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Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair

231 points by gmays 2y ago

ChuckMcM 2y ago
Always great to hear from people on the far side of the valley of despair. I don't think it is pointed out enough that people who fall off of "mount stupidity" can sometimes get really really stuck. In my experience when they do that at work it is quite traumatic. Another good book for the author and others is "5 Elements of Effective Thinking" by Burger & Starbird. It thinks about thinking which can sometimes side step the depression of suddenly not thinking you know anything about anything that accompanies that big drop off mount stupid.
- financypants 2y ago
  what do you mean by falling off mount stupidity, especially at work?
  - brm 2y ago
    Mount Stupidity relates to section two of the blog post where it references a concept related to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
  - ChuckMcM 2y ago
    It was discussed in the article, but to be more explicit, sometimes a person who is sure of their understanding of things learns a new thing and that new thing opens their eyes to a huge amount of complexity they were missing. They go from feeling like they knew everything there was to know about a thing to feeling like they know little to nothing about the thing. (this is the "Falling off Mount Stupidity") Depending on how senior they are at work, that can be quite traumatic. A lot of people in tech sort of base their self image on how smart they perceive themselves to be with respect to their peers. When that perception inverts their own world model makes them feel worthless. In the two cases where people I was managing this occurred (that I knew of) their productivity dropped like a rock and they became seriously depressed. One I managed to get back on track, the other left tech and I have lost track of where they ended up.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - mikelikejordan 2y ago
    Mount Stupidity is the peak of overconfidence greatly outpacing your competency level. So, falling off is essentially being humbled by expreiences that make you realize you do not know as much as you think you do, and your confidence takes a major dive as a result.
- mikelikejordan 2y ago
  Thanks for reading my blog post! I'm going to pickup that book today and make sure to start reading it!
shermantanktop 2y ago
For child, being precocious in a subject is usually a curse. Being bright and a generally fast learner is also a trap. Hitting the wall is inevitable for almost everyone, but until that point your self-image is built on forward velocity, and especially relative velocity — you’re just faster than your peers. Turns out there are faster kids, they just aren’t at your school. Parents can make this worse but it’s pretty hard to prevent it.
- tippytippytango 2y ago
  Yep, we all have to hit the wall and that’s where we find out what we’re made of. It can be a valuable experience with the right people around to help.
  - skyde 2y ago
    Can you give more detail on what you mean by it can be a valuable experience with the right people around to help. My son (7 years old) is gifted in Math and as a parent I find it extremely hard to decide how much I should push him (register him to math competition, weekend math club ...) and how much I should just let him get 100% on exam and not accelerate the learning.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      I guess how easy it is to do depends heavily on the district, but why not have him skip some math courses and leave extracurriculars for if he's really interested in it rather than just good at it? I ended up skipping three years of math by the end of high school, though I never did any club or competitions.
    - sebg 2y ago
      It really depends on how much your son wants to do math. As you can imagine, there is a whole world of kids like your kid who love math and want to do nothing more than math. If you're interested I can chat with you or recommend resources here if you decide to help your kid do more math.
    - 2y ago
nyeah 2y ago
This may be a great article. As an aside, all Dunning and Krueger showed is that everybody thinks they're in the top 1/3 to 1/4. (At least everybody in undergrad school at Cornell.)
- dahart 2y ago
  Oh it’s much worse than that, and it wasn’t everybody in Cornell undergrad, it was a grand total of like 45 undergrads at Cornell who signed up for extra credit (which I imagine is a pretty big confounding factor - the A students don’t need it, and the F students don’t bother, on top of the massive confounding factor of only measuring undergrads from Cornell - they didn’t measure any people who are truly incompetent or unskilled). The DK experiment depends on people ranking themselves against the cohort, other people who they don’t know. The DK effect probably doesn’t exist, it has been argued compellingly that the paper does not demonstrate what it claims to. “To establish the Dunning-Kruger effect is an artifact of research design, not human thinking, my colleagues and I showed it can be produced using randomly generated data.”(!!!) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruge... “the asymmetry reported by Kruger and Dunning actually goes away, and even reverses, when the ability tests given to participants are very difficult.” https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-krug... “The Dunning Kruger Effect is probably not real” https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-...
  - nyeah 2y ago
    If you are downvoting, I hope you've read at least one of D&K's papers. Or at least looked at the plots. Not meta-stuff pro or con, but what Dunning and Krueger wrote.
    - dahart 2y ago
      I didn’t downvote anyone, in fact I upvoted your comment. Why do you ask? I am getting downvoted here, but I don’t know why. Yes I have read D&K’s paper and studied the plots and methodology multiple times. I thought I was mostly agreeing with you here. What part of their plots or paper are you thinking of? In my opinion, the paper dramatically overstates the claims of what it actually demonstrates experimentally. The title alone primes the reader to jump to a conclusion that isn’t supporter by their data; they did not show people who are unskilled or “incompetent” on an absolute scale, they did not test all skills in general (they only tested 4 relatively easy “skills” and one of those was subjective), they did not test the general population. Looking at the plots again won’t address the confounding issues I mentioned, even if I don’t dispute their data at all. Every time I read the DK paper, even now, I’m struck by how wild it is that so many people refer to this as a human-wide cognitive bias, when there was so little evidence to begin with, the study was so small and biased, so many people have called out problematic issues with their data and experiment design. If randomly generated data shows the same effect, then what, exactly, did D&K demonstrate?? https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol9/iss1/art4/ https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol9/iss1/art4/
philips 2y ago
I have enjoyed the challenge of relearning mathematics with Math Academy as well. I find the format and reviews extremely helpful- it is so refreshing to end a lesson or review early if you are getting all the answers right compared to the drudgery of my schooling experience where you are getting question after question that isn't introducing a new mental challenge. My only desire is that their site worked on my phone- it would be nice to do a lesson when I have some free time and some paper.
- Exoristos 2y ago
  That is known as "drill," and is vital to math success.
  - dleeftink 2y ago
    I'd wager there are not many skills or occupations were drill isn't vital to success.
chrsig 2y ago
I'll call out 3b1b and khan academy for me. Especially over covid. Made math fun again. My middleschool principal thought it'd be a good idea to skip me over pre-algebra into alg 1. Turns out that doesn't work great, and I still have confidence issues because I have a hard time remembering the properties of addition & multiplication by name. I know the rules.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  My middleschool principal thought it'd be a good idea to skip me over pre-algebra into alg 1. Next time you read a novel, try this: 1. Read each sentence at half your normal reading pace 2. Skip every other chapter. Sounds ridiculous, right? That's my reaction when people propose grade skipping as the only solution for a child whose natural pace is 2x the 'standard' pace at which math is taught in school.
  - harrison_clarke 2y ago
    a lot of school is redundant, and the courses are often non-sequential skipping chapters of a novel doesn't work very well, but it works great for the encyclopedia, and pretty well for a lot of textbooks it's also not that hard to use khan academy or wikipedia to fill in the gaps, if you did miss something
    - rahimnathwani 2y ago
      I'm thinking specifically about the USA math curriculum. It's pretty sequential until 8th grade or so. Filling in gaps is fine for people with good study skills, but that excludes the vast majority of elementary school students.
      - harrison_clarke 2y ago
        the "smart" kids do seem to have those skills, though. either that, or they're being tutored on the side, or they just require fewer examples to get it whatever the case is, i think the idea behind skipping grades is that the kid isn't learning much in the classes they're in. they may not learn much in the next level either, but it allows the school to test that they've learned what they were supposed to (from class or elsewhere), while wasting less of the student and teacher's time that said, testing out seems like it'd be better than forcing the kids to sit through yet another math class, even if it's one level higher. more time to touch grass, or read in the library, etc.
abstractbill 2y ago
Congrats on your progress! Over the past few years, while homeschooling my daughters, I've come to see the way math is usually taught as horribly pathological. In the US, where we live now, it's often seen as a competitive activity -- almost like a sport. In the UK, where I grew up, that wasn't the case but still it was taught as this huge body of knowledge and skills with almost no motivation. My daughters are so advanced in math and I really don't believe it's even mostly due to innate ability. It's because, just to take an easy random example, when we studied geometry our very first lesson was me pointing out that the word "geometry" just means "earth measuring", and it was useful for farmers to be able to do that. Or, when we proved the irrationally of sqrt(2), of course I entertained them with the tale of Hippasus being thrown into the sea by the Pythagoreans. For basically everything we've learned there are so many fun stories. It makes me sad that most students of math never get to hear them.
- pipes 2y ago
  As a b and c grade student, who messed about, stumbled through a not very good info technology degree at university I definitely agree with this. The stories and lore are what makes me now so interested in programming and software engineering. I've pretty much taught myself everything programming related and that's what I work as too. I desperately want to learn math up to and including calculus as I feel like it's a hidden shame that I'm a programmer with not much math ability. I'm actually considering signing up for math academy.
rcarr 2y ago
I really want to do Math Academy and even briefly tried it a year ago. It's absolutely great but it's also very expensive. I know that math skills are invaluable, it's far cheaper than schooling, and that long term the investment is likely to pay for itself but when you're skint $49/month is still a pretty hefty sum, especially if you live outside of America. For context in the UK, a basic gym membership (£17/month) and a SIM only phone plan with unlimited data (£22/month on a two year contract) only costs £1 more in total than Math Academy (£38/month). I can't help but feel that the people who would benefit from it the most are also the people least likely to be able to afford it.
- 8bitsrule 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ABS 2y ago
    you could check the website slightly less quickly and see you can cancel at any time within the first 30 days and get a full refund https://www.mathacademy.com/terms-of-service#cancellation https://www.mathacademy.com/terms-of-service#cancellation It's what I did 10 days ago before deciding to try it out
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      I don’t trust those plans - it’s easy to forget to cancel it, and most products are simply hoping that you will forget. If I actually think I will want to cancel it, I will not sign up for services with this pattern. It’s a simple rule that saves a lot of mental overhead.
      - ABS 2y ago
        and that is fine, it's your choice but has nothing to do with the other party not offering an option to test, change your mind and not spend money. I personally just put a reminder in my calendar for all such things and be done with it.
      - 2y ago
mikelikejordan 2y ago
Hey everyone! This my blog. Just made an account on here so I could comment. Thank you all for the support and reading my story! :)
pona-a 2y ago
I am currently studying for our country's version of the SAT and, having tried Math Academy — having been convinced there is nothing anywhere as polished and developed on the market — I still had to cancel my subscription after the first month. The price just wasn't worth it; over a single year, it translates to a cost greater than one-on-one tutoring. Small companies have to understand the value of local pricing — nobody is willing to pay above h percent of their salary for a service X, and there's only so much that rule can be bent. I understand that, at the end of the day, the company still has all their expenses in USA prices, but for digital services with no manufacturing or logistic costs, it can be better to make a modest profit than none at all.
- chamomeal 2y ago
  Wow that’s a pretty glowing review of the service. Sucks about the pricing though. I haven’t really looked at math academy, but I was in school (including college) I probably learned 40% of math from khan academy, 40% from textbooks, and maybe 10% from lectures. How does math academy compare to Khan academy?
  - pona-a 2y ago
    Math Academy uses spaced repetition for skills with tiny, to-the-point interactive lessons (typically following "theory, some exercises, theory, some more exercises" formula) based on an initial diagnostic test, where the skills are structured as a graph of dependencies. I didn’t, at the time, appreciate how challenging a problem it was until I started researching Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. While their definition of a skill can be a bit narrow, thus putting more time into reviewing things I'd rather move on from, it does work from what I've observed. I recall they had a course on Abstract Algebra and other more advanced subjects, so if you're really interested, the great thing about subscriptions is that you can afford to try it.
- ABS 2y ago
  I decided to try it 10 days ago exactly because of the pricing. It would be impossible for me to have one-on-one tutoring for a year at only €465 ($499 but I'm in EU). And that's regardless of the tutoring quality
simplegeek 2y ago
Inspiring and well written. It resonated with me for I find myself in a similar position. I wonder how much time did the author commit on weekly basis. Nonetheless, I wanted to signup on Math Academy immediately but doesn't look cheap. Are there any other recommended websites for learning math (apart from Khan Academy, Math Academy)?
- mikelikejordan 2y ago
  Hey! This is my blog post thanks for reading! At my peak I spent roughly 4h a day on math academy because I wanted to get 100+ XP. I've brought it down to about 2h a day since I'm also teaching myself python for my goal of being a MLE in the future.
BinaryMachine 2y ago
Great post! It's always interesting to see the experiences of fellow peers going through Math Academy. It took myself 2 1/2 months to complete Mathematics for Machine Learning on Math Academy last year (2024) working through reading material, taking notes, and completing all the exercises took all day everyday I loved it, this was after I completed Khan Academy (starting from the beginning of mathematics negative numbers, to the end differential equations) because I kept putting it off for years when I got to busy. The main thing for me was learning not to get too frustrated when getting an answer wrong. If I made a mistake, I focused on understanding what went wrong, looking up youtube videos on the topic if it was confusing, and then trying again. At the end of a lesson I wish I had someone to bounce questions off of but thats when I used chatGPT. Congrats!
- mikelikejordan 2y ago
  Thanks for reading my blog! M4ML is the next course for me after I complete MF3. What are you doing now on math academy!
  - BinaryMachine 2y ago
    Yeah! Unfortunately at the time I had gotten laid of from work so I had extra time just not extra $ to keep paying monthly subscription, also some courses still said coming soon at least the ones I wanted to take when I was taking M4ML. Good Luck with M4ML its a great course! Covers a lot, I was impressed, wish there was some videos or more visuals but it doesn't hurt to use youtube. I took maybe 7 pages of notes on my github and each over 4000-8000 lines (I used the notes to do the step by step exercises it was easier for me to type notes and do the exercises on computer than pen and paper this is what I used to do). I take the notes because I will probably forget, but I think its key to always be learning and keep practicing even when your done the course. Once I get hired again I will def take Discrete Mathematics. In the mean time I've just read books on ML and LLMs, free online courses, youtube videos etc.
    - mikelikejordan 2y ago
      I understand the feeling. You'll get another job soon and be back to crushing math problems on math academy. Thanks I'm excited for M4ML a lot. I feel like I'll experience math in a way I never have before. Would you be willing to share your github of notes?
tptacek 2y ago
Math Academy is awesome, I'm fully hooked, but, repeating something I wrote elsewhere: it is a bleak existential confrontation with your ineptitude with fractions.
- plutosmoon 2y ago
  you and me both buddy
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I'm signing up like, oh, I have a lot of gaps I can fill in with calculus, and it's like, no, you got a lot of gaps you need to fill in with simplifying cube root expressions. The best is every once in awhile it double checks to make sure I still know what multiplication is, with like Dick and Jane bought 10 apples problems. I have given it no reason to believe otherwise! But I trust the algorithm.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Also, I go too fast through them and do stuff in my head that I should write down and make dumb mistakes, and when I get the "Incorrect" I'm like, yeah, I see exactly the dumb thing I did, let's move on, and it's like, no, let's do a next problem that's real nice and easy to make sure you get this and I'm like "stop patronizing me motherfucker".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
golly_ned 2y ago
I tried math academy about a year ago since I wanted to finally get a strong grasp on linear algebra. But I gave up during the diagnostic test. It was very, very long, and didn't seem to be adjusting in difficulty, and asked similar questions. I'm normally a fast test-taker, but after about a third, I figured it would take me an hour and a half or two hours more. I hope they've updated it by now.
- littlekey 2y ago
  It's still the same and I agree it's a splash of cold water to sign up for the platform and immediately be put through the gauntlet. I would say it's worth getting through it as none of the actual course material is like that, it's much more bite-sized. But I hope they figure out a way to smooth out that onboarding process, maybe split the test into segments and weave them into the rest of the material somehow.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago
  def try again. I personally absolutely bombed it. But you know its been 20 years since I've been in a math class. Its all to figure out where to start you off. It doesn't matter where that is, it matters where you go from there.
- zelos 2y ago
  You can do the diagnostic test in multiple sittings: I think I split it up into 3 parts? To some extent, though, I don't think you're meant to spend lots of time on each question struggling to figure it out as it's trying to determine what bits of the course you can skip, so if you can't answer a question relatively easily it's best to just say "Don't know" and move on so you get some revision during the course.
MisterTea 2y ago
$50/month? I know people with children who can't afford the NYC mandated trash cans which cost the same...
bost-ty 2y ago
I read this article because I wanted to learn more about their Math Academy experience, but I found the preamble and backstory a little long, which caused me to skim. Re: Math Academy, I used the service for ~3 weeks last year from a post here on HN by the guy responsible for the AI/ML knowledge graph behind the platform (I believe his first name is Justin). I was "only" doing about 30-60 minutes a day (a little bit higher than their guidance, but low for someone not doing math otherwise IMO). N.B. Due to substandard early instruction combined with being "gifted and talented", I was placed by the test into Math Foundations 1 (or 2?). For example, I still don't have an active/working mastery of the unit circle. So if you're a real whiz, YMMV. I found Math Academy effective at showing me my weaknesses and sharpening those skills in the short term, but I probably didn't do it for long enough to benefit from the spaced repetition effects. I found the UI/UX better than Khan Academy (sans AI), and much less tedious (when I demonstrated understanding, the questions moved on or increased the complexity vs. doing the full problem set no matter what). When I cancelled within the first month to receive my refund (see other commenters mentioning the high price), I was surprised to see my support email and refund request email both went to one of the founders (or owner?), Sandy Roberts, who was emailing me while also attending her daughter's college orientation (or helping her move, can't recall right now). Cancelling was painless once I realized I was getting a response from someone at the platform --- so if you're interested in trying it, I can recommend giving it a shot. Maybe there's some sort of economy for them if more (adult) people sign up, because 50 USD still feels a bit steep.
- Nifty3929 2y ago
  "other commenters mentioning the high price" I understand that everybody has different financial circumstances, but personally I find it so odd how people prioritize their spending. $50/mo to level up your math game? Too much. 8x $6 lattes per month - totally worth it. $200k+ for a university education after which you STILL won't know basic math (or much else useful for most majors) - super totally worth it. For me I'm just willing to pay a lot more than other folks are to learn interesting skills. Math, sailing, music, leatherworking, perfume making, whatever - to me that's such a good use of money.
  - 2y ago
djaouen 2y ago
A rare, insightful post from someone who didn’t do well in maths in high school. A true HN treat!
TrackerFF 2y ago
Side note: An absolute pet peeve of mine is how the Dunning-Kruger paper is being misrepresented, to the point of abused, like the graph included in this blog post.
- Denzel 2y ago
  In what specific way did this post misrepresent or abuse the Dunning-Kruger concept? (Btw, the graph used is the same one used on the Wikipedia page for DK.) If you’re able to explain what you understand to be misrepresented, you can clear up the misconception for others — like me.
  - TrackerFF 2y ago
    You can find the original paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_and_Unaware_of_It_How_Difficulties_in_Recognizing_One's_Own_Incompetence_Lead_to_Inflated_Self-Assessments https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_... It's a mere 15.5 pages of actual text.
    - Denzel 2y ago
      So, instead of engaging in a discussion, and sharing your knowledge, with someone genuinely interested in learning from you— to improve upon the seeming misconception that bothers you — you link to paper and do nothing to correct your own pet peeve. Maybe consider that human life is finite, no person will ever be able to read or analyze everything, so you can help others when you have a piece of knowledge. Relevant - https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/.
  - qntty 2y ago
    I don’t see that graph anywhere on the Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec... I do see other graphs that tell a different story. Namely, that confidence is a monotonically increasing function of competence. If the data supports the idea that there is a valley of despair where confidence decreases as competence increases, I must be missing it.
cleandreams 2y ago
I am going through Math Academy and I like it very much. I have done advanced technical work in my field but my math background had weaknesses from my public schooling in a large urban area and some experimental math instruction in high school. The ability to do it over is oddly exhilarating.
bbconn 2y ago
Who is building the Math Academy equivalent for other subjects (especially other sciences)?
- sn9 2y ago
  From listening to interviews, it seems like after completing a full undergrad's worth of math courses, they plan to expand to CS and math-adjacent fields (probably physics at least?).
keeeba 2y ago
Nice story - I’ve seen you on the leaderboard a few times. Good luck through the rest of Foundations III
yapyap 2y ago
This kind of started to feel like a Math Academy promo at the end.
hasanas 2y ago
Thank you for sharing your wonderful story. The prelude triggered a lot of emotions and memories from my own past. Math Academy looks very enticing!
danielecook 2y ago
I’m doing math academy and I have two comments. First, the value of this site comes from its content which is very thorough. I think it’s a great way to learn math. Second - I love the website. It reminds me of what I think of as the golden age of web design where sites were mostly server side rendered with a little jquery / Ajax sprinkled in, and more information density was preferred.
darkteflon 2y ago
I’ve used Khan Academy with the kid and always been impressed, but Math Academy sounds very promising indeed. Anyone have an informed view on the relative merits? I don’t mind paying the monthly fee if there’s genuine value.
- sn9 2y ago
  https://jonathanwhitmore.com/posts/2024-09-10-MathAcademy-after-2000-points/ https://jonathanwhitmore.com/posts/2024-09-10-MathAcademy-af...
Rendello 2y ago
Math Academy and a SQLite course pulled me out of despair as well. I grew up thinking I was relatively smart and being able to learn on my own, but only randomly and sporadically. After not learning much the past few years and feeling very stupid, I decided to look for some paid courses to take on Hacker News. The SQLite course was in a very different video format and took roughly 20 hours, but I learned a lot and immediately used that knowledge in two software projects that would've seemed insurmountable to me. As for MA, it's taken a lot longer and has been difficult. I'm now at 6000XP and halfway through Fundamentals II. I have a lot of thoughts, but I (kind of) plan to (probably not) write a review after having completed Foundations I-III, since I haven't talked to anyone else who's done so so far.
- bb86754 2y ago
  Any chance you remember the name of the SQLite course?
  - Rendello 2y ago
    It was High Performance SQLite: https://highperformancesqlite.com/ https://highperformancesqlite.com/ The course content could all be learned from the excellent SQLite docs, and in greater detail. However, I think paying the $200 was worth it for me, since the course led me through a structured learning path, this is my "year of structured learning", after all. I had some minor complaints, but in the end I learned a ton and feel empowered because of it. I'd like to take his Postgres course too but the price is too high for me.
- lolu_plan 2y ago
  which sqlite course ?
harry8 2y ago
Tried it for one of my kids, mini-review: From Parent: Expensive Alpha quality - missing absolute value signs, auto-marks "1./2" as wrong compared to "1/2", parental controls have bugs, eg you want to pause, then change the date won't update the date you're pausing to. Uses XP (experience points) as gamified motivator and then doesn't respect their value by docking unnecessarily or due to bugs. Emailed on sign up to be "personally welcomed and invited to respond with feedback, or any questions" So I did, because I want this kind of effort to succeed. Response totally ignored all content of the email and suggested he could delete the account for me(!) From student, who is quite a way ahead of his peers in math. "boring, annoying and stupid" Account is paused due to the above, if we cancel it I'll be pretty annoyed given the unused portion and expense. Khan Academy has very similar merit. You can donate a lot less than USD$50 / mth. Maybe we got unlucky and the good intentions of "personally welcoming and requesting feedback, inviting questions" was lost due to getting snowed under so response LLM happened and totally ignoring follow up rather than being deliberately rude? Could well be. Lotta hype about it, justified? I didn't see it.
wjholden 2y ago
If anyone from Math Academy is reading: the price point just doesn't work for me. I'm happy to pay ~$100/year for our family's Duolingo subscription. $49/month is too much.
soonyatha 2y ago
I started reading the article without paying much attention to the word Academy in the title, and was attracted by the single word 'Math'. In the first part, I found it interesting when the OP talked about their learning experience. In the final part, my interest faded when their writing turned towards a business entity. Reeks of a publicity stunt.
Gimpei 2y ago
I had a similar experience where math went from being easy and fun to an intimidating and painful slog. My problem was just how focused most courses are on learning techniques for solving problems. I found all those endless substitutions that you learn in calculus to be infinitely dull and so it was difficult to do a good job. Ditto for the solution techniques for differential equations. Don’t get me started on matrix inverting. I think I had to do a 5x5 matrix once for a homework assignment. What a colossal waste of time. Proof-based math classes came like a revelation to me. When I took Real Analysis, for the first time in over a decade, math was fun. You weren’t just memorizing and reapplying recipes. You were seriously thinking about unique problems and devising solutions. And all the while, you were learning where all these techniques actually came from and how everything connected together. I don’t understand why we can’t have more proof heavy math in high school. Who cares whether you remember the arctan substitution or whatever in an integral; I’d always just use a solver for that anyway. I’d rather be learning about what an integral is in the first place.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago
  > I don’t understand why we can’t have more proof heavy math in high school. proof based math requires critical thinking and its a lot harder to scale the teaching of critical thinking. We dont' pay enough for teachers of quality to be able to do this at the public school level. Its also much harder to test for in standardized tests.
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    > Its also much harder to test for in standardized tests. You could test it using interactive proof verifiers. This would also make it a lot easier to teach, since proof verifiers can handle even very complex mathematical proof via the repeated application of a mere handful of rules. (The rules are also surprisingly similar to the familiar "plug and chug" workflow of school-level math, only with different underlying objects - lemmas and theorems as opposed to variables and expressions.)
- nicf 2y ago
  I'm a private tutor who works with adults on proof-based math. I've often had a similar thought to the one you're expressing here --- I also found proofs pretty revelatory when I first exposed to them and wondered where this magical tool had been all my life --- but I wonder how well this experience would scale to the mass of students in high school math classes. After teaching proof-writing to my students for several years now, I've seen a lot of variation in how quickly students take to the skill. Some of them have the same experience that it sounds like you and I had, where it "clicks" right away, some of them struggle for a while to figure out what the whole enterprise is even about, and everything in between. Basically everyone gets better at it over time, but for some that can mean spending a decent amount of time feeling kind of lost and frustrated. And this is a very self-selected group of students: they're all grown-ups who decided to spend their money and spare time learning this stuff in addition to their jobs! For the kind of high school student who just doesn't really think of themselves as a "math person", who isn't already intrinsically motivated by the joy of discovering what makes integrals tick, I think it would be an even harder sell. High school math teachers have a hard job: they have to try to reach students at a pretty wide range of interest and ability levels, and sadly that often leads to a sort of lowest-common-denominator curriculum that doesn't involve a lot of risk-taking.
stared 2y ago
Dunning-Kruger effect does not look like that! Compare and contrast with actual one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect Sure, novices overestimate their skills - but the relationship is monotonous, with no peaks or valleys at all.

231 points by gmays 2y ago

Always great to hear from people on the far side of the valley of despair. I don't think it is pointed out enough that people who fall off of "mount stupidity" can sometimes get really really stuck. In my experience when they do that at work it is quite traumatic. Another good book for the author and others is "5 Elements of Effective Thinking" by Burger & Starbird. It thinks about thinking which can sometimes side step the depression of suddenly not thinking you know anything about anything that accompanies that big drop off mount stupid.

financypants 2y ago
what do you mean by falling off mount stupidity, especially at work?
- brm 2y ago
  Mount Stupidity relates to section two of the blog post where it references a concept related to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  It was discussed in the article, but to be more explicit, sometimes a person who is sure of their understanding of things learns a new thing and that new thing opens their eyes to a huge amount of complexity they were missing. They go from feeling like they knew everything there was to know about a thing to feeling like they know little to nothing about the thing. (this is the "Falling off Mount Stupidity") Depending on how senior they are at work, that can be quite traumatic. A lot of people in tech sort of base their self image on how smart they perceive themselves to be with respect to their peers. When that perception inverts their own world model makes them feel worthless. In the two cases where people I was managing this occurred (that I knew of) their productivity dropped like a rock and they became seriously depressed. One I managed to get back on track, the other left tech and I have lost track of where they ended up.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mikelikejordan 2y ago
  Mount Stupidity is the peak of overconfidence greatly outpacing your competency level. So, falling off is essentially being humbled by expreiences that make you realize you do not know as much as you think you do, and your confidence takes a major dive as a result.
mikelikejordan 2y ago
Thanks for reading my blog post! I'm going to pickup that book today and make sure to start reading it!

shermantanktop 2y ago

For child, being precocious in a subject is usually a curse. Being bright and a generally fast learner is also a trap. Hitting the wall is inevitable for almost everyone, but until that point your self-image is built on forward velocity, and especially relative velocity — you’re just faster than your peers. Turns out there are faster kids, they just aren’t at your school. Parents can make this worse but it’s pretty hard to prevent it.

tippytippytango 2y ago
Yep, we all have to hit the wall and that’s where we find out what we’re made of. It can be a valuable experience with the right people around to help.
- skyde 2y ago
  Can you give more detail on what you mean by it can be a valuable experience with the right people around to help. My son (7 years old) is gifted in Math and as a parent I find it extremely hard to decide how much I should push him (register him to math competition, weekend math club ...) and how much I should just let him get 100% on exam and not accelerate the learning.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    I guess how easy it is to do depends heavily on the district, but why not have him skip some math courses and leave extracurriculars for if he's really interested in it rather than just good at it? I ended up skipping three years of math by the end of high school, though I never did any club or competitions.
  - sebg 2y ago
    It really depends on how much your son wants to do math. As you can imagine, there is a whole world of kids like your kid who love math and want to do nothing more than math. If you're interested I can chat with you or recommend resources here if you decide to help your kid do more math.
  - 2y ago

nyeah 2y ago

This may be a great article. As an aside, all Dunning and Krueger showed is that everybody thinks they're in the top 1/3 to 1/4. (At least everybody in undergrad school at Cornell.)

dahart 2y ago
Oh it’s much worse than that, and it wasn’t everybody in Cornell undergrad, it was a grand total of like 45 undergrads at Cornell who signed up for extra credit (which I imagine is a pretty big confounding factor - the A students don’t need it, and the F students don’t bother, on top of the massive confounding factor of only measuring undergrads from Cornell - they didn’t measure any people who are truly incompetent or unskilled). The DK experiment depends on people ranking themselves against the cohort, other people who they don’t know. The DK effect probably doesn’t exist, it has been argued compellingly that the paper does not demonstrate what it claims to. “To establish the Dunning-Kruger effect is an artifact of research design, not human thinking, my colleagues and I showed it can be produced using randomly generated data.”(!!!) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruge... “the asymmetry reported by Kruger and Dunning actually goes away, and even reverses, when the ability tests given to participants are very difficult.” https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-krug... “The Dunning Kruger Effect is probably not real” https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-...
- nyeah 2y ago
  If you are downvoting, I hope you've read at least one of D&K's papers. Or at least looked at the plots. Not meta-stuff pro or con, but what Dunning and Krueger wrote.
  - dahart 2y ago
    I didn’t downvote anyone, in fact I upvoted your comment. Why do you ask? I am getting downvoted here, but I don’t know why. Yes I have read D&K’s paper and studied the plots and methodology multiple times. I thought I was mostly agreeing with you here. What part of their plots or paper are you thinking of? In my opinion, the paper dramatically overstates the claims of what it actually demonstrates experimentally. The title alone primes the reader to jump to a conclusion that isn’t supporter by their data; they did not show people who are unskilled or “incompetent” on an absolute scale, they did not test all skills in general (they only tested 4 relatively easy “skills” and one of those was subjective), they did not test the general population. Looking at the plots again won’t address the confounding issues I mentioned, even if I don’t dispute their data at all. Every time I read the DK paper, even now, I’m struck by how wild it is that so many people refer to this as a human-wide cognitive bias, when there was so little evidence to begin with, the study was so small and biased, so many people have called out problematic issues with their data and experiment design. If randomly generated data shows the same effect, then what, exactly, did D&K demonstrate?? https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol9/iss1/art4/ https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol9/iss1/art4/

philips 2y ago

I have enjoyed the challenge of relearning mathematics with Math Academy as well. I find the format and reviews extremely helpful- it is so refreshing to end a lesson or review early if you are getting all the answers right compared to the drudgery of my schooling experience where you are getting question after question that isn't introducing a new mental challenge. My only desire is that their site worked on my phone- it would be nice to do a lesson when I have some free time and some paper.

Exoristos 2y ago
That is known as "drill," and is vital to math success.
- dleeftink 2y ago
  I'd wager there are not many skills or occupations were drill isn't vital to success.

chrsig 2y ago

I'll call out 3b1b and khan academy for me. Especially over covid. Made math fun again. My middleschool principal thought it'd be a good idea to skip me over pre-algebra into alg 1. Turns out that doesn't work great, and I still have confidence issues because I have a hard time remembering the properties of addition & multiplication by name. I know the rules.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
My middleschool principal thought it'd be a good idea to skip me over pre-algebra into alg 1. Next time you read a novel, try this: 1. Read each sentence at half your normal reading pace 2. Skip every other chapter. Sounds ridiculous, right? That's my reaction when people propose grade skipping as the only solution for a child whose natural pace is 2x the 'standard' pace at which math is taught in school.
- harrison_clarke 2y ago
  a lot of school is redundant, and the courses are often non-sequential skipping chapters of a novel doesn't work very well, but it works great for the encyclopedia, and pretty well for a lot of textbooks it's also not that hard to use khan academy or wikipedia to fill in the gaps, if you did miss something
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    I'm thinking specifically about the USA math curriculum. It's pretty sequential until 8th grade or so. Filling in gaps is fine for people with good study skills, but that excludes the vast majority of elementary school students.
    - harrison_clarke 2y ago
      the "smart" kids do seem to have those skills, though. either that, or they're being tutored on the side, or they just require fewer examples to get it whatever the case is, i think the idea behind skipping grades is that the kid isn't learning much in the classes they're in. they may not learn much in the next level either, but it allows the school to test that they've learned what they were supposed to (from class or elsewhere), while wasting less of the student and teacher's time that said, testing out seems like it'd be better than forcing the kids to sit through yet another math class, even if it's one level higher. more time to touch grass, or read in the library, etc.

abstractbill 2y ago

Congrats on your progress! Over the past few years, while homeschooling my daughters, I've come to see the way math is usually taught as horribly pathological. In the US, where we live now, it's often seen as a competitive activity -- almost like a sport. In the UK, where I grew up, that wasn't the case but still it was taught as this huge body of knowledge and skills with almost no motivation. My daughters are so advanced in math and I really don't believe it's even mostly due to innate ability. It's because, just to take an easy random example, when we studied geometry our very first lesson was me pointing out that the word "geometry" just means "earth measuring", and it was useful for farmers to be able to do that. Or, when we proved the irrationally of sqrt(2), of course I entertained them with the tale of Hippasus being thrown into the sea by the Pythagoreans. For basically everything we've learned there are so many fun stories. It makes me sad that most students of math never get to hear them.

pipes 2y ago
As a b and c grade student, who messed about, stumbled through a not very good info technology degree at university I definitely agree with this. The stories and lore are what makes me now so interested in programming and software engineering. I've pretty much taught myself everything programming related and that's what I work as too. I desperately want to learn math up to and including calculus as I feel like it's a hidden shame that I'm a programmer with not much math ability. I'm actually considering signing up for math academy.

rcarr 2y ago

I really want to do Math Academy and even briefly tried it a year ago. It's absolutely great but it's also very expensive. I know that math skills are invaluable, it's far cheaper than schooling, and that long term the investment is likely to pay for itself but when you're skint $49/month is still a pretty hefty sum, especially if you live outside of America. For context in the UK, a basic gym membership (£17/month) and a SIM only phone plan with unlimited data (£22/month on a two year contract) only costs £1 more in total than Math Academy (£38/month). I can't help but feel that the people who would benefit from it the most are also the people least likely to be able to afford it.

8bitsrule 2y ago
[flagged]
- ABS 2y ago
  you could check the website slightly less quickly and see you can cancel at any time within the first 30 days and get a full refund https://www.mathacademy.com/terms-of-service#cancellation https://www.mathacademy.com/terms-of-service#cancellation It's what I did 10 days ago before deciding to try it out
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    I don’t trust those plans - it’s easy to forget to cancel it, and most products are simply hoping that you will forget. If I actually think I will want to cancel it, I will not sign up for services with this pattern. It’s a simple rule that saves a lot of mental overhead.
    - ABS 2y ago
      and that is fine, it's your choice but has nothing to do with the other party not offering an option to test, change your mind and not spend money. I personally just put a reminder in my calendar for all such things and be done with it.
    - 2y ago

mikelikejordan 2y ago

Hey everyone! This my blog. Just made an account on here so I could comment. Thank you all for the support and reading my story! :)

pona-a 2y ago

I am currently studying for our country's version of the SAT and, having tried Math Academy — having been convinced there is nothing anywhere as polished and developed on the market — I still had to cancel my subscription after the first month. The price just wasn't worth it; over a single year, it translates to a cost greater than one-on-one tutoring. Small companies have to understand the value of local pricing — nobody is willing to pay above h percent of their salary for a service X, and there's only so much that rule can be bent. I understand that, at the end of the day, the company still has all their expenses in USA prices, but for digital services with no manufacturing or logistic costs, it can be better to make a modest profit than none at all.

chamomeal 2y ago
Wow that’s a pretty glowing review of the service. Sucks about the pricing though. I haven’t really looked at math academy, but I was in school (including college) I probably learned 40% of math from khan academy, 40% from textbooks, and maybe 10% from lectures. How does math academy compare to Khan academy?
- pona-a 2y ago
  Math Academy uses spaced repetition for skills with tiny, to-the-point interactive lessons (typically following "theory, some exercises, theory, some more exercises" formula) based on an initial diagnostic test, where the skills are structured as a graph of dependencies. I didn’t, at the time, appreciate how challenging a problem it was until I started researching Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. While their definition of a skill can be a bit narrow, thus putting more time into reviewing things I'd rather move on from, it does work from what I've observed. I recall they had a course on Abstract Algebra and other more advanced subjects, so if you're really interested, the great thing about subscriptions is that you can afford to try it.
ABS 2y ago
I decided to try it 10 days ago exactly because of the pricing. It would be impossible for me to have one-on-one tutoring for a year at only €465 ($499 but I'm in EU). And that's regardless of the tutoring quality

simplegeek 2y ago

Inspiring and well written. It resonated with me for I find myself in a similar position. I wonder how much time did the author commit on weekly basis. Nonetheless, I wanted to signup on Math Academy immediately but doesn't look cheap. Are there any other recommended websites for learning math (apart from Khan Academy, Math Academy)?

mikelikejordan 2y ago
Hey! This is my blog post thanks for reading! At my peak I spent roughly 4h a day on math academy because I wanted to get 100+ XP. I've brought it down to about 2h a day since I'm also teaching myself python for my goal of being a MLE in the future.

BinaryMachine 2y ago

Great post! It's always interesting to see the experiences of fellow peers going through Math Academy. It took myself 2 1/2 months to complete Mathematics for Machine Learning on Math Academy last year (2024) working through reading material, taking notes, and completing all the exercises took all day everyday I loved it, this was after I completed Khan Academy (starting from the beginning of mathematics negative numbers, to the end differential equations) because I kept putting it off for years when I got to busy. The main thing for me was learning not to get too frustrated when getting an answer wrong. If I made a mistake, I focused on understanding what went wrong, looking up youtube videos on the topic if it was confusing, and then trying again. At the end of a lesson I wish I had someone to bounce questions off of but thats when I used chatGPT. Congrats!

mikelikejordan 2y ago
Thanks for reading my blog! M4ML is the next course for me after I complete MF3. What are you doing now on math academy!
- BinaryMachine 2y ago
  Yeah! Unfortunately at the time I had gotten laid of from work so I had extra time just not extra $ to keep paying monthly subscription, also some courses still said coming soon at least the ones I wanted to take when I was taking M4ML. Good Luck with M4ML its a great course! Covers a lot, I was impressed, wish there was some videos or more visuals but it doesn't hurt to use youtube. I took maybe 7 pages of notes on my github and each over 4000-8000 lines (I used the notes to do the step by step exercises it was easier for me to type notes and do the exercises on computer than pen and paper this is what I used to do). I take the notes because I will probably forget, but I think its key to always be learning and keep practicing even when your done the course. Once I get hired again I will def take Discrete Mathematics. In the mean time I've just read books on ML and LLMs, free online courses, youtube videos etc.
  - mikelikejordan 2y ago
    I understand the feeling. You'll get another job soon and be back to crushing math problems on math academy. Thanks I'm excited for M4ML a lot. I feel like I'll experience math in a way I never have before. Would you be willing to share your github of notes?

tptacek 2y ago

Math Academy is awesome, I'm fully hooked, but, repeating something I wrote elsewhere: it is a bleak existential confrontation with your ineptitude with fractions.

plutosmoon 2y ago
you and me both buddy
- tptacek 2y ago
  I'm signing up like, oh, I have a lot of gaps I can fill in with calculus, and it's like, no, you got a lot of gaps you need to fill in with simplifying cube root expressions. The best is every once in awhile it double checks to make sure I still know what multiplication is, with like Dick and Jane bought 10 apples problems. I have given it no reason to believe otherwise! But I trust the algorithm.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Also, I go too fast through them and do stuff in my head that I should write down and make dumb mistakes, and when I get the "Incorrect" I'm like, yeah, I see exactly the dumb thing I did, let's move on, and it's like, no, let's do a next problem that's real nice and easy to make sure you get this and I'm like "stop patronizing me motherfucker".

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

golly_ned 2y ago

I tried math academy about a year ago since I wanted to finally get a strong grasp on linear algebra. But I gave up during the diagnostic test. It was very, very long, and didn't seem to be adjusting in difficulty, and asked similar questions. I'm normally a fast test-taker, but after about a third, I figured it would take me an hour and a half or two hours more. I hope they've updated it by now.

littlekey 2y ago
It's still the same and I agree it's a splash of cold water to sign up for the platform and immediately be put through the gauntlet. I would say it's worth getting through it as none of the actual course material is like that, it's much more bite-sized. But I hope they figure out a way to smooth out that onboarding process, maybe split the test into segments and weave them into the rest of the material somehow.
cultofmetatron 2y ago
def try again. I personally absolutely bombed it. But you know its been 20 years since I've been in a math class. Its all to figure out where to start you off. It doesn't matter where that is, it matters where you go from there.
zelos 2y ago
You can do the diagnostic test in multiple sittings: I think I split it up into 3 parts? To some extent, though, I don't think you're meant to spend lots of time on each question struggling to figure it out as it's trying to determine what bits of the course you can skip, so if you can't answer a question relatively easily it's best to just say "Don't know" and move on so you get some revision during the course.

MisterTea 2y ago

$50/month? I know people with children who can't afford the NYC mandated trash cans which cost the same...

bost-ty 2y ago

I read this article because I wanted to learn more about their Math Academy experience, but I found the preamble and backstory a little long, which caused me to skim. Re: Math Academy, I used the service for ~3 weeks last year from a post here on HN by the guy responsible for the AI/ML knowledge graph behind the platform (I believe his first name is Justin). I was "only" doing about 30-60 minutes a day (a little bit higher than their guidance, but low for someone not doing math otherwise IMO). N.B. Due to substandard early instruction combined with being "gifted and talented", I was placed by the test into Math Foundations 1 (or 2?). For example, I still don't have an active/working mastery of the unit circle. So if you're a real whiz, YMMV. I found Math Academy effective at showing me my weaknesses and sharpening those skills in the short term, but I probably didn't do it for long enough to benefit from the spaced repetition effects. I found the UI/UX better than Khan Academy (sans AI), and much less tedious (when I demonstrated understanding, the questions moved on or increased the complexity vs. doing the full problem set no matter what). When I cancelled within the first month to receive my refund (see other commenters mentioning the high price), I was surprised to see my support email and refund request email both went to one of the founders (or owner?), Sandy Roberts, who was emailing me while also attending her daughter's college orientation (or helping her move, can't recall right now). Cancelling was painless once I realized I was getting a response from someone at the platform --- so if you're interested in trying it, I can recommend giving it a shot. Maybe there's some sort of economy for them if more (adult) people sign up, because 50 USD still feels a bit steep.

Nifty3929 2y ago
"other commenters mentioning the high price" I understand that everybody has different financial circumstances, but personally I find it so odd how people prioritize their spending. $50/mo to level up your math game? Too much. 8x $6 lattes per month - totally worth it. $200k+ for a university education after which you STILL won't know basic math (or much else useful for most majors) - super totally worth it. For me I'm just willing to pay a lot more than other folks are to learn interesting skills. Math, sailing, music, leatherworking, perfume making, whatever - to me that's such a good use of money.
- 2y ago

djaouen 2y ago

A rare, insightful post from someone who didn’t do well in maths in high school. A true HN treat!

TrackerFF 2y ago

Side note: An absolute pet peeve of mine is how the Dunning-Kruger paper is being misrepresented, to the point of abused, like the graph included in this blog post.

Denzel 2y ago
In what specific way did this post misrepresent or abuse the Dunning-Kruger concept? (Btw, the graph used is the same one used on the Wikipedia page for DK.) If you’re able to explain what you understand to be misrepresented, you can clear up the misconception for others — like me.
- TrackerFF 2y ago
  You can find the original paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_and_Unaware_of_It_How_Difficulties_in_Recognizing_One's_Own_Incompetence_Lead_to_Inflated_Self-Assessments https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_... It's a mere 15.5 pages of actual text.
  - Denzel 2y ago
    So, instead of engaging in a discussion, and sharing your knowledge, with someone genuinely interested in learning from you— to improve upon the seeming misconception that bothers you — you link to paper and do nothing to correct your own pet peeve. Maybe consider that human life is finite, no person will ever be able to read or analyze everything, so you can help others when you have a piece of knowledge. Relevant - https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/.
- qntty 2y ago
  I don’t see that graph anywhere on the Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec... I do see other graphs that tell a different story. Namely, that confidence is a monotonically increasing function of competence. If the data supports the idea that there is a valley of despair where confidence decreases as competence increases, I must be missing it.

cleandreams 2y ago

I am going through Math Academy and I like it very much. I have done advanced technical work in my field but my math background had weaknesses from my public schooling in a large urban area and some experimental math instruction in high school. The ability to do it over is oddly exhilarating.

bbconn 2y ago

Who is building the Math Academy equivalent for other subjects (especially other sciences)?

sn9 2y ago
From listening to interviews, it seems like after completing a full undergrad's worth of math courses, they plan to expand to CS and math-adjacent fields (probably physics at least?).

keeeba 2y ago

Nice story - I’ve seen you on the leaderboard a few times. Good luck through the rest of Foundations III

yapyap 2y ago

This kind of started to feel like a Math Academy promo at the end.

hasanas 2y ago

Thank you for sharing your wonderful story. The prelude triggered a lot of emotions and memories from my own past. Math Academy looks very enticing!

danielecook 2y ago

I’m doing math academy and I have two comments. First, the value of this site comes from its content which is very thorough. I think it’s a great way to learn math. Second - I love the website. It reminds me of what I think of as the golden age of web design where sites were mostly server side rendered with a little jquery / Ajax sprinkled in, and more information density was preferred.

darkteflon 2y ago

I’ve used Khan Academy with the kid and always been impressed, but Math Academy sounds very promising indeed. Anyone have an informed view on the relative merits? I don’t mind paying the monthly fee if there’s genuine value.

sn9 2y ago
https://jonathanwhitmore.com/posts/2024-09-10-MathAcademy-after-2000-points/ https://jonathanwhitmore.com/posts/2024-09-10-MathAcademy-af...

Rendello 2y ago

Math Academy and a SQLite course pulled me out of despair as well. I grew up thinking I was relatively smart and being able to learn on my own, but only randomly and sporadically. After not learning much the past few years and feeling very stupid, I decided to look for some paid courses to take on Hacker News. The SQLite course was in a very different video format and took roughly 20 hours, but I learned a lot and immediately used that knowledge in two software projects that would've seemed insurmountable to me. As for MA, it's taken a lot longer and has been difficult. I'm now at 6000XP and halfway through Fundamentals II. I have a lot of thoughts, but I (kind of) plan to (probably not) write a review after having completed Foundations I-III, since I haven't talked to anyone else who's done so so far.

bb86754 2y ago
Any chance you remember the name of the SQLite course?
- Rendello 2y ago
  It was High Performance SQLite: https://highperformancesqlite.com/ https://highperformancesqlite.com/ The course content could all be learned from the excellent SQLite docs, and in greater detail. However, I think paying the $200 was worth it for me, since the course led me through a structured learning path, this is my "year of structured learning", after all. I had some minor complaints, but in the end I learned a ton and feel empowered because of it. I'd like to take his Postgres course too but the price is too high for me.
lolu_plan 2y ago
which sqlite course ?

harry8 2y ago

Tried it for one of my kids, mini-review: From Parent: Expensive Alpha quality - missing absolute value signs, auto-marks "1./2" as wrong compared to "1/2", parental controls have bugs, eg you want to pause, then change the date won't update the date you're pausing to. Uses XP (experience points) as gamified motivator and then doesn't respect their value by docking unnecessarily or due to bugs. Emailed on sign up to be "personally welcomed and invited to respond with feedback, or any questions" So I did, because I want this kind of effort to succeed. Response totally ignored all content of the email and suggested he could delete the account for me(!) From student, who is quite a way ahead of his peers in math. "boring, annoying and stupid" Account is paused due to the above, if we cancel it I'll be pretty annoyed given the unused portion and expense. Khan Academy has very similar merit. You can donate a lot less than USD$50 / mth. Maybe we got unlucky and the good intentions of "personally welcoming and requesting feedback, inviting questions" was lost due to getting snowed under so response LLM happened and totally ignoring follow up rather than being deliberately rude? Could well be. Lotta hype about it, justified? I didn't see it.

wjholden 2y ago

If anyone from Math Academy is reading: the price point just doesn't work for me. I'm happy to pay ~$100/year for our family's Duolingo subscription. $49/month is too much.

soonyatha 2y ago

I started reading the article without paying much attention to the word Academy in the title, and was attracted by the single word 'Math'. In the first part, I found it interesting when the OP talked about their learning experience. In the final part, my interest faded when their writing turned towards a business entity. Reeks of a publicity stunt.

Gimpei 2y ago

I had a similar experience where math went from being easy and fun to an intimidating and painful slog. My problem was just how focused most courses are on learning techniques for solving problems. I found all those endless substitutions that you learn in calculus to be infinitely dull and so it was difficult to do a good job. Ditto for the solution techniques for differential equations. Don’t get me started on matrix inverting. I think I had to do a 5x5 matrix once for a homework assignment. What a colossal waste of time. Proof-based math classes came like a revelation to me. When I took Real Analysis, for the first time in over a decade, math was fun. You weren’t just memorizing and reapplying recipes. You were seriously thinking about unique problems and devising solutions. And all the while, you were learning where all these techniques actually came from and how everything connected together. I don’t understand why we can’t have more proof heavy math in high school. Who cares whether you remember the arctan substitution or whatever in an integral; I’d always just use a solver for that anyway. I’d rather be learning about what an integral is in the first place.

cultofmetatron 2y ago
> I don’t understand why we can’t have more proof heavy math in high school. proof based math requires critical thinking and its a lot harder to scale the teaching of critical thinking. We dont' pay enough for teachers of quality to be able to do this at the public school level. Its also much harder to test for in standardized tests.
- zozbot234 2y ago
  > Its also much harder to test for in standardized tests. You could test it using interactive proof verifiers. This would also make it a lot easier to teach, since proof verifiers can handle even very complex mathematical proof via the repeated application of a mere handful of rules. (The rules are also surprisingly similar to the familiar "plug and chug" workflow of school-level math, only with different underlying objects - lemmas and theorems as opposed to variables and expressions.)
nicf 2y ago
I'm a private tutor who works with adults on proof-based math. I've often had a similar thought to the one you're expressing here --- I also found proofs pretty revelatory when I first exposed to them and wondered where this magical tool had been all my life --- but I wonder how well this experience would scale to the mass of students in high school math classes. After teaching proof-writing to my students for several years now, I've seen a lot of variation in how quickly students take to the skill. Some of them have the same experience that it sounds like you and I had, where it "clicks" right away, some of them struggle for a while to figure out what the whole enterprise is even about, and everything in between. Basically everyone gets better at it over time, but for some that can mean spending a decent amount of time feeling kind of lost and frustrated. And this is a very self-selected group of students: they're all grown-ups who decided to spend their money and spare time learning this stuff in addition to their jobs! For the kind of high school student who just doesn't really think of themselves as a "math person", who isn't already intrinsically motivated by the joy of discovering what makes integrals tick, I think it would be an even harder sell. High school math teachers have a hard job: they have to try to reach students at a pretty wide range of interest and ability levels, and sadly that often leads to a sort of lowest-common-denominator curriculum that doesn't involve a lot of risk-taking.

stared 2y ago

Dunning-Kruger effect does not look like that! Compare and contrast with actual one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect Sure, novices overestimate their skills - but the relationship is monotonous, with no peaks or valleys at all.