I’ve completed the Math Academy course Probability & Statistics, my eighth Math Academy course thus far. As usual, I’m posting an update on my Math Academy experience, along with miscellaneous comments on matters Math Academy-related. (For a list of all my Math Academy posts, along with all my certificates of completion and activity logs, see my Math Academy page.)

The usual disclaimer: Not everyone will share my opinions on Math Academy, and not everyone will want to use the Math Academy system as I do. But my comments may be useful or interesting to at least some people.

Activity statistics

According to my activity log for the Probability & Statistics course, I averaged just over 33 XP per day, with a lot of variability (standard deviation of over 18). I didn’t do any work at all on 8 days out of 67, just over a tenth of the time I took to complete the course. Both the XP per day and the number of missed days were improvements over the previous course I took.

However, I did worse on quizzes than I did in my previous course: There were a total of 14 quizzes, and I had to retake 9 of them, almost two-thirds. I did 144 reviews, exactly twice as many as the 72 lessions.

Math Academy and talent development

A core belief of Justin Skycak, and a key principle behind the design of Math Academy, is that education should be more like talent development, and students treated more like (student-)athletes. Skycak talks (and tweets) a lot about the benefits of doing this, but less about the trade-offs involved, especially when Math Academy is used in a K-12 school setting (as in Alpha School and other educational institutions). Let’s start with the contrast between athletics and academics in a typical high school.

Participation in high school athletics (and other activities like band) is voluntary. No student is compelled to try out for the football team, but they have no choice in whether they have to attend class or not, or even whether they attend a particular school or not. (This applies even to private schools, since parents will often choose their children’s schools and not allow them a say in the matter.)

The mandatory nature of class attendance vs. the voluntary nature of school athletics affects how various aspects of talent development are perceived. For example, an athletics coach will closely monitor the activities of athletes (including filming their practice and game performance and measuring and timing them in multiple ways), will tightly control their activities both on and off the field, will give them often harsh feedback (including in front of their teammates), and if their performance is not up to snuff will bench them or even cut them from the team.

But when similar practices are deployed in the classroom, for example, the AI-supported monitoring of Alpha School students taking academic classes (including Math Academy classes) on the school computers, they are decried as intrusive, icky, gross, dystopian, and so on, because the presumption is that these are imposed on students who are compelled to endure them. This I think accounts for a lot of the loaded language that critics of Alpha School, etc., use when commenting on these schools.

However, I think the fundamental problem that many such critics have with talent development in the context of academics is due to a more fundamental issue: by its nature talent development magnifies differences, and thus increases rather than reduces inequality within schools and (by implication) within society at large.

This is a larger discussion, so I’ll postpone it to a future blog post.

Next steps

This completes the Math Academy set of courses that I originally set out to take. My annual subscription still has over four months left for me to take another course, and I don’t want to just do reviews. So I’ll likely start the Differential Equations course next. However, I do plan to reduce my daily XP goal from 40 to 30.

(I plan to use the extra time to study Japanese—something I’ve thought about doing for a while, and finally decided to do. My goal is just to be able to read Japanese. All of the anime I’d want to watch already have English subtitles, but there are lots of manga and other content I’d like to read that will likely never get official translations. My progress in learning Japanese is likely to be slow, and I won’t be posting updates on it.)

Come next February I’ll face a decision: Subscribe to Math Academy for another year? Go back to a monthly subscription? Drop Math Academy entirely? I see some value in continuing my Math Academy subscription in order to get reviews for the courses I’ve previously completed, but I’m not sure if that has $499/year or $49/month value.

It would be different if Math Academy released new courses for adult learners; I’d be particularly interested in the previously-discussed computer science and (to a lesser extent) machine learning courses. However, as I noted in my last update, at this point it’s not clear when Math Academy might release these courses, or indeed whether they’ll release them at all.

That’s it for now. See you at my next update!