From Math Tutoring to Shaking Up Education!
I've been self-employed as a 1:1 math tutor for a long time. I have plenty of demand and a waiting list, all from word-of-mouth. Now I want to scale my business and develop new income streams, starting with preparation this summer and implementation in September.
But I'm not sure how to do it.
Here's my brainstorm. What do you think?
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Create an online course on a MOOC platform such as Udemy or Coursera. "How to Teach Your Child Math" for home schooling parents. "Learn Fractions For Real" mostly for adult learners. "Become a Self-Employed Math Tutor".
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Public school teacher professional development. https://bit.ly/2NYgZCd
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From 1:1 tutoring to 1:n classes. Run classes in 4-week cycles with, say, 10 students at a time. Eg: "Monday afternoons, Fractions 1. Monday evening, Algebra 1. Tuesday evenings is Fractions 2", etc. Not sure if this can work in the COVID era, though.
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Develop paper materials / work books and sell them. I have already done a tiny bit of this and my materials are very good with respect to pedagogy, but I don't know how to differentiate my materials in terms of marketing.
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Build a tutoring network in which I train new tutors then take a cut of their revenue. I don't know how I would keep tutors and students from simply leaving the network, though, other than the monumental tasks of building a system of coveted credentials and/or some kind of math education platform. I have started training an older student of mine to become a math tutor, though, and it has been a recent highlight of my career.
A few things I want to avoid at all costs.
- Helping students hack their way to a decent mark while causing themselves tremendous long-term damage. Sadly, this is a HUGE share of most "education" systems and is especially prevalent in math. :-(
- Any business in which I have to do all the work myself - i.e. the status quo! I want to build an organization and/or systems, not be a sole employee who does everything.
- Building a system that can only reach wealthy parents, though I'm OK starting out that way.
FYI: The USP of my current math tutoring service is "it works". Many of my students come to me remedially with a lot of fear and shame, but soon they're enjoying enrichment level math. This is radically harder and more counterintuitive than it sounds, which is why education is such a stagnant field. But if I can scale what I do, then this business might spark some real big change.
Your help is appreciated. :-)
Seems that much of the work here is just in the grind of pure networking. Networking at scale might mean building a platform of math tutors where students can get a tutor any time in their local area. I can imagine scaling into this but it would likely mean a lot more networking, possibly delegating to your clients to network more people into offering services.
The other options with Moocs is that you basically need to build a comprehensive, repeatable, quality content that can be widely distributed. This has the benefit of building something essentially once. Though now you’re in the competitive space of essentially YouTube and existing moocs. Sounds like you might be somewhere between the personal tutor and repeatable content.
Great to build on!
If I build a network in which "... students can get a tutor any time in their local area..." then, it will likely be like most other tutoring networks which mostly just help students hack bad homework and bad tests. I need to train the tutors to follow particular methods and curriculum to ensure the tutoring causes learning, not hacking. I'm not sure how to do this at the moment.
Are there a lot of MOOCs targeting parents who are now homeschooling their kids in math?
As for the repeatable content, that is core to what I want to do. The severe bottlenecks in K-12 math include, for example, fractional arithmetic. I would have semi-scripted lessons and a portfolio of carefully designed activities that all students would do, regardless of their age or what they're doing in school.
I would've been so happy if I had had such a math teacher back in the school days. I didn't like mine and thus I studied really badly. Converting miles to km wasn't an easy task for me. I got much better when I entered another school where teachers were set up to teaching kids.
Your "FYI" is the most important thing to focus on, IMO:
If that's true, then I'd focus on making content / system that addresses this. That's the "pain" your customers have - they're fearful of math. Let's keep that in mind.
Well... it could just be an incredibly hard problem, like you said. I'm not an education expert or researcher, but my guess is that there are plenty of math tutors who get amazing results, just like you. I'd also guess the reason why is because a US classroom might have >30 students, while tutors are mostly working 1:1. If that's true, then tutoring is just not scalable in the traditional sense.
However, maybe you can figure out a middle ground. You might be able to group students into groups of 5 that share eg. 4 similar characterstics that would make it possible to be tutored together effectively. Something like the following scenario: I sign up my child for math tutoring, then I answer these questions:
You then try to group together like students so that when you tutor them, you can focus on just their weaknesses.
If that's successful, congratulations: You've just scaled 5x over 1:1 tutoring. ;)
Now you might consider making very specific "courses". For example: "9th grade geometry for 12th grade students who are scared of math" (title needs work, obviously :D) , and putting into the course what you know/learned while tutoring a group of 5 students having that exact problem.
This is easily falsifiable.
First, prepare for shock. Prepare more than you think you need to.
Second, go to a high school in a wealthy neighborhood in which a majority of students already have tutors. Ask a random sample of their recent graduates - who will almost all be going top-notch 4-year universities at the end of the summer - this question.
You want to sell an app on Google Play which charges a 29.5% commission on each sale. After paying that commission, you want to keep $12. Take as much time as you need with the following. You may use pencil, paper, and calculator, and anything you find on the internet. (a) Estimate the right sale price for the app. Explain your estimate. (b) What should you type into a calculator to figure out exactly how much you should charge? (c) How confident are you in your reasoning and work?
Don't help them with anything. Treat it like a UX test. Resist the urge to help a squirming, suffering, fellow human who is about to start a degree in, say, science.
Third, kick yourself for not preparing sufficiently for the shock.
Lastly, think about what this means for the REST of the educational system and the many tutors within it.
[You could ask the same question to journalists, lawyers, politicians, elementary school teachers, nurses, or many other professions that require a 4-year degree but are infested with math phobia, and you'd replicate the same results.]
My hypothesis is that if I train tutors specifically to administer ~40 lessons tackling the "bottleneck" math content, then I can at least scale linearly for a few years. The best of those tutors can then train people to replace themselves and then the scaling can be non-linear.
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Edit / PS : For the record, the reason so many people struggle with math is because they are victims of a broken system. Virtually all of them could learn math to a high level if they were taught well. :-)
I see now that what I described is one of your options. Obviously I think that's a good choice, which actually is incredibly useful in the covid-19 era. Parents need something for their kids to do when they're stuck inside anyways.
I didn't think about how small groups might help out parents in covid era. Thank you for that insight!
I actually meant that you could do the small group tutoring online and kids could join from home.
I don't know how I would manage a group of students online that would capture a lot of the benefits of 1:1. I could handle a small homogenous group IRL though.
@BravoMath sent you an email with my thoughts. Looking forward to catch-up with you :)
Cool. Will respond to you by email now.
Sorry about the weird formatting. I should have been more careful with that! I didn't mean to include italics anywhere. Do these forums use markup? Or is there a WYSIWYG editor on the way?
Our forum uses Markdown.
Ok, good to know. Thanks for getting back to me and for running Indie Hackers generally!
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Thanks!
Yes, that's me.
Herein lies one of the key problems with the entire field of education: our intuitions are terrible but demonstrations, examples, cog sci evidence, and personal experience don't convince anybody of anything. Virtually no one uses evidence to guide pedagogy. The entire field is much like medicine in the 1400s. I can't even get parents of my most successful students to care about or believe in my pedagogical beliefs or practices, even after they've sat in on lessons.
They stick with me because their kids like math and excel in after hating it for years.
I don't expect to. Right now, my plan is to train former students and other relatively inexperienced people to become good math tutors. I'm looking for models to copy in this regard.
I've thought about blogging. I'm thinking I'll do something like Paul Graham's Essays instead. Do you think that would work?
Also... dadsworksheets has a lot of drills for free, but it actually falls prey to many of the same cognitive traps, such as the fluency illusion, avoiding the types of problems students struggle with the most, absence of questions that require sense-making and estimation, etc. Students can do a ton of these kinds worksheets and have no idea what the equations mean. E.g. The student that fluently completes zillions of exercises such as (5/7)(1/8) = __ , but nobody finds out that the student believes (5/7)(83) must be bigger than 83.
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My marketing tagline will be something like "We'll have your grade 5 kid enjoying grade 10 math or the lessons are free!" And, yes, I will stand by that.
As for the pedagogy, I have no idea how to condense my pedagogy meaningfully. Is there any value whatsoever I say: "The lessons will be fun and engaging, they'll be carefully calibrated to optimally challenge the student, and the experience will be very meaningful and motivating. The students will find the math beautiful and useful. We make rigor and mastery fun! All of our methods are backed up by research and evidence."
I actually take all of that seriously.
Most offerings in the educational world do not, but they all say they do.
Imagine if you were running in an election. You may very well be the most honest person on Earth. But, from a marketing standpoint, how much does it help if you say "I'm not like the other politicians - I'm honest! Trust me!"
This is the issue I need to solve.
Actually, virtually all research on fractional arithmetic shows we want kids to use exactly the same mental models for fractional arithmetic as whole number arithmetic. Whether a student is studying 5x3=__ or 5x(1/3)= ___ or (2/5)*(1/3)=___, they should be able to use rectangular areas, word problems, equal groups, scaling, etc. to think through them. Unfortunately, very few students do because few people in North America teach that way.
Why is that?