[suncherta]

I am happy Math Academy customer. Agree with most what you wrote above. Except for the pricing estimate for the private tutor and related 26x cheaper comparison. People generally don't hire private tutors to have lessons every workday of the week. No I think it would make sense for do so even leaving out financial cost. It is more like once a week session with take away homework (maybe twice a week for a quite intense level). This brings cost comparison down to the 5x time (10x for twice a week). Still quite impressive.

[JustinSkycak]

Oh cool, always happy to run into MA customers! I see your point -- however, in my comparison, what I'm trying to get at is this: imagine that when a student goes to school each weekday, instead of spending an hour in a traditional class that is not personalized to their needs, they spend an hour with a 1-on-1 tutor who engages the student in personalized training exercises. This is essentially what Math Academy is.

I realize that tutoring is typically done at a lower frequency, but I don't agree that the lower frequency is ideal. At least in my mind, when I imagine the Platonic ideal of an education, there is no real difference between "lesson" and "homework" -- minimum effective doses of instruction are interspersed with minimum effective doses of active problem-solving, where every single problem is carefully selected in response to the learner's performance on the previous problem(s).

If this characterization of the Platonic ideal accurate, then achieving it would require a tutor continually sitting next to the student, analyzing their performance on every single problem that they do, and deciding the exact moment to move the student on to a new topic or problem type. Of course, that is infeasible with human tutors, so we settle for one or two days per week where the tutor tries to get the student prepared enough to tackle the homework without being completely overwhelmed.

I would argue that, while 1-2 tutoring sessions per week can really make a difference in a student's education, a lot of learning efficiency is still left unrealized (compared to 5 tutoring sessions per week).