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Most kids hate math because it's taught inefficiently, through one-size-fits-all lectures, where they're constantly asked to learn new things despite not having mastered the prerequisites. Students can learn far faster and with less stress when instruction is individualized, mastery-based, interleaved, and reinforced through spaced repetition. Math becomes frustrating when students are pushed ahead with gaps in foundational skills or cognitively overloaded; it becomes motivating when they experience small, frequent wins at the edge of their "knowledge frontier." Math Academy operationalizes this through an adaptive diagnostic that detects missing prerequisites and constructs a custom course to cover them, short alternating bursts of instruction and practice to ensure that students master material before moving on, and cumulative spaced review & quizzes to prevent forgetting, creating an individualized "glove fit" to each individual student. The broader vision is a shift away from lockstep classrooms toward individualized, coach-like learning.

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The transcript below is provided with the following caveats:

1. There may be occasional typos and light rephrasings. Typos can be introduced by process of converting audio to a raw word-for-word transcript, and light rephrasings can be introduced by the process of smoothing out natural speech patterns to be more readable via text.
2. The transcript has been filtered to include my and Jason's responses only. I do not wish to infringe on an external speaker's content or quote them with the possibility of occasional typos and light rephrasings.

Jason Roberts: Well, it all started as an experiment. My wife and I were asked to coach the fourth grade math field day team, right? Because I opened my mouth about math one too many times at parent-teacher conference. Next thing I know, we’re coaching the math field day team. So word to the wise, shut up and ask about the bake sale. Don’t ask about math. Who knows what’s going to happen?

So that kind of morphed into - I had so much fun with the kids. And they would ask, well, what is pi? And what is this? And they would want me to explain stuff. And then I would realize, hey, they didn’t know what a negative number was. I’m like, wait a minute, you don’t know what a negative number is? That shall not stand. And so the push and the pull with the kids had us start moving faster. And I wasn’t bound by curriculum because I was a math team.

And I found that by the end of the fourth grade, I had covered pretty much all pre-algebra. And then when I convinced the school to do a pullout class with this group of 13 kids - and just so you understand, two thirds of the students are on free and reduced lunch at the school. This is a public school. This isn’t some special school that has a bunch of Caltech parents or something. This is just a typical struggling public school.

And it was just an experiment. You started to say, hey, I wonder if I could teach them algebra. And then my wife Sandy was like, what, are you crazy? And then I was like, well, I wonder if we could teach them trig. And she’s like, that is insane. What are you talking about? They’re in fifth grade. I don’t know. I probably explained sine and cosine. Next thing I know, we’re doing more and more advanced stuff.

And I think the trick is this - you just go one step at a time, right? You make sure they get the fundamentals down so that you can do the next step. You keep them excited and interested and confident, right? And you try and make it as fun for them as possible. I would be like, hey, do you guys realize you just learned ninth grade math? They’d be like, ninth grade math? Oh, do you guys realize you just learned tenth grade math? Tenth grade math! And then they’re like, what do we learn next? Oh my gosh, I know more than my older sister. Or my dad says he can’t even help me. They get more and more excited, more and more proud, right? And more confident, and then just kind of success builds on itself. And that’s one of my favorite sayings - nothing succeeds like success.

Jason Roberts: Well, I will say this - there is a range of aptitudes in math. There is with anything, whether it’s sports or music. Some kids, you put them out there with a soccer ball and you go, whoa, that kid’s athletic. And you have other kids who are fine. And other kids, you’re like, whoa, I sure hope this isn’t going to be their thing. Having coached little kid soccer myself, there’s a spectrum, right?

But a group of five or six year olds walk out and you can just see it. And I have three kids. My oldest - I would say he falls in the mathematically gifted range. He was one of the original group of kids that did calculus in seventh grade. I have my youngest, he’s kind of your A minus and honors class. Good, but not like my oldest was. And then I have my middle one who has dyscalculia. She was in an IEP.

She really, really struggled with the concept of fractions when she was in fourth and fifth grade. So there is a range. But what you want to do is maximize the potential of each kid, which is what a parent does. When you have two, three, four kids, you realize, geez, they’re all different. We treat them all the same. They share the same genetic material, but they all come out different. Everybody has their own gifts. Everybody has their own strengths. My little one who struggles with math is incredibly creative and funny, and can write circles around the other two. Everybody gets something. Some of us get something for free, other stuff we have to work for.

But the thing is this - kids can learn math a lot more effectively than they are now. They can move at a better pace, they can move with a lot less stress, a lot less frustration. They can learn the material better if it’s taught in the most effective way possible.

Everybody knows that if you hire a really good coach or instructor or tutor for your kid - whatever it is, whether it’s violin or piano or tennis or soccer or math - and that kid gets to work with a special coach one-on-one, that’s a huge advantage. And if any kids were doing that, you’re like, my God, that’s unfair. Because it’s unfair because it works. Problem is, it’s incredibly expensive.

But if you have highly effective personalized instruction, the rate at which a student can master the material is just much higher. Not every kid is going to get a PhD in physics from MIT, and that’s fine. But what you want is for each of them to get to at least baseline on all the important things, and then allow them to really excel at the things they are naturally gifted towards or really love.

Justin Skycak: And when we talk about the personalized instruction, really what we’re referring to specifically is giving students practice on the things that they are ready to learn right at that moment in time, and the things that they need to review. The primary thing that makes math hard and makes learning inefficient is when a student is asked to learn something when they have not learned the prerequisites yet.

Just imagine somebody can just do arithmetic, they haven’t learned algebra, and you throw a calculus problem at them. Well, of course it’s going to be like, wait, what’s going on? Obviously that’s inefficient, but this occurs all the time on smaller scales in standard classrooms. In an algebra classroom, a student might struggle with solving a linear equation and the class has moved on to quadratic equations. Or in calculus, a student might struggle with trigonometry - sine, cosine, and tangent - and yet they’re being asked to solve integrals that require trigonometry.

And so when you just ensure that a student has mastered all the prerequisites before you ask them to learn the new thing, then learning flows a lot more smoothly. Now, of course, different students often need different amounts of practice on particular topics. Maybe you’ve got two kids that both have their prerequisites in place and you ask them both to learn a particular topic, and one kid just gets it pretty much right away. They just need three practice problems, four practice problems, and they’re good to move on. Another kid maybe needs 10 or so, and that’s okay. As long as you just get every student the reps they need before you move them on, then learning is going to be smooth.

Justin Skycak: Well, there’s a handful of failure modes or inefficiencies that occur in particular classrooms. The first one that comes to mind - a big inefficiency that happens all the time in school is that they move through units one at a time. This week is all linear equations. The next week, or maybe two weeks of linear equations and then two weeks of geometry, you take a quiz and then whatever.

When really the most efficient way to learn stuff is to interleave or to mix it up. So you’re rotating. Learn a simple linear equation today, do a bit of geometry tomorrow, come back the next day, build on that linear equation. Then do some statistics the next day, kind of mix it up. Now, this stuff is all stuff that you know the prerequisites of, right? We’re not jumping ahead in the learning process. We’re just jumping around horizontally on all the different things you need to learn.

And the reason why this works so well is because of the spacing effect. The thing is, when you learn something today, in order to continue retaining it into the future, you need to periodically review it. The optimal way to do this is called spaced repetition. What happens is you learn something today, then you review it again the next day, then you wait a little bit longer before you do it again, maybe a couple of days. Then after that, you wait even longer, maybe a week. You’ve got these expanding intervals.

Because what happens is your retention - each time you review it, your forgetting slows down a bit. So you can wait longer until you need to review. And you have to wait longer to make it a little bit more challenging so that you can actually extend your retention. But if you just stack all of your learning on a particular unit or module for two weeks straight, and then you call it done - you’re not actually done. You’ve just done a first pass at it and you really need to keep coming back to review it. And the most efficient way to do this is to spread it out and continually come back to it instead of just doing it once and calling it done.

Jason Roberts: The thing I’d like to do is maybe go back to something really basic. Sometimes I think of using a simple analogy or simple case where people can get their head around it, because they’re like, okay, spaced repetition or this interleaving or whatever.

So imagine - remember how you taught your kid to tie their shoes. You sat down on the floor with them, showed them how you do it, then said, now do it with me. You go step by step. You correct them. You walk through it again. You wouldn’t do inquiry-based learning - like, okay, well, how do you think you’d tie your shoe? That’s ridiculous. You want to be efficient. You’ve got to get your sisters ready, you’ve got to get out the door.

So it’s direct instruction. You get them tying the shoe laces as quickly as possible. Lots of repetitions, step by step, feedback along the way. Then you do it again later that day. Then the next day - let’s see if you can do it. Almost. You go through it again.

Do you ever get confused about how education works? Just think about how you taught your kid to tie their shoes. That’s all it is. Is that how you taught your kid to tie their shoes? No big inquiry-based thing, no hour of videos. Same goes for everything you care about. It’s just a simple mental model.

Jason Roberts: Well, I think about something like history. A lot of times those are stories, right? And how do you listen to a story? You sit back and you listen to the story. You take it in. I think our brains have evolved to be good at remembering stories, remembering information through a narrative. That’s how information is transmitted from one generation to another for hundreds of thousands of years. So I think that’s sort of a separate thing.

But when you’re talking about actual individual skills, that’s a little different than remembering a story or a narrative. Things that are skill-based - tennis, sports, music - all these things that are skill-based, that’s just a bit of a different thing.

And how does it become a lecture? Well, guess what about lectures? They’re easy. It’s easy and kind of fun to just sit up there and talk, right? Going to show you - you see a movie and the professor’s up there regaling the class. That’s probably really fun for them. It’s also pretty easy. Coincidentally, you’ll find a lot of these kinds of things that people are doing at work just happen to be easier. Isn’t that funny how that works? You know what’s hard? Hard is sitting on the ground teaching your kid to tie their shoe over and over again. Hard is grinding through practice problems. Hard is working with a kid and you’re teaching them tennis - hit the ball again, now I got to chase it.

Because if you’re really vested in the outcome - like I want you to be good at this thing - then you’re going to do the hard work. If you’re like, well, I can plausibly not do all that stuff because this is the culture of how we do things in this school and I can just talk - you might just do that.

Because if I have everybody sitting down and working and I’m walking around making sure everybody’s on task and correcting them - that’s exhausting. With 12, 15 kids, maybe you can do that. Get to 25, 30, 40 kids - you’re trying to walk around working with kids, other kids are getting off task, everybody’s getting loud. In most situations, you’re dealing with a large number of kids. You can do these things, but it just takes a lot more effort. And as humans, we tend to do less when we can get away with it.

Jason Roberts: Well, Justin, I’ll let you go ahead and take this one.

Justin Skycak: Yeah, so it kind of all comes down to this personalization that we’re talking about, the individualized instruction, this glove fit. When somebody thinks, I’m just not good at math at all, I can’t learn algebra or something like that - usually it’s really just a symptom of the fit not being right. There’s not the right glove fit to them. They’re being asked to do things that are far ahead of them.

So the starting point is really just - you need to be working on problems, learning new topics that are right along your knowledge frontier, which is what we call it. It’s the boundary - the stuff that you have learned the prerequisites for, but you have not learned yet. That’s the stuff they need to be working on. So any kind of educational program that you look for, whether it’s a person or a computer or whatever, it really just comes down to how well is it assessing what you know and delivering you practice right at the edge of that to help move you forward, filling in these gaps.

Now, as you were saying with your uncle who’s the math teacher - it’s very hard to do that in a classroom setting when you’re just one person with a bunch of kids. You can only really be interacting with one kid at a time in this personalized setting, because they all have these different gaps.

Even if you found a topic every student is prepared for, some need 10 reps before moving on and others get it right away. Within minutes, every student’s knowledge profile is different again. It’s an impossible problem for one teacher to deliver that personalized glove fit to a whole class.

Jason Roberts: And it’s not just about aptitude. Students stop paying attention. I had a really hard time paying attention in school. My math teacher in 11th grade would call on me five, six times a class because I’m looking out the window. Some students are mentally working through steps while listening. Others are just sitting there. So it’s attention, engagement, all of it - and there’s only so much that even a really good math teacher can do.

Jason Roberts: Yeah. Okay. Well, let me correct the record. I liked math. I just hated listening to someone talk about it for an hour. Like, this is boring. Who wants to sit for an hour and listen to someone talk about almost anything?

Justin Skycak: Well, it’s like you go to sports practice and your coach just plays in front of you for an hour and you don’t actually do anything. The coach is just hitting tennis balls. You’re not doing anything. You’re just sitting there. It’s like, why am I here?

Jason Roberts: Yeah, it’s boring. And so I think first of all, you don’t need them to love it. Not everybody’s going to love everything. You have six subjects in your typical middle school or high school. You’ve got to love English and you’ve got to love history. Okay, in an ideal world that would happen. Let’s be realistic. At the very least, they’re fine with it.

They can be okay with it. Everybody has their preferences. You can’t make people - there’s only so much you can do. Some people love it, some people don’t, it’s okay.

But here’s the thing - when somebody can be successful at something, and I don’t mean they get an A, but I’m teaching you and now you can tie your shoes and you can tie it. Great, success, it feels good. Just a little win, it’s a win, right? Can you solve this problem? Boom, you got it right, great. And then those little wins, those little successes create the dopamine hits in your brain and it makes you feel good.

It’s only when you continually struggle and fail over and over that you’re like, what’s the point? Terrible, I hate it. So if you start where the kid is at and you just take small steps, then they can be successful, and those little successes, those little wins add up. Nothing succeeds like success. And they build confidence and don’t think of it as a painful thing. Like, oh, you want to do some math? Okay, we’ll do some math. They’re not going to do three hours of it, but they don’t have a problem with it because every day they do it, they figure stuff out, they do the problems, it’s fine.

So that’s really what you need. You want to put students in a position where they can move at a pace that’s right for them from a starting point of where they’re at and where they can be successful. That’s all you got to do. You don’t have to sit there and wax philosophic about the beauty of mathematics because it’s probably going to be a waste of time. Especially - how beautiful is pre-algebra? I mean, come on, let’s be realistic.

Jason Roberts: Okay. Math Academy is a personalized adaptive self-learning math platform. You would go to the website, you sign up, you say my student is in fourth grade math, or my student is in algebra one or calculus or whatever. They sign up for the course. And the first thing the student does is they take an adaptive diagnostic exam. Just like when you go in to get a suit - the tailor measures you and then cuts to fit. The adaptive diagnostic doesn’t take three or four hours like some standardized tests. It can usually get to a point within 20 to 35 questions. It gets this really high resolution MRI of what you know - just like your uncle could sit down and immediately see where a kid is at. That’s what the system does.

Then it says, okay, let’s say you’re doing algebra one and it says, well, the student came to me mid-year, transferred in, and you go, okay, you know 23% of algebra one, but you’re missing about 20 or 30 prerequisites. I’m detecting some weaknesses here, and we need to remediate those because those are going to be a problem. They’re going to continue to be a problem, and they’re never going to go away. So the system will create a custom fit course for the student. We’re going to skip ahead past that basic algebra stuff that you know. We’re not going to waste time on doing that. You did that at your other school. You know this, great. We need to clean up some of this stuff and we’re going to keep going forward on the algebra that you’re ready to do.

And so the student would have a list of learning tasks they can pick from, up to five. We like to give students some agency - it’s hey, here are five things, pick one. But at the end of the day, they have to do them all at some point. We say you can’t push the peas around the plate forever. Eventually you’ve got to eat the peas. It’ll give you some flexibility, but you got to do everything.

And so every learning task, we try and keep them pretty short - between five and 12, 15 minutes at the very high end. Seven to 11 minutes is around the sweet spot. And we assign XP or experience points. So we say this is a 7 XP lesson, which means it should take you about seven minutes to do. Here’s a 12 XP lesson. Some students will take a little longer, some will take a little less time. Depends, but on average, it’s about right.

And then the parent would say, okay, well, my student’s in algebra, I expect about 40 minutes of focused effort a day. One XP is equivalent to one minute of focused effort. I’m going to have them do 40 XP a day. So they would do these learning tasks and they could pick which ones they want, and accumulate 40 XP. They’re good. Everybody’s happy. Mom’s happy. Dad’s happy. Kid’s done their 40 XP.

And the better a student does, the more XP they get. So they can get bonus XP - a 7 XP task might earn you 10 XP if you do a great job. That aligns incentives. The parent wants mastery. The student wants to be done so they can go play Roblox. Fair. The better you do, the faster you finish.

So the better they do on their learning tasks, the more XP they earn, the faster they get their XP for the day, and they’re done. So it takes a lot off the parent’s shoulders because the students do the lessons, they do the problems, they adapt. If they struggle and fail, it will come back the next day or two. They’ll be re-served with a different set of questions. So it tries to handle pretty much everything. The parent doesn’t have to go, gee, what problems are we going to do? Or what should you do? Should you do this review? It handles all of that.

Justin Skycak: Yeah, so the system - every single time a student submits an answer, the next question, the next learning task, everything is chosen based on their knowledge state at that moment in time, their individual knowledge state, which is like their own fingerprint. Every single thing that we ask the student to do at each minute is based on our computation of what do they know? And what are they prepared to do? What is the single most efficient use of their time right at this moment? Let’s have them do that.

Jason Roberts: That’s what you’re always thinking as a tutor - what’s going to move the needle? Review yesterday’s stuff before they forget, come back to something from two weeks ago that’s getting fuzzy, introduce something new that also serves as review. You’re optimizing that mix. And you give the student a little choice - not 50 things, but not just one thing either. Humans love a little bit of choice.

And the one thing that I think we care about most is learning efficiency. Everybody loves efficiency. People hate getting jammed up in lines and sluggishness. And so if you can just make things move efficiently, it just feels great.

If I say you want to learn algebra, is it going to be three hours of pain every day? Not worth it. But 20 minutes? 25 minutes? No problem. A lot of things are not a problem if the cost isn’t high. Whether it’s a student who wants to be an engineer and move at three times the pace - that works great for them. But for the student who’s like my middle one - math is dumb, I want to read. Okay, well, how about we do whatever is most efficient so you can be done with it and then you can go write your story. She’s happy. Now if it takes hours, it’s stressful, it’s painful - nobody’s happy.

So you want to lower the cost by making sure you’re not wasting time. And you don’t waste time by making sure the learning experience is perfectly adapted to the student. We’re giving you exactly what you need right now. We’re not wasting time with stuff you already know. We’re not trying to teach you stuff that’s too far beyond you. It’s really about maximizing efficiency, which means it has to be maximally personalized and highly intelligent.

Justin Skycak: Yeah, we have gone full nerd on this problem of optimizing learning efficiency, almost to an embarrassing level. We could talk anybody’s ear off about it. But just at a high level, one of the things that we do that is kind of unique to us is every single problem exercise that you do, we are tracking all of the sub-skills that you’re practicing in there.

Say you solve a linear equation, a two-step linear equation. Part of that, you are maybe combining like terms, combining variable terms. Step two is solving a one-step equation. Once you’ve reduced the two-step down to a one-step, you’re also practicing division or subtraction or whatever. As you get up the chain in math, you end up practicing tons and tons of sub-skills.

Imagine solving integrals. Well, there’s like 50, a hundred sub-skills. And so we have this big map of all the math skills that there are to learn. And every time you do a problem, we are looking down through that map saying, okay, what sub-skills have you done as part of this problem? And so you get what we call implicit review on those sub-skills. Which means when you practice the sub-skills as part of a larger skill, you can wait longer before you have to do explicit review problems on the sub-skills. You basically knocked out some of your review by learning a new thing that forced you to do the review as part of learning the new thing.

Jason Roberts: A perfect example of this - if you were teaching a student in pre-algebra class and you say, okay, I’m going to teach you how to solve one-step linear equations. x plus 5 equals 10. Subtract 5 from both sides. Now we have x equals 5. Great. Now try x plus 3. You do x plus 3, x minus 7 equals 4. You do a bunch of those. And then maybe the next day, you review, or you could do equations with multiplication. So 2x equals 12. Divide both sides by 2, and x equals 6. You do a bunch of those.

And then rather than having to do separate reviews on both of those, you say, you know what? I’m going to teach you two-step equations. 2x minus 3 equals 7. So then we add 3 to both sides, just like we learned. And then we’ve got 2x equals 10. And then we divide by 2. So you see, we made a step forward in the skills graph - or sometimes in the parlance of video games, the skill tree - and yet we knocked out the repetitions we were going to have to do. Because if we didn’t review those things, they were going to disappear.

Just because you learned something at one point does not mean you remember it forever. Math is especially like that because it’s so far away from what we typically do in our normal lives that there’s nothing that reinforces it. That’s why in schools, when they go unit by unit - just because they knew it in October does not mean they know it in April. If you did not review it, it’s mostly gone. Not to mention the 10 weeks of summer and the summer slide.

That’s part of maximizing efficiency. If I can keep you from forgetting, then I don’t spend time reteaching and we can just keep making forward progress. So the system attempts to preempt forgetting at just the right time - just before they forget it, so the review feels like a quick refresher instead of starting over.

Jason Roberts: Yeah, it’s a race to the end. Okay, whether it’s algebra or whatever level - let’s say you’re using algebra as an example. What do we care about? We want you to master algebra, 100% master. Not just get through it - we want you to master it. And it doesn’t really matter what you did first. Did you do solving linear equations or did you do simplifying like terms or adding rational expressions? Whatever it is, nobody cares. You know what you care about? Did you learn it? Did you master it? Do you remember it?

And so whatever you can do to make that happen is the best thing to do. The system does what I mentioned earlier - interleaving. We don’t go unit by unit. Let’s say there’s 10 units. You’d be doing some from each one. You’re kind of doing a little bit every day and definitely every week you’re doing everything. We’re trying to keep everything fresh. Imagine the system almost works as if there could be a pop final exam. How would you do? We want you to be ready for a pop final exam on everything you’ve learned at any point in time.

We also have quizzes every 120 XP - once or twice a week. A 15-minute quiz pulls questions from across everything you’ve covered. Can you do it with no priming under timed conditions? The system recalibrates based on results - if you missed three questions, it gives you review topics for those areas, then a retake with new questions. It builds confidence and helps lock down weaknesses.

Justin Skycak: Absolutely. Everything. So the system is fully automated. You don’t need a human to sit down next to the student. You don’t need a teacher or a tutor. The lessons in the system teach the student.

Now, the way that we approach this is to alternate between minimum effective doses of instruction and practice. So earlier we were talking about the phenomenon of, okay, sometimes a teacher lectures for 50 minutes in class, and then you’ve got an hour of homework, and then you realize that you actually spaced out 10 minutes into the lecture and you don’t really learn a whole lot and you’re kind of spinning back up for the homework.

Well, the thing is, it’d be a lot more efficient if you just merged those things together. So that you get five minutes of, okay, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s an example. This is why we’re doing it. Now you do it. You do a few reps, a few problems. Maybe the first one you’re like, this is actually a little tricky. And then you look back at the worked example and you’re like, right, that’s how you do it. You do it. And then maybe the second one you’re faster on. You’re like, okay, I got it. Then the third one, you’re like, oh, I’m ready. And then only then do we move on to the next segment of learning.

And so we’re constantly alternating between this - we’ll give you some background, we’ll show you what to do for these kinds of problems, how to solve them, and now you solve. And then as soon as we detect that you’re at the point where you’ve got this, then we move forward to teach another increment. We don’t teach a full unit in one go and then make you do homework. We don’t even teach a full topic in one single go and then make you do problems afterward.

We call them knowledge points. These are the smallest atomic unit of learning that we can have students comfortably do in one go. The smallest amount of information that we can have them comfortably consume in one go and then solve practice problems on it before jumping to the next one.

And the reason why we do this is because we don’t want to overload students. Like we were saying earlier, talking about the gap between when a student is asked to do things far beyond where they’re at - that all turns into cognitive overload in a student’s brain. And when a student is cognitively overloaded, basically all the learning grinds to a halt. They just can’t manipulate all the information in their brain. That’s when you get the phenomenon of just like, I don’t know what to do. I can’t do it. What don’t you understand? Everything. I don’t understand anything. That’s cognitive overload speaking. And so if you just squeeze these down into the minimum effective doses of instruction and practice, then everything goes smoothly.

Jason Roberts: I’ll just jump on this real quick. I think the way we use it - this whole software platform came out of a school program that we taught for years, the math acceleration program, the radical accelerated program. The thing about it is, because we hired these PhD instructors, and they’re like, whoa, as this thing became automated - what do I do? I’m like, look, think of it as it can handle all the grindy work.

Like I’ve got to explain how to solve a quadratic equation for the 37th time? I think the system can handle that. Instead, spend the first 10, 15 minutes of class working through a challenge problem, maybe talk about the history of some mathematical subject, maybe have a mathematical project you’re working on. And some days not - maybe the kids are like, can we just do Math Academy? Because I want to get out of here.

Some kids are just fine with that. And sometimes the parent or the teacher can say, I’m going to focus on doing something interesting that you might find engaging. I’m going to connect this - I know you like space stuff. Well, you know what, let’s talk about the math of rockets. Or I know you’re looking at snails and their shells. Well, that’s a Fibonacci sequence. Or the golden ratio and stuff. So you can kind of spend time on that and say, okay, but I’m not going to grade your 30 factoring problems.

That’s why parents want to do this at home - because doing it right is hard. Think of it like a head football coach. He has assistants for offense, defense, strength and conditioning - they do all the grindy work. The head coach gets to think at a larger scale. You let the system do the hard work. The adult gets to do the more fun part.

Justin Skycak: If you’ve got something that comes to you right off the bat, go ahead.

Jason Roberts: Okay. I just think it’s like a lot of things. It just takes time. People have to get used to it. It’s social proof. I talked to some people, I talked to a friend and they used it and they’ve been really successful and their daughter loves it and she did really well and it removes the stress. It’s just about seeing it. I think it’s social proof. Because everybody wants new and better, but then they don’t actually want new and better, right?

Jason Roberts: You always have the bleeding edge, the early adopters, the people that say, I’m going to try this crazy thing, whatever it is. What’s this iPhone thing? And it’s just a matter of when people see other people experiment and have success and it reduces stress and increases efficiency and everybody’s happy. They’re like, oh, this is great. Yeah, we’re going to do this.

I think it’s just a matter of that. So that’s what we’re really focused on - bottom up, grassroots. We don’t go and sell to schools. We do no advertising. It’s all really focused on word of mouth. Solve people’s problems - the problems that parents have, the problems that the micro schools have and the charter schools - and we deal with them and then they tell other people and other people call us. That’s kind of how it works.

Justin Skycak: Well, definitely no more of this hour-long lecture then homework problems. And also no more of every single student doing the same homework. Because they all have different knowledge profiles, right? They should ideally be working on different things.

Honestly, it’s a little weird that this technology is just kind of coming into existence now and not 20 years ago. Because there’s just so much human potential on the table, so much potential in students that just gets lost to inefficiency - just inefficient training methods. Think about all these athletes that reached a high level in their sport, and in their younger years, they received very personalized training with a coach, somebody who really knew what they were doing and giving that real personalized talent development. Like, hey, you’re really fast, that’s good, but you got to work on your agility. Or maybe you’re a skater and you’re like, okay, you’re good on your right leg, but we got to work on your left leg. Somebody to make them work on the things that they need to be working on to be successful for them particularly.

Well, why don’t we have that for literally every subject in school? You can map out the curriculum. You can figure out using computers what students know and don’t know. You can figure out what they’re ready to learn. Why don’t we have something like that already? I would just love to see school transition from the class or the grade as a group moving in lockstep to a kind of individualized, personalized talent development, where every student has their own coach, whether that’s a person or a computer or a hybrid combination, but something that is giving them the personalized training that they need to reach the highest potential across all these subjects.

Jason Roberts: No, it’s fine. I was just gonna say I got a hard stop. I gotta hop on another call.

Jason Roberts: Well, thank you for having us. It’s been a pleasure.

Justin Skycak: Thank you for having us.

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