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Description:
This is a living document consolidating the principles of increasing learning rate based on the writing of Math Academy’s chief quant and director of analytics, Justin Skycak
A (long) personal thought
In September I wrote about signing my 6th grader and myself up for courses on mathacademy.com. It’s been a month and we’re addicted and competing with each other to level up in our respective leagues by gaining XP. A unit of XP approximates “one minute of focused effort by a serious but imperfect student”.
[I’ve turned a bunch of readers onto this site just as I was turned on to it by another reader and now I got peeps texting me questions about it or telling me about their kids progress. You love to see it. Random side note — I have a good friend who just moved from my neighborhood to Austin because he’s deep in the education/AI intersection and the weird city is the scenius for education experimentation. I mentioned it to him and let’s just say he knew all about it from different angles. What he told me only got me even more stoked about what mathacademy is doing fwiw.]
In that post, I pasted links to 30 articles that I planned to read by the site’s chief quant Justin Skycak after already doing a fair bit of reading on the blog. I’ve plowed thru the 30 articles and then some, which is still just a fraction of what’s on there.
I’m personally highly interested in the entire topic of using AI to develop talent and learn at rates that were previously unthinkable. I have a large unfinished document with years of insights that I’ve pulled together from various sources that probably won’t see the light of day. For education I’m a big fan of writers like Scott H. Young, Cedric Chin, Matt Bateman, Kathleen Mercury and Freddie deBoer. You can search the substack for all the times I’ve referenced their work and I have plenty more in backlog. I’ve also harped on the degree to which SIG’s education was extremely well-mapped out from a pedagogical point of view. It wasn’t until I heard Todd Simkin explain the educational influences that informed how they taught did I appreciate the extent to which education theory underpinned their methods.
See:
🔗*Educational Ideas Inspired By Seymour Papert’s Constructionism *****([Moontower](http://悡悩悢悧悭悭悫悢悮%20ideas%20inspired%20by%20seymour%20paperts%20constructionism-9x20c/))
🔗Notes From Todd Simkin On The Knowledge Project (Moontower)
🔗General & Childhood Education Articles (Moontower)
I’m adding Justin to my list of must-reads. After spending most of Sunday with the blog, I’ve synthesized a much more condensed version of Principles of Learning except it’s fully based on Justin’s insights.
I reached out to him when I first discovered the site and made my interest in what he’s doing as plain as possible. I told him:
I think being born on 3rd is to get exposure to someone when you are young who shows just how self imposed our speed limits are.
He hadn’t heard it put that way before.
I harp on this stuff. You’ve seen it on my affirmations page.
The wealth you give a youth is self-efficacy. A chance to match their abilities to the needs of communities they find themselves in as they get older. Autonomy and confidence through competence.
When I say “speed limit” I’m not referring to speed only, or even necessarily. It’s more about limits in general. In athletics, you can’t be Lebron no matter what you do. But whatever your limit is, it’s further than you think. It goes without saying that finding your limit requires brutal effort and commitment…but however far that gets you, personalized instruction will get you even further.
If a great teacher/mentor/coach will get you further than the frontier that caps out at a given level of effort, then that role has insane leverage. The very act of pushing through a previously-conceived frontier will increase your motivation and effort as you see what’s possible.
There was a Washington Post article several years ago referring to “America’s most advanced math program” in Pasadena. The kids were crushing the AP Calc BC exam in 8th grade.
Who were the teachers?
The founders of mathacademy.com
The Math Academy began as a tutoring program run by husband-and-wife duo Jason and Sandy Roberts before being formally adopted into the PUSD curriculum in 2017.
Seen narrowly, MathAcademy is an AI program that helps you learn math faster.
I think this is to miss what’s coming.
The instruction portion of the personalized coach is being automated.
I’m fairly convinced that we aren’t too far from knowledge not just being democratized (I mean Wikipedia already exists) but structured for delivery on incredibly effective, personalized rails.
Before someone’s reactance reflex gets all buzzy, I don’t mean “education” will be solved by a robot. Instruction is simply one component of education. Motivation, support, guidance, as well the type of story-telling and conversation that relates classroom learning to the world and others is as human-based an activity as a warm hug. But if the price for personalized instruction craters, the secondary effects are going to be large and visible.
At scale, we are going to find out just how many kids are capable of finishing Calc BC by grade 8 or publishing a novel in middle school. We hear those stories now and we dismiss them as “genius” or “privileged”.
But what if a low price for personalized instruction tells us we’re wrong about this? There will always be examples of genius or privilege. But if stories of insane achievement start multiplying amongst broken-English immigrants or other groups who are not advantaged in any way EXCEPT in motivation than you’ll know that the things Justin is writing about turned out to be true.
The price of personalized instruction falling is not a panacea. The cost is only a bottleneck after basic needs like stability and safety are met. But the cost is an active bottleneck for all but the rich once those needs are met. Even expensive schools are only incrementally better on truly personalized instruction (their primary advantage might be the compression of the classroom range to a higher functioning average but that’s not the same as personalized instruction so much as a release from tolerating a small number of disproportionally disruptive students).
I’m fascinated by mathacademy because of what it telegraphs — a future of cheap personalized instruction. I’m not picturing slicker edtech apps here. This is a glimpse of something different.
Libraries were free. The internet is free, convenient, and wider reaching. Sal Khan is a prophet who built on its rails. Well, the tracks are being upgraded.
The trains are going to go faster.
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This is a synthesis of what I got from reading Justin’s blog.
The objective function of educational strategy outlined below is to maximize the learning rate—helping students acquire and retain knowledge more effectively. There are certainly great programs for independent learning out there but the objective in this discussion is to leverage technology and cog sci to progress through levels of mastery faster.