What we covered: – In elementary school, there's often an intense focus on conceptual understanding, but not enough time spent building real fluency with core skills. And this has left many kids without automaticity on basic things like multiplication facts. Math is extremely hierarchical, and when students don't have the basic facts at their fingertips, they quickly run into bottlenecks as the material gets more complex. – Sure, drills can be made more fun, but the bottom line is that they have...
Mar 28, 2026•1 hr
What we covered: – A lot of schools have recently begun using Math Academy in their classrooms. And one of the biggest benefits of using Math Academy is that it automates all the mechanical parts of teaching, like writing questions, keeping track of what students know and what they don't know, monitoring student progress, assigning extra practice when needed, grading, all that grindy stuff. – None of these tasks is enjoyable. They suck. Just ask any teacher. I mean, we grinded through all that b...
Mar 15, 2026•54 min
What we covered: – As Math Academy has grown over the past year, we're getting a better sense of general do's and don'ts when scaling a startup. We've learned hard lessons about overloading the database, the task processor, and our team, requiring numerous infrastructure and process updates. – Schools have been using the system and we've built plenty of additional features to, among other things, accommodate unique billing schemes and make it easy for teachers to manage classes on the system. – ...
Feb 19, 2026•1 hr 14 min
0:00 - Introduction 3:57 - Added 115 “Missing Middle” topics to SAT Prep 6:06 - Integrating the SAT Missing Middle topics into other courses 9:42 - Added tens of thousands of free response questions 10:34 - Free response questions are useful because they don’t prime you 13:33 - When to use free response vs. multiple choice questions 14:54 - Too many free response questions taxes learners 16:39 - Limiting the length of free response answers 18:08 - Building infrastructure for free response questi...
Feb 10, 2026•1 hr 8 min
What we covered: The dangers of accumulating learning debt: the gap between what you can do and what you need to be able to do. If you miss building up your foundational skills in school or sports, you can get by for a while. You develop some compensatory strategies, like favoring your forehand over your backhand, or using ChatGPT to write all your school essays. But learning debt is like any other kind of debt: it accrues interest and eventually comes due. Over time, the workarounds become more...
Jan 28, 2026•51 min
What we covered: – The benefits of short problems. Math Academy problems typically take only a minute or two. This way, students can stay on the rails with lots of reps, successfully building up complexity instead of getting crushed by it from the start. – What goes wrong in college math classes: they tend not to scaffold content very well, forcing students to build their own bridges across knowledge & skill gaps. Weekly problem sets often consist of a handful of hour-long problems that inst...
Jan 14, 2026•1 hr 17 min
What we covered: – A recent report from the University of California San Diego revealed that 1 in 12 incoming freshmen were not proficient in middle school math – basically, anything above arithmetic with fractions. Their existing remedial math course was too advanced for these students, so they had to design even lower remedial remedial math courses. Even crazier, over a quarter of these students had a perfect 4.0 GPA in their high school math courses. – It’s not just UCSD. This is everywhere. ...
Jan 03, 2026•1 hr 4 min
What we covered: – Most kids are not intrinsically motivated to do the hard things: practice their soccer drills, do their math homework, eat their broccoli. Getting them to do the hard things often requires gamification and/or incentives. – A little gamification goes a long way. Jason gamified drills for his kids’ soccer team to get the most out of each practice (e.g., “zombie attack”), and it was unreasonably effective. XP and leaderboards on Math Academy are also unreasonably effective. – A g...
Dec 18, 2025•1 hr 41 min
What we covered: – Any successful endeavor requires a great team: capable people, who like and trust each other, and have complementary skillsets and ways of thinking. Some modes of thinking cannot be performed at the same time within a single brain. – Accountability requires control. You can’t hold someone responsible for outcomes unless you also give them control over the system that produces those outcomes (though you can set reasonable operational boundaries). – Solve today’s problems today....
Dec 11, 2025•1 hr 17 min
What we covered: – Building a knowledge graph is like city planning & road construction. Too many prerequisites leading into a single topic creates a cognitive traffic jam. – Elegantly rewiring a live knowledge graph: the evolution of our tooling and automatic validations. How to avoid staging servers & migrations and NOT have it blow up in your face. – UI work takes time and adds complexity, so we spend it on the customer. Internal tools are almost entirely command-line; clickable butto...
Dec 03, 2025•1 hr 20 min
What we covered: – Why “problem solving” is often just a vague label people use when they haven’t explicitly enumerated the underlying skills, and how those skills can in fact be exhaustively mapped in a knowledge graph. – How to approach research problems: Alex's PhD journey, top-down familiarity vs bottom-up mastery. – If you have natural talent, use it, but not as a crutch, otherwise you'll stunt your long-term development. Don't turn your blessing into a curse. – The story behind building ou...
Nov 25, 2025•1 hr 22 min
What we covered: -- How bureaucracies instinctively reject new ideas like an immune system attacking a foreign organ, and what it takes to keep your project from being "spit out." Concrete example: how Jason & Sandy muscled past institutional resistance to get 8th graders passing AP Calc BC. -- Every system inevitably decays into mediocrity unless someone fights to keep the standards high. The way you keep people, systems, and projects moving is by "horsing" them forward. Concrete example: h...
Nov 18, 2025•2 hr 29 min•Ep. 3
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" 59:0...
Nov 04, 2025•2 hr 43 min•Ep. 2
0:00 - Introduction 4:00 - Applying the MA Way to X Growth 7:40 - Status of the ML Course and its Kick-Ass Coding Projects (Part 1) 25:50 - Jason's Near-Infinite List of Important Things 34:20 - The ML Course Has Been a Massive Undertaking 42:10 - Breadth-First Development 44:30 - Status of the ML Course and its Kick-Ass Coding Projects (Part 2) 50:15 - Why Math Academy Needs To Do a CS Course 56:45 - The Never-Ending Stream of Confusion 1:00:30 - The Story of Eurisko, the Most Advanced Math/CS ...
Nov 03, 2025•2 hr 36 min•Ep. 1
