hi

life update...

Hey there,

I know it’s been a while since the TikTok (rip) glory days, but I realized I still had this thing, and believe it or not, 10,000 of you here.

Feel free to ignore this! Unsubscribe, etc, etc. I (will) won’t take it personally.

But, I do still get DMs from time to time of people asking what I’m up to. So I wanted to update those of you that may still have, somewhere deep within your psyche, a fuzzy imprint of a red shirt wearing, strange, physics lecturer TikTok guy.

It’s been 3 and a half years since I quit teaching, and since then a lot has happened! I worked at two different tech startups, took some time off, traveled around quite a bit, moved back to Canada, but most importantly I read two books recently that changed my world view completely.

The first is The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

The second is The Math Academy Way by Justin Skycak.

The second book in particular has had a big impact on me recently. It reignited something in me that, I thought, had been completely extinguished. A passion and love for teaching and education in general.

There’s too much to to cover (it’s 400+ info packed pages) but one of the key foundations is this:

Bloom’s 2 sigma problem.

What Blooms’s 2 sigma problem states, and is well accepted and replicated in the learning science literature at this point, is that everyone learns better with a one on one tutor. In fact, by common metrics, “2 sigma” better (i.e. 2 standard deviations away from the mean in the positive direction).

Unfortunately, not everyone can afford a $50/hour (at least) tutor for the things they want to learn. It’s expensive.

But the research is solid. Want to get fit? Hire a personal trainer. Want to learn violin? Get private lessons. Want to learn math? Hire a personal tutor.

And then once you have a solid base, you can get creative with it. For what it’s worth, I think there are some exceptions here, especially in the arts, but imagine trying to write a research level math paper only knowing how to do 1+1=2. Not gonna happen.

What MathAcademy has really demonstrated to me is that it’s possible for everyone to have their own personalized one on one tutor, not for $50/hour, but $50/month (what they charge). And it’s basically just as good.

I see people complain sometimes about the price of MathAcademy on twitter, but I think what they miss is that this is not another Coursera slop or Brilliant course that’s more entertainment than real learning.

The amount of times I’ve had the experience of signing up (and sometimes even paying) for one of these courses, getting a couple chapters through, and either getting stuck or demotivated is too high to count.

What MathAcademy is selling, and why $50/month is more than reasonable imo, is not really the content (though the quality of their math content is definitely great). It’s the one on one tutor making sure that you actually learn the stuff effectively. No other online course is offering this.

Not to mention, in their automated system, they incorporate roughly 10 educational pedagogy techniques, backed by our best cognitive science inspired understanding of the science of learning. These techniques are painfully lacking, not just from online courses, but from basically all of our traditional education institutions as well (spaced repetition, mixed practice, interleaving, to name a few).

Also their Duolingo-style leaderboard which I personally like for adding a little bit of extrinsic motivation. I’m almost in Emerald League! (please clap)

This means that we are well on our way to every single student no matter who or where they are getting the one on one personalized instruction they need. $50/hour (private tutor) to $50/month (math academy) is, depending on how many hours the student uses the platform for, somewhere between a 100-100,000x price reduction.

I also think they have aspirations to completely replace our current school systems at all levels. At least for math and other technical subjects. And honestly I could see it.

I’ve personally racked up 20 hours or so each month for the past 3 months.

(As I’m editing this, I’m realizing this is starting to sound like a paid ad lol, but I swear it’s not. I genuinely just love what these guys are doing).

Part of what made me leave academia, even though I was “well liked” as a lecturer, was I felt like I was teaching the wrong way. I felt like I was doing my students a disservice by continuing to teach the way I was (and had to in order to keep up with the other profs).

I was giving my students so many exercises, problem sets, practice tests, etc… when what I thought was the right way to learn was really to let students discover for themselves, “inquiry-based learning”, and other more modern concepts that have taken over the educational research over the past decade or so.

Not to mention seeing the immense mental stress students were already under (which to be fair has many other underlying issues like the price of college), I really had a hard time justifying to myself my employment.

But if we’re just focused on the learning itself, a lot of this inquiry based educational research is now turning out to be misguided and not effective. And we actually know, and have known for a long time (some of the papers mentioned in The Math Academy Way date back to the 50s), what effective and efficient ways of teaching are.

Turns out I was completely wrong, and I was actually doing a decent job at teaching, mainly thanks to just following what the physics teaching specialist in the department was doing. These notions I had, that are turning out to be completely against what we know and have known about effective teaching for decades, are a big part of the reason I left my teaching job.

But even if I had known what I happened to be doing was on the right track, it still wouldn’t have been good enough.

Because when you teach a class of 200 students all at once, or even just 20 all at once, it is impossible to deliver the content in the effective way every student deserves.

Why? Because every single student is missing or rusty on different prerequisites, and so even the most well meaning teacher in the world couldn’t help every student in the way that they deserve even if they wanted to. It would take too much time, and the experiment has been tried. It seems the max one teacher can handle for one on one tutoring is roughly 5 students at a time.

When I was still teaching college classes, some of the students in my class went to well off private high schools in the US, or fantastic international schools, and had basically seen all the material I was teaching them already, and gotten As in the classes.

Other students had been to an under-equipped, inner-city school and were seeing this material for the first time.

It’s not really fair to either of them that we expect the same out of each of these students in the same amount of time. It wastes the time of the prepared student that should be learning more advanced things, and it left huge gaps of knowledge with the underprepared student due to them not developing the required fluency with the material (through no fault of their own).

Anyway, I’ve been grinding away at MathAcademy and absolutely loving it. To me, this is roughly what the future of education looks like. It diagnoses exactly what you really know, and takes every person, unique to their needs, up to where they want to be.

There’s definitely room for improvement, but I think they’ve provided a great proof of concept.

If you’ve been following me on twitter, you know I’m trying to build something out that’s similar for the subject i know best (quantum, though this is subject to change. Maybe just basic physics? If you have a strong opinion here please share), so feel free to check that out if you want, but that’s not the main thing I wanted to make this post about:

I’ve gotten a decent number of messages over the years since I kinda stopped posting on TikTok etc., asking where I’m at, what I’m up to, and I never felt like I had a really good answer.

Working at tech startups was alright, it taught me what the real world was like, it let me save up a little money, and I did learn some valuable stuff. But it really wasn’t anything to write home about, and after three years, my heart definitely wasn’t in it anymore.

But having discovered this science of learning stuff, having read The Math Academy Way front to back, and also having seen it implemented so well by them, it really blew my mind, and got me thinking about what’s really possible in education.

So, I now feel like I have something interesting to say to the “what have you been up to?” question. :)

Not just that, but I will likely be teaching physics again, part time here in Canada, at the college level (or community college level for you Yanks out there). I want to know what are the unique challenges facing teachers at that level, and also, now that I’ve been learning about all this science of learning stuff, I want to see how well I can really implement it, not just online, but in the classroom.

I want to be able to believe that every single student can genuinely get an A, i.e. master the course material, in a notoriously challenging and technical subject, with no grade inflation, and I think with the right software it is now possible.

Anyway, I hope you’ve all been well. I’m not sure if I’ll keep posting here or not, but I do have more things I probably want to say about this science of learning stuff, and if you are interested in following along with this course I’m building, feel free to drop your email here: infinitysci.com . Am working with a pretty cool guy on this.

Thanks for reading.

All the best,
Chris