the first one to finish and go on to her upcoming SAT prep course. It’s a whole other thing. But I check in every day, and like when she, she does really well, but every once in while, like last night, she failed a task. I asked her, Mike, how did you get your XP done? She’s like, yeah, she’s like,

I didn’t get it all because I got negative XP. I’m like, yeah, negative XP. What happened? She’s like, I don’t know. But she knows that I care, that I’m paying attention. When she does a good job on her quizzes, I get emails, I you the quiz. Awesome. Killing it. And giving her that positive feedback, and she feels good.

Right? Kids want to make their parents happy and I’m just like, good job, keep it up. You’re doing great. You’re really learning this stuff. I’m excited. I think you’re going to crush the SAT math section. But I’m like, if she has done it, I’m like, have you done your XP yet? She’s like, all right, well, come on, keep it. We’re coming up, right? You know, you.

You have a certain schools you want to go to and you have to have these, you know, super high SAT scores to get there. So, you know, I didn’t make the roles. I’m just trying to help you achieve what you want. You you say you want to go to these type of schools with these kind of requirements. I’m just doing my part is to help you. But I, I check in every day using the morning. mean, honestly, I check in more than once a day just because, you know.

my software, right? So but but nevertheless, and you know, I do, but it helps me because she’s, you know, stay on top of things. ⁓ One thing I want to just come back to, you know, about the whole over helping. I did it myself. It’s so I’m just, it’s like, it’s, it’s so tempting. Right? Okay, here’s the situation. You’re like, Okay, we got to do this math.

Justin (2:39:28) Yeah.

Jason (2:39:51) And my wife, Sandy, she’s finished up dinner for instance. Like I just kind of remember this one scenario. And it’s like, we gotta finish this up because dinner’s gonna ready in 15 minutes. And I’m trying to like, okay, let’s get through these last couple of things. So I’m sitting in there with Colby and this is years ago. And I’m like, ⁓ I don’t wanna miss stuff wrong because I wanna get through it. Right? Like we gotta.

gotta get dinner because you guys got to get to bed because it’s getting late. You know, your mom’s gonna get annoyed if we don’t eat because your sisters are hungry, you whatever, right? So like, I’m trying to move things forward. As parents do, you’re always trying to like, okay, we got to go from here to here. I to get you up. I got to get you to school. I got to get you to dinner. get to get your pajamas. get it. You I mean, this is always even in high school, even though the kids are in high school, you’re still like,

pushing to move things. Maybe you’re less involved, but you’re always trying to move from stage to next stage. And so you’re like, hey, know, oh, are you sure you’re sure that’s the right answer? I knew not to do it. I just couldn’t help myself. Because I wanted to be done. Like, I don’t want to sit here and do this. Like, I got stuff to do, too. Like, let’s just finish this up. And like, by me doing that a few times, I probably saved us 10 minutes. But I also shortcut his learning process. So

It actually was, okay, we got done sooner. It was short term win. We got it done. We got dinner on time. Your mom was not annoyed because we were, we took too long. Okay, long term loss. Now you don’t know this stuff as well. Now you do it every once in a while. It’s not the end of the world. You do that all the time. It’s going to be a problem. You, like you said, you forsake the, the opportunity for them to wean them off you and the learn becoming more independent.

but you also shortcutted the learning process of those particular skills because you did not allow them to make a mistake, get the extra practice that they needed, learn to adapt from mistake, all that kind of stuff. So I’m just saying, I did it too. did it more than a few times, and I kind of even knew what I was doing at the time.

But you know, sometimes you eat a donut and you know you shouldn’t eat it. But you just do it anyway. That was a mistake. Why did I eat those donuts? know? Sometimes you just can’t help yourself. We’re human. We just, we want to get through the day. We want to, we need a dopamine hit. That stuff, there’s a stress, there’s time, you know, but just you got to keep it in your mind that, you know, you don’t want to be eating donuts every day. Right? As much as I hate that fact and you don’t want to like…

help your students so much that they’re not making mistakes. It’s not gonna work. It’s not gonna lead to the result and the outcome that you want. It’s not gonna lead, it’s gonna not deliver the level of learning efficiency that they can achieve if you set things up the right way.

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