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KindlED
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED
Episode 54: The Art of Problem Solving. A Conversation with Richard Rusczyk.
Ready to unlock the magic of math? 🎉 This episode features Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving and Beast Academy. His journey—from an “aggressively average” high school in Alabama to Princeton—shows the magic of student empowerment through autonomy and intrinsic motivation. 🚀
We explore learning spaces where project-based learning and creative problem-solving shine. Richard explains how leading with questions reduces math anxiety and builds confidence. Through stories of teachers and mentors, he highlights the value of self-paced and mastery-based learning.
At Art of Problem Solving, students don’t just excel—they join a vibrant learning community and build lifelong friendships. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑❤️
This episode celebrates the mentors, parents, and educators creating empowered learners. 🙌 Tune in and get inspired to help kids think creatively, overcome challenges, and thrive. 🎧
More About Our Guest
Richard Rusczyk founded the Art of Problem Solving in 2003 to create interactive educational opportunities for avid math students. Art of Problem Solving now reaches hundreds of thousands of high-potential math students every year through its learning centers, online schools, books, websites, and online learning systems. Richard authored or co-authored 7 math textbooks and was one of the co-creators of the Mandelbrot Competition and a past Director of the USA Mathematical Talent Search. Richard was a participant in National MATHCOUNTS, a three-time participant in the Math Olympiad Summer Program, and a USA Mathematical Olympiad winner (1989). He graduated from Princeton University in 1993.
Connect with Richard
https://artofproblemsolving.com/
https://beastacademy.com/
Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast:
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
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We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
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Hi and welcome to the Kindled podcast where we dig into the art and science behind kindling, the motivation, curiosity and mental well-being of the young humans in our lives.
Speaker 2:Together, we'll discover practical tools and strategies you can use to help kids unlock their full potential and become the strongest version of their future selves. I am really bad at math. That is something I tell myself a lot. Katie, what about you?
Speaker 1:I also tell myself that I'm bad at math. It's a big limiting belief that I have and I don't wish it upon my kids and I'm having a hard time facilitating that for them, coming from where I've been, and so I'm really excited about our conversation today because we're talking to the founder of Art of Problem Solving, beast Academy. This is a very common, like very popular, math curriculum and the guy that runs it is like not just your average curriculum creator, like he's and he's brilliant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's crazy, he's so smart let me tell you a little bit more about richard resick. He's the founder of art of problem solving. I started that in 2003. He wanted to create an interactive educational opportunity for avid math students. The art of problem solving now reaches hundreds of thousands of high potential math students. The Art of Problem Solving now reaches hundreds of thousands of high potential math students every year through its learning centers, online schools, books, websites and online learning systems. Richard authored or co-authored seven math textbooks and was one of the co-creators of the Mandelbrot competition which is something that I've never heard of before, so I'm going to have to Google that and he's a past director of the USA Mathematical Talent Search. Richard was a participant in National Math Counts, a three-time participant in the Math Olympiad Summer Program and a USA Mathematical Olympiad winner in 1989. He graduated from Princeton University in 1993.
Speaker 2:Hold on. Before we get to the conversation, mandelbrot competition. I listened to a podcast that Richard was on and Mandelbrot was like a mathematician and this was back in like the nineties. And he picked up, uh, went to a pay phone and found the guy's phone number to ask him if he can use his name for the competition. And he told him yes.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's really awesome. All right, well, let's talk to Richard. So we want to get started here by hearing a little bit about your background. Can you tell us about, like, your math education journey? What brought you into this work? Why are you so passionate about math and kind of like what your big? Why is? What change are you trying to make in the math world?
Speaker 3:All right. Well, when I was a student I was always really interested in learning. My mom was a first grade teacher so I started reading pretty early because she practiced on me. But she also saw that I was very interested in math. So when I was in middle school there was a new math competition that came out. It was called Math Counts and she read about it in the newspaper and she went to the school and said I think my son will really enjoy doing this. And it turns out she was right. A teacher there invested a lot of time in me and some other students and brought us to the first math competition, the first math counts competition in that area, which was the first math competition I ever went to. That was the first place where I was in a room full of other students who were a whole lot like me. They read the same books, they laughed at the same jokes, they enjoyed the same sorts of things. It was the first time when I started to really realize that this thing that I really enjoyed doing and was kind of good at might have value in a broader world, because there were also other adults at this math competition who weren't required by being my parent or being my teacher to be happy about what I could do with mathematics. So that gave me a signal, because before that all I had ever gotten that signal for or seen that signal I never got this signal was basketball.
Speaker 3:Basketball was very important in my middle school. You can't see me, I'm about five seven. Basketball was not going to be in my school, but it's math competition. I started to find my people and didn't have any idea then that you know, fast forward 15 years every professional space I would enter would be full of those sorts of people. You know you don't see that when you're in middle school, all you see is how important basketball is. It was more of the same. So I went to high school in Northern Alabama. I went to a high school that I like to describe as aggressively, average, aggressively average.
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 3:So our high school, maybe two thirds of us graduated, maybe 10, 15% went straight to four-year college. So you know, there weren't a whole lot of other students like me. There were a few, but there weren't many. But there was. There was a teacher there, gwen Snoddy is her name. She would bring a handful of us to competitions all over Alabama and then eventually all over the Southeast where I would again get to meet a lot of us to competitions all over Alabama and then eventually all over the southeast where I would again get to meet a lot of people who would, many of whom, or some of whom, are still my closest friends, people that I met through these events.
Speaker 3:But I didn't really understand the importance of what I was doing in all of these competitions until I went to college. So in college I went to Princeton and you've heard me describe my high school. I was really worried about competing against students who went to Thomas Jefferson you know these high powered magnet schools or went to Exeter, you know these, these fancy, wealthy private schools. I was worried about competing with them because they probably had all this specialized training that I didn't have. You know, the only specialized training I had of any sort was. I went to a couple summer camps for mathematics, but other than that it was mostly just working on old math contest problems by myself. But what I saw in college was that I had it backwards, I had the specialized training that the other students didn't have, and it was from all of that time that I spent working on problems that I didn't know how to solve. And so it wasn't the work that I'd done in school that had prepared me for college. It was the work I'd done outside school, being challenged with problems that I had never seen before, and that's what I refer to as problem solving is solving problems that you've never seen before. So it was that experience in the first and it happened right away.
Speaker 3:Right away in college I saw that so many students really struggling because in college the way the tests work is it's four or five problems, you've got three hours, the problems don't look anything like the homework. Well, that's what the hardest math contests are like there are five problems, you've got three or four hours, and the problems don't look like anything you've seen before. You have to find a way through them. But in most of middle school and high school pretty much everywhere tests look exactly like the homework, but with the numbers changed. So I'd had this experience of figuring out how to overcome fear and how to apply the basic ideas I knew to solve harder problems.
Speaker 3:And what I found in college is that this skill transferred. So while I had learned it in math, I could take that same skill and apply it in physics, chemistry, economics, philosophy, computer science, engineering. It was all basically the same game Take basic ideas that you understand and combine them in novel ways to solve problems that you haven't seen before. And that's where I started to realize this stuff that I, these skills that I developed in math contests. They're really valuable. Why do students have to wait until math contests to see that? And that's what inspired me to start to bring this to more students.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. So tell us a little bit about what the art of problem solving is, and then, yeah, like just we'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 2:I've got a lot of follow up questions.
Speaker 1:But what is the art of problem solving so?
Speaker 3:I mean our mission is to discover, inspire and train the great problem solvers of the next generation. So there's a lot of pieces in there. I mean discovery is not just for us to discover them but for the students to discover themselves. And that for me happened at math competitions is when I went there and I was like, oh, this is the sort of stuff that most resonates with me and I think a lot of students. They may not have that opportunity in mathematics because what they're introduced and what they're shown all through elementary, middle and high school is. Mathematics is the thing where you're taught a trick, you master the trick, you repeat the trick on the test and then you learn the next trick and that's all math is. And if you can't get the trick perfectly right, then you're not good and that's a terrible thing to teach a child. We'll come back to that later.
Speaker 2:Yes, so many people just think they're bad at math. But yes, keep going.
Speaker 3:Where were we?
Speaker 1:What is the art of problem solving?
Speaker 3:Yeah, art of problem solving. So let's discover the inspire piece is to get students really excited about mathematics and to get them to see the beauty that we see, to get them really inspired to learn more and to work through the hard points and to have that aha moment and get addicted to that aha moment when they really understand something new. And then that last piece train. Of course, that's where we spend a lot of our time is to give the students both the fundamentals but then also the general problem solving skills so that we can empower them to make that same transfer step that I found in college. We work in a lot of different lanes now because students learn in a lot of different ways. So we have now, by the end of this year, we'll have 15 learning centers around the country. We have two online schools.
Speaker 3:We have a series of books all through elementary school, all through high school, high school, middle school and high school are textbooks. You recognize them as textbooks. Elementary school, we have a curriculum called Beast Academy, where the books they're workbooks, like things that people recognize as workbooks, but they're also comic books and comic books. That's our main pedagogical vehicle, aside from the problems in the practice, and we went with comic books for a few reasons. First and foremost, you have children. You know how well lecturing third graders works. Wow, it does not work at all. You need to have a conversation and that's what the comic books allow us to do. The comic books allow us to simulate a conversation. So we create classrooms of the little monsters and the kids love the monsters they send. They send us pictures of themselves dressed up as our monsters for for Halloween.
Speaker 2:And the illustrations are beautiful. My son used Beast Academy and it's like he loves reading graphic novels. So when I showed him that it's like it's like he loves reading graphic novels. So when I showed him that it's like wait, this is my math workbook that I'm using because he does not do well with workbooks and traditional education. We would just sit in the parking lot for hours and he refused to go into the classroom. So I had no other choice. But, ok, I guess you're coming home, and the first thing that we did for math was I discovered Beast Academy and I was like, yes, this is totally in line with the way he loves to learn and the illustrations. Because you're like oh, we have this comic book. No, you guys, it is really awesome Graphic novel and and I learned so much in learned math in a way that I had never discovered. So I just had to interject.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for sharing that. We love to hear that, and I think what you're responding to a bit there is. What we were doing in these comic books is we're creating a space and the kids will emotionally put themselves in that space. And what we're doing inside that space isn't just doing math, it's we are kind of simulating the behaviors we'd like the students to adopt. You know this creative struggle, working together, being okay with being incorrect, sometimes like that's not bad. Learning, trying new things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't work. We get to simulate a lot of these things inside that comic book format. In a way, you can't do that in a workbook. Then we also, of course, knew we were going to go digital someday. So that's another reason we went with the comic books is we would be. We didn't want to go digital just with, you know, black and white worksheets, and we have done that.
Speaker 3:So we've created an online learning systems Beast Academy Online where we have a lot of practice for the students. Of course, we have online versions of these books. We have lots of videos that I've done. I think it's nearly 900 videos now on the Beast Academy platform and, once again, like we're delivering the material in a lot of different avenues because students learn in so many different planes. We also have two different online schools, one of which is video audio video. We started that during the pandemic because we took all of our learning centers and pushed them online. We couldn't use our older online school the online school we started way back in 2003. Our older online school, which is mostly for middle and high school, we teach math in a chat room.
Speaker 3:Basically it's text and images only, which is a fantastic medium for students who are really dialed in, they're really motivated and they don't want to be on screen, because there are some kids who definitely don't want to be on screen. They don't. They don't want to listen to other people, they don't want people to hear them, but they do want to communicate. And the other thing they can do in this room is that they can. They can read much better than they can listen.
Speaker 3:My wife will tell you that I can read much better than they can listen. My wife will tell you that I can read much better than I can listen to. So you know, it's something that was made maybe to fit my learning style, but the kids can also reread, and this is something that students can't do in a typical classroom is they can't re-listen to what the teacher said, they can't scroll back, they can't have a side conversation and then go back and see what was actually going on in class while I was paying attention to something else. They can accomplish that in this other online school, but once again, different learning avenues for different students.
Speaker 1:Yeah, something that you keep saying, that I just keep hearing, is that these kids are really dialed into the signals that adults are sending them about what's important and what success is Right, and sometimes we forget that that's like their primary motivator, right? So like be connected to the adults in their life, to be seen as good, to be accepted and to be seen as valuable to their community. And so what I hear you being really receptive towards is like building learning environments and using lots of different mechanisms that cater to that and that assume that that's what the child's looking for, and I think that's really that's something that really sets the art of problem solving apart from other like learning entities that I've seen. Like you really get that, and that's something that I feel like we, like at Predna, have in common because that's like our primary motor motivator too.
Speaker 1:It's just like how can we create learning environments that assume the child's looking for a relationship and doesn't forget, we're not just trying to teach them tricks and then, like you, what did you say? Like if you, if you learn the trick, you can do you repeat the trick, and if you can't repeat it, just right, then you're not good and it's like, oh I, my son, really, really struggles with math and I feel like even in Prenda he's like surrounded by the message that it doesn't matter if you get that one problem wrong. It's like the creative problem solving and the persisting. But it's like it's still really hard to get kids to believe that unless you're like signaling that in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you need to model it. And that's one thing for parents is you said this really well that the kids are very tuned into what their parents think and what their kid, what their parents value. So if you're sending the signal that they're supposed to get every single question right, oh, they're going to have a hard time with getting one wrong here or there, and like if they're getting every single question right, that just means they're not learning efficiently enough.
Speaker 3:They're not being challenged, so we don't even want them to be in a world where they're getting every single question, right, right?
Speaker 2:Or even what testing cultivates. Take the test once you don't do well, and then you're just moving on. In a traditional classroom and you mentioned multiple times you have I've mastered finding all the different avenues and all the different ways that each unique child learns. And what I keep hearing in your story, and what has translated into the art of problem solving, is the science of intrinsic motivation. You said I found my people that is related personal and autonomy and working on it on your own, and so then you've taken that and translated it into a company to reach thousands of kids, which is so cool. And you did teach for a little while as well, right?
Speaker 2:How'd that go.
Speaker 3:Well, so I dropped out of grad school because I wanted to be a math teacher. So then I taught. I was a high school math teacher for one semester One semester, so solid effort. Yeah, I was 22. I'm 52 now, so you can imagine what I looked like when I was 22. Um, it did not go.
Speaker 2:Like the students.
Speaker 3:So the first day I'm in there, I'm up there at the board. You know, I started in the middle of the year. I'm trying to teach and the kids are like what's the new kid doing? Pretending to be the teacher?
Speaker 2:Oh, no, that's hard, yeah it was.
Speaker 3:But I mean there were some students that I could really reach. So I had, I had an honors class and those students were a lot like me. They were still solidly attached to learning. All of my other classes were not that. There were always in one of those in those classes, one or two or sometimes three students who they had the interest, they had the potential and maybe earlier teachers hadn't seen it and hadn't been able to draw it out. I could reach those kids, but the kids who had already tapped out on learning I was not equipped at 22 to reel them back in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I look what you're doing now, which is so cool. It's like full circle.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean part of it. Part of it started then was I'd also I'd started, I'd co written a pair of math books. I started during my senior year of college and then finished during this year while I was teaching, and those math books were for students who were involved in middle school and high school math competitions and these books were starting to get some traction. In that semester that I was teaching, you know, we were selling, I don't know, 50 or 100 books a month, which was great. It was enough to pay rent and pay for food, so that was good.
Speaker 3:But I was also looking at that saying, oh, I'm reaching a lot more students with those books than I am in this classroom and I'm not. I didn't feel like I was serving the students in the classroom all of them particularly well, but I was serving the students that I was reaching with the books because that was the audience I understood, that was the audience that I could serve. So I left teaching after that and I took a hiatus. I got distracted, I traded bonds for four years and then I took some time off.
Speaker 2:Got distracted.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, it was way easier than teaching, way way easier than teaching and a good bit more lucrative as well, but it wasn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you don't have to discipline bonds, you know.
Speaker 3:You don't have to worry about bonds.
Speaker 3:talking back to you, the discipline goes the other way, I assure you, yes, but it wasn't. It didn't. That wasn't a creative enough, creative enough endeavor for me, so I left. I left bond trading and then eventually actually the way I got started with with the company was I started working with a couple of students. I'd moved to San Diego. I have one student locally in San Diego and another one in Northern California that I would work with on. It was either Yahoo Messenger or AIM, which you know. I mean, y'all are too young to remember those.
Speaker 1:No, I know what that is. We're not too young.
Speaker 2:I do too. Sorry, we're not that much younger than you.
Speaker 3:But then I. So one day I got the two of them online at the same time and I just put them online in a room together and it was magical just seeing them go and I thought, wow, if it's this good with two students, what's it like with 10? What's it like with 100? And that's where I got the idea to build an online school. This is 2002, 2003 is when I got started with this, where I could put up a sign and say we're going to do challenging, interesting mathematics. If you're looking for a greater challenge in school, or if you're just bored in school, come here and we'll work with you. And it turned out there are a lot of kids like me. I didn't know it at the time, but it turns out. There are a whole lot of kids out there who need something more, and it's not just the kids who are getting hundreds on all their tests. You know. There are plenty of students out there for whom math is not working for them. But they have. They have the aptitude, but what we're doing with them in elementary school isn't isn't working. So I had a.
Speaker 3:Just a couple of days ago, we we opened up one of our academies in Mountain View up in Northern California and we host an event there and I stand in a room, you know, meet with families, take pictures, sign books, that sort of thing. And early on a mother and her daughter came in and described to me in tears. Both of them described to me their experience. I'm starting to tear up just relating this. But their experience.
Speaker 3:Like she was in third grade, she was sometimes even withheld from her classroom. She was struggling with math so much she was one of the weakest students in the class. And now I'm meeting her. She's entering seventh grade, she's the top student in her class, she's entering algebra and the difference between those two things was Beast Academy. They started working through our Beast Academy curriculum and then went through our pre-algebra and that, I want to say it rescued her. Like the experience she was having with math. She was never going to have a good relationship with mathematics. And here she is, you know, three, four years later, describing herself as like I'm going to do something good relationship with mathematics. And here she is, you know, three, four years later, describing herself as like I'm going to do something with math in my life. We have the reputation of we're, for the quote, smart kids and I think the challenge here is I don't think the world is very good at identifying those kids.
Speaker 2:Totally, oh, a hundred percent. Because a lot of those kids, if they don't have the motivation to do it, then they see, like so many gifted kids just don't have the, they don't have the interest. Therefore they don't have the motivation. But if you can capture them in a way that is in line with the way they get excited about learning and truly can feel empowered. Because, you know my son, we had tried not to throw a mathnas, because, you know my son, we had tried not to throw a mathnasium under the bus or anything, but we had tried mathnasium and it was just all these worksheets and it was like how many worksheets you want to do? And it was all these reward systems. It's like the more worksheets you do, the more rewards you get. So my son no-transcript, like literally would not get out of the car to go back, like he.
Speaker 2:So those extrinsic motivation or motivators only lasted a very short amount of time where something like beast Academy, it's fun, it's engaging, it's you know, looking at math and even your videos, your videos, or you're teaching math, I was excited about math and I was one of those students that felt like, or one of those people that I would say I'm bad at math. I would memorize all the formulas. I would get A's on tests. I could not retain any of the information I learned or even tell you what I was doing, but I was just really good at memorizing formulas and being able to spit it out. So, watching your videos, I'm like, oh, that's what we're doing, like it makes so much more sense now. So I think that's a really big key. And so what would you like? What would you say is the main challenge in traditional math education and the way teachers are taught how to teach it in a traditional classroom?
Speaker 3:I mean, you might have just hit the nail on the head, for the main challenge is the way teachers are taught. It has nothing to do with how to teach it in a classroom. Teachers a lot of teachers are going to come in and teach math the way they were taught it. So this problem just keeps feeding itself until there's an intervention and we change teachers' relationships to mathematics, and I think that is one of the big challenges. So you look at elementary school and that's where the problem really sets in. Again, my mom was a first grade teacher. Love first grade teachers. They love children. They love reading and writing. Math maybe not so much, and I think that's one of the challenges we have is in elementary school.
Speaker 3:A lot of our elementary school teachers are there to teach reading and writing, and they're there because they love children and they have to teach math and to get them to change their relationship with mathematics is a challenge because for a lot of them, math was the hard part of school and they didn't have a great relationship or a great that right there.
Speaker 1:It's like we're all coming up through the same, like trick based approach to math. We don't really get it. We don't see the beauty and the wonder in math. We don't get it like the relationship, like how math makes my desk stand up, or like how math was used in the real world, like you know. And then you something, um, a quote that I like I can't think of. Who said it right now? Um, but you cannot lead a child to a place you have not been.
Speaker 1:And if you can, if you do not love, like I can very easily transfer my love of children's literature, for example, to my kids, because another great quote this is Gordon Neufeld a child's heart finds something to attach to and becomes like it. So if I'm building this relationship and creating this relationship of warmth and compassion and mentorship, and the kids are like, this is my person, what does my person think is important? It goes back to those signals, right, and the person giving the signal is like lukewarm on math, then they're going to be like, oh, they're going to take that, they're actually going to dial it up a notch, Like every time it transfers, it gets dialed up. So they're like oh yeah, math is not useful.
Speaker 1:Math is boring, like all of those stories, the narratives, the limiting beliefs around math get turned up and then we have to overcome them. We overcome them with worksheets and bribes. We don't try to overcome them with art and beauty and like wonder of the world. Right, because we don't know how to do that, because I can't describe that, because I have internalized it myself. So there's no way that we can take the hundreds of thousands of teachers in the United States and have them transfer like love and wonder and like motivation for math, because they don't have it. So it absolutely has to start, like at the fount, the head of the river, right Before we all like go fill our water bottles up like the water's muddied. We got to fix that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that's right and I think part of the way you do it.
Speaker 3:You just I mean Adrian's described it a little bit right here, and we hear this from a lot of parents who use our materials and some teachers.
Speaker 3:This is the way I wish I had been taught math.
Speaker 3:When the parents or the teachers are learning the math alongside the child going through Beast Academy or relearning the math or learning a different perspective on the mathematics, that's where the relationship changes.
Speaker 3:So we have several schools now that are implementing Beast Academy as a full curriculum, and in one of these schools I was visiting recently there's a teacher there who she described herself as pretty severely math phobic before starting to teach Beast Academy, and she's had such a good experience over the last two years teaching math with Beast Academy that when the math specialist position opened up in her school, she switched into that lane so she could teach math all the time, which is something that she didn't imagine she'd ever do. You know, this is 20 odd years experience teacher, and every year is this like I'm going to teach math because I have to, but I'd really rather do something else too. I want to teach math all the time because now I understand it and now I enjoy it. And that that, I think, is the way you start to change these relationships, is get good materials in the hands of the teachers and some of them will gradually, some of them will convert.
Speaker 1:Totally so.
Speaker 3:I want to know if teachers will be better, if we can teach more of the kids better.
Speaker 1:Right, right, right, yeah, yes, totally. So walk me through. Like you get a student in one of your schools, or maybe someone a Beast Academy participant, and they're just like not vibing with math. They maybe have some of those limiting beliefs Like how do you guys go about getting kids excited to learn math?
Speaker 3:to learn math. Yeah, there are a few. I mean, there are a few different things, a few different strategies. One can try One is get around. Get them around other kids who are excited about math. That can help. But you have first you have to figure out where their level is. And sometimes that's tough, because sometimes you've got a, you've got a parent with a seventh grader and they're like my student should be learning algebra and you're like, no, your student should maybe do Beast Academy 4 and Beast Academy 5. They'll go through it pretty quick. A lot of it will be review, but they'll be rebuilding their foundations and then they'll be able to go faster later. So, finding the right level, being willing to maybe place down a level, maybe even two levels.
Speaker 1:That's an amazing moment where you, as a parent, right there, like this is a signaling moment. It's like, and is this a problem? And am I disappointed? Are we frustrated with this not being where we're supposed to be? Or is this a moment where that parent can sit in that spot and be like awesome, I'm so excited that you're going to get what you need. And like I love you and I'm just as warm and excited with you as if you had. Like we're on level right. Like that is a big, powerful moment that we sit in as parents and it's hard as parents to hear that your kids are behind.
Speaker 1:We see this at Prenda all of the time, because we do adaptive diagnostic testing and placement and make sure that kids we don't we literally don't care how old you are, like we only care what you need to know next and we want to match you with that as soon as possible, so that your learning minutes we call it their learning frontier. You know all of your learning minutes can be spent at your learning frontier, because that's when your learning is the most effective and efficient and that's when you experience the most amount of competence and that's where we retrain these limiting beliefs. And then we have time, because that learning is so much more efficient and effective. We can go outside and play right. We don't need this big, big, long, long sit in your seat eight hour school days, cause it's like if we can get where you're going make some progress, like go play baseball, it's great, go play basketball.
Speaker 2:Go play basketball. I think labeling them with levels too, and numbers versus grades I think is so helpful as well, cause we've done a lot of different math curriculums and right start is one of them too. It's like letters instead of grades, cause my son he's twice exceptional and can be, you know, have some rigid thinking and we've been working on his cognitive flexibility. He'll say well, I'm supposed to be in this grade and he tests many grade levels ahead typically, but there are always holes, right. So I'm like well, you're on level G, it's not even you're on 4A or 4B. So I think that helps to undo some of the shoulds and where we should be and look at that individual, unique child and place them where they are to help that. Because if they're working at a level that they're not ready for, or if it's too like they're way more advanced, like what they're thinking, then how are you going to empower that child?
Speaker 3:When we originally released Beast Academy, the cover was grade one, grade two, grade three, grade four. And then we had some teachers come back to us and said you know, if you change that grade to level, I'll be able to use this with a lot more students.
Speaker 2:Yeah, powerful. What are the other exciting ways that you get kids excited about learning?
Speaker 3:To show them surprising things.
Speaker 3:Once you, once you start to get them to engage with any sorts of questions like there are a lot of things in math that are really, really surprising, and that if you can get kids to see some of those and start to get curious about why some of those things are true, or just the fact that they know them and their parents don't, that's kind of fun as well.
Speaker 3:So that's another one Answering the why question being able to explain to them why these things are the way they are. There are kids out there who will get very frustrated with not knowing why. They may not communicate that, they may not enunciate that, but they will be shutting down because they're just doing this routine but they don't understand why it works. Okay, I stack the numbers up, I add the ones in this column and then I take the extra number and I put it here and I like that's not terribly motivating, but when you get them to really understand the why, why these tools work the way they do, that can really turn it on. Another, of course, is just being excited about it yourself. It's not now we have to do math. It's now we get to do math.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just as I say, you bring so much energy in your videos, which I think is a really key component to get kids excited, because if you're excited and you're like look how this works, like it's so fun, because then you see that same energy. Even though it's a screen and you're not here in my living room, it still comes through the screen and it's really exciting.
Speaker 1:So follow up question to this what do you mean when you say teach math through problem solving? Like, how is it different? How, like we kind of painted the picture of the trick base, like, how is this different? What does the approach look like?
Speaker 3:The approach looks different because we lead with problems. We ask the students questions. So in a lot of our classes or all of our classes, but a lot of the time the teacher doesn't start by telling the students stuff. The teacher starts by asking questions and the students answer. The students work through problems. The teacher should be asking questions more than giving answers. At the end, the teacher comes back through and summarizes Okay, this is what we learned and this is.
Speaker 3:These are the main lessons we're going to draw from it, but the goal there is to get the students to make a lot of leaps. They won't make every single one, and they might need to be led pretty close to the water before they can drink, but the ones that they discover themselves. Then it becomes their math instead of math that's been handed to them. It also gets them. It gives them some practice in the actual experience of learning and discovering new things. Gives them some practice in the actual experience of learning and discovering new things, and that, I think, is the critical thing we need to teach these students, because that's the human thing that we still get to do, when AI is doing everything else Regurgitating old stuff. Computers are way, way better at it than humans will ever be. So if we set students up with that, we're setting them up to compete with computers, which is guaranteed to set them up for failure. We need to train them for human things, but we need to get practice, otherwise they're going to be formula memorizers.
Speaker 3:I was as well, so that was the way I approached mathematics all the way until I got to the highest level of competitions. I could memorize my way through a lot of the levels of competitions, but there was a level, at the Olympiad level, where you had to write proofs for things. It took me two years to be able to solve any of the problems't solve a single problem for two years that I did this, and that's when I had to go back and relearn most of my mathematics from a lens of not what is true, but why is it true. And it was that shift.
Speaker 2:I'm curious Do you think it's important that kids are memorizing math facts and multiplication, because you're talking about AI and tools and calculators and things like that, and so I'm just curious what your thoughts are they?
Speaker 3:need to know some math facts. They need to know some. In my perfect world, a student doesn't get a calculator until they can prove the quadratic formula. It is not my perfect world anymore, and that's not because we want this. Math is a great tool to learn how to solve new problems. That's its power. When I'm teaching math, I'm not teaching math. When I'm teaching math, I'm teaching everything, and that's the goal. The goal is not for them to learn the mathematics. The goal is for them to learn how to learn, and when you give them a calculator, you're taking away that opportunity. You're taking away that opportunity. They'll have their calculator to punch the numbers in and they'll get the answer. What they're learning is the algorithm of the things to punch to get the answer, and by the time they're actually doing problem solving, the problems are really, really hard. We could start with easier problems and take away the calculator, and they're going to have to reason their way through.
Speaker 3:Now you talked about memorizing math facts. Just about the only thing that's worth memorizing is a multiplication table, and that's not that many math facts we don't want them memorizing. 5 plus 7 is 12. They should develop a number sense to do that. But 5 times 7,. At some point we don't want them going okay, five, seven, seven and seven is 14, 21. Like, yes, get them through the multiplication table. They can move on to other things if they haven't mastered the multiplication table, but it's there's. There's not that many that they actually have to learn. It's like I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you're saying my 14 year old. He still does not have his multiplication facts memorized. And I do have, uh, some kind of a book. It's like memory. It's helping you memorize through story and there's illustrations. I can't remember what it's called. It's behind me in this cabinet and so I'm like, okay, when he gets home today it's like Vaughn, you do have to know.
Speaker 2:Richard said we need to memorize those multiplication facts. He could probably go up to five, but it is something that he's like I don't even need to use it. But I think about how many times I use multiplication, just when I'm grocery shopping, just when I'm really happy that I had drill and kill and I learned those facts at least, because I do use it day to day. I don't want to have to keep relying on my phone. You said it's really important that they see the why, and so I think that's what we really need to lead with with. A lot of these kids are so used to having phones now and computers and it's like, okay, well, we tell you why you need to use this and it's going to help you.
Speaker 3:then maybe they'll be more willing to do so yeah, and you want them to have a basic number sense, and so you need that sort of basic addition and basic multiplication to have that number sense, because so many things you'll see in the news I mean the news is almost entirely innumerate. So when they're telling you something, sometimes you can just very quickly be like, oh, that's obviously wrong, because if you multiply those two numbers, you're telling me that you know, whatever you're explaining here is going to cost $4 trillion. That's obviously not true. So, uh, let's not believe anything else we're talking about here.
Speaker 2:So these are yeah, well, in my middle son, he had his multiplication facts memorized before he was three, so it's like their brains work so, and they're both twice exceptional, but they just cause. My middle son is the one that has done Beast Academy, and he his number sense is he just calculates stuff. He has like a human calculator, and so it's really cool, though, to see how they learn and then finding different ways that make them want to have a, you know, or cultivates that positive relationship with math. Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit. What are some common causes of math anxiety you've observed? We talked about this a little bit and you said we were going to come back to it, so I would love to dive into that, and can you also, you know, share some techniques to help students overcome their fear of math?
Speaker 3:It's. It's almost entirely due to bad experiences, and a lot of the root of the bad experiences is when students are put in an environment where getting answers incorrect means failure, and I think that's you know, for parents of very young children is to try to just avoid ever teaching them that, because it's not natural for kids to believe this. You know, you've had little children, when they're four, like everything is hard, they can't do anything, but they want to do everything. They see you doing amazing things chopping vegetables, riding a bicycle and they want to do that too.
Speaker 3:They can't do it, though, because, or they're going to try anyway, um, they're not going to be able to do it because they're still four. They're going to cry and cry and cry and go running and screaming and hollering because, yeah, they are four, but then they're going to do something really amazing, because they're four and they haven't learned yet how to quit forever. They're going to come back, they're going to keep trying. We train this out of kids and so, yes, they're kids who are perfectionists and to some extent, sometimes that's going to be an inherent behavior, but it's also somewhat a learned behavior. If they're told that that is the expectation, particularly in a math class to be perfect, they'll internalize that, and then, when they start missing things, then it becomes very anxious and they don't have this relationship with writing. Because writing, when you're first learning, it's obvious that it's hard. It might actually be hard to write, but it's also. There's not a clear right and a wrong In math. Three plus seven, there's a right and a wrong here, but if the student answer is nine, it's not and you're wrong, it's well, let's try that one again. And this is part of why, in most of our homework, students aren't marked, you know, if they get it wrong the first time, they get another shot at it. It's not like you get the big red mark, you don't get another shot at it. We want kids to try again, try again and be okay with missing problems from time to time. A lot of our assignments you don't have to get every single one right to be passing. A lot of elementary school learning systems. They'll have five problems and if you miss that fifth problem, well, you've got to do five problems again. And if you miss the fifth problem on the next time around you've got to do five problems again and it's torture for the kids. So I think that is a big part of avoiding the anxiety coming up in the first place.
Speaker 3:Now, once a child has it, then you have extra work to do as a teacher, as a parent, to get them over it and you have to model that behavior. You have to be. You know you sometimes do some things that are wrong and being like oh, I got, I did that, let's just try this again, not freak out, not make a big deal. Oh, I did it wrong, no, okay, let's just. Let's just do this again Erase, erase, erase, start over again. So I think that's that's a really big part, a really big part of it.
Speaker 3:Another piece there is get them to a successful point and celebrate the success when they get there, like overcoming failure feels so good, overcoming a challenge feels so good, and getting them to shift from thinking of it as overcoming failure to overcoming a challenge. Well, now you've won, because then they're going to want to do it again and again, and again and they're going to believe they can. But it's going to take time for kids who have really internalized this. So when kids come into our curriculum there's a learning period where students have to overcome this fear, particularly kids who have always gotten hundreds on everything. And it's new For students for whom they already have a shaky relationship with math. They're already used to having some struggle.
Speaker 3:But we've seen this all the time with our materials. We had our introduction algebra book out before our pre-algebra book. And when the intro algebra book was out and no pre-algebra in the homeschool community, when the intro algebra book was out and no pre-algebra in the homeschool community, the intro algebra book had this reputation of being so hard. And then we released the pre-algebra book and the pre-algebra book had this reputation of being so hard, but the algebra book that was kind of easy. And you see what happens there. Right, they adjust. They adjust their expectations, they understand what's expected of them and how to approach the material and how to react when not getting everything right.
Speaker 2:Something I really had to work on was not just modeling, but how I talked about my relationship with math, especially because the child I was attempting to homeschool could really school me in math and, like I said, he could do all the calculations. I'm like, okay, hold on, I'm like counting it in my head and he's like it's this number, you know, and um or was. He loves problem solving and loves riddles and and figuring those kinds of things out. So I had to really work on how I talked about how I felt about math, instead of saying things that were like I'm really bad at it or math is not my thing, and because then they start even though he loved it, like I started to see that he started to have that same mindset about math too. I'm like, wait, no, you love it, like this is your thing, but he was listening to me talk about it in such negative ways for so long. So I think that's really important that we pay attention to that Funny story.
Speaker 1:The other day I am in a position at Prender right now. That really challenges me. I'm at my learning frontier. It's not something that I'm like late technically qualified to do, I'd say, but so I'm like late technically qualified to do, I'd say, but so I'm learning a ton Right. And I had to like calculate some sort of like rate of.
Speaker 1:I just was doing math and I literally did not know. I could feel my brain. I was asking my brain to solve the problem and my brain was like I'm coming up short here, sis, like just like I had nothing for you, like, do you want me to do something? It was like feeding me, like do you want this phonogram or this literacy principle? It's like just blank zone for math. And so I ran out and my husband was, luckily, good at math and good at spelling. Those are my, my, um, the things that I have a fixed mindset around my competencies. We'll say so. I ran out and my kids I have an 11 year old and nine year old boys who are in Prenda and we talk about this stuff all the time. I'm working so hard as a parent and their guides are working so hard to give them this like this framing, that it is okay to make mistakes and that my boys are really close together. So there's a little bit of competition and the younger one is a little bit like he will try a thousand times. He was literally I was like do you want to be on this like fancy? Literally I was like do you want to be on this like fancy, like hard club volleyball team the other day. And he was like I do not care if I am the worst person, I know that I will get better if I play with those kids. And I was like okay, great, we'll sign you up. And then the other boy, my oldest boy, was like doesn't sound fun to me. And I'm like okay, cause he, his personality is just a little bit more like I don't want to be bad, I don't want to, I'm the older brother, I'm already supposed to be like, better, like, so he you know that competition is is tricky for him.
Speaker 1:So I ran out. I was just trying to solve this math problem. I ran out and I was like can you just tell my husband, can you just come watch me do this math? Like this is a very high stakes math problem. This isn't a practice, right? It's like if I get this wrong, our company will do like it will not be good for our company. So like, come watch me do my math.
Speaker 1:And I was like talking through my husband, like we were just having a conversation about math and my boys are watching me in the real world do math at a high like a high risk, you know. It's like I need to get this right. But then I'm like you know, using my resources and getting double checked and like talking about it. And and my son was like I think that that problem, like a very similar problem, was in my math last year. And I'm like, yes, I'm going to ignore that. That makes me feel very sad personally, but I'm going to celebrate you. I'm like, yes, you are, you can do. Like the math you're learning is very relatable to the real world and we really need to have these skills. And and his, his math attitude has been a little bit different since he saw that, but it was, it was a. It took a lot of vulnerability for me, like I wasn't, you know, and that it's hard to lead that way as a parent. It it is.
Speaker 3:It's really hard being willing to ask for help. Like so many students, it's hard for them to ask for help, particularly students who have coasted and are hitting choppy waters for the first time. So the longer a student goes before needing to ask for help, harder it's going to be. So showing them your vulnerability in being willing to ask.
Speaker 1:Yeah, any other tips you can add to that about, like building a growth mindset around math that you've seen?
Speaker 3:I mean, part of it is just living it. Living it yourself is like let's go learn how to do the thing. So, whether it could be anything, you know any challenge you're encountering in the house where you've got to figure out how to do something and you don't know how to do it. Well, let's go get on the internet and look for a video that teaches us how to do this, so to show that, oh, we can actually learn how to do new things.
Speaker 1:The other day my husband was fixing our minivan doors and we have a very common minivan and he was like Googling it and you know, like the boys are like kind of helping, like shadowing him, and he got on YouTube and Googled that and was watching this video and it ended up it was my older brother in real life that had made this video, put it on YouTube and my husband had found it and he was like, come here, those are your brother's hands, isn't that your brother's voice?
Speaker 1:And I'm like, yeah, that is my brother's hands. How does he know your brother's hands? His face was not in the shot. I was like, can't you, isn't that his watch? So then my boys were able to see like I come from a family of learners, like we are DIY, figure it out people and when we know something we can help. And so it really is about setting that example as a parent, as an educator, building this new culture around, like the idea that it's okay to not know and that you can get help. And I think that the more that we lean into that, like, the healthier this next generation is going to feel around problem solving and to really attack life as if it's just one big problem, like it might not have to do with math, like you've said several times, like it's everything right, it's the and I love that you call your organization the art of problem solving. It's not like let's teach math tricks, right, it's the opposite of that which is so powerful.
Speaker 2:So we talked about beast academy a lot. You have a high school program too. You have like the online school, but do you have like workbooks and like a curricula or curriculum specifically for high schoolers?
Speaker 3:we've talked a lot about beast academy. That's beastacademycom. That's our elementary school. That's where you'll find the books, you'll find the learning system then for middle school and high school. That's actually where we started was middle school and high school. That's actually where we started was middle school and high school. We started with contests. Then we expanded to a full curriculum for students who have high interest and high potential in mathematics. So we have a full strand of textbooks. So this is pre-algebra, algebra, geometry. We also have explorations in areas that you typically don't see in school, like counting and probability. So these are the beginning steps of discrete math, and discrete math is the mathematics that's kind of the fundamentals of computer science. So it's gotten a lot more important than you know your standard kind of pre-calculus calculus. So we've got all that in textbooks. We also have the two online schools. One of the online schools goes through all that curriculum that I just discussed. It also has classes now in physics we're building out a computer science curriculum and then in our learning centers we also have a language arts curriculum that goes grade two up to 12. That's in all of our physical learning centers and in our newer online school that we started.
Speaker 3:So the flagship website is artofproblemsolvingcom aopscom either one of them point to the same place but also as a large online community. So we have you know. On any given day, there are thousands and thousands of students from all over the world on the community, mostly talking about math, sometimes talking about video games, um, but they're coming together. It's often. It's often honestly. For a lot of our kids, it's their first experience of the internet. It's the thing their parents will let them do when they're 10 or 11. And what they find is they find friends, they find a community, so that when they start later going to this program or that program, they'll often have friends already there. So that's the AOPopscom.
Speaker 2:Then our learning centers are, uh, aopsacademyorg, aops, academy all one word, thereorg, and, like I said, we have 15 around the country and that's are thosea supplement to regular school or are they kind of like I feel like mathnasium doesn't open until three because they're more like for kids struggling in school and then we use that even as a homeschool family? Or are they open during the day? What is that? They're?
Speaker 3:open. They're mostly they're after school and summers, because most of our students are also in school, though we do have a lot of homeschoolers as well in those classes. There are places where we're where we've gotten large enough that we started to experiment with some homeschool times, but generally we find that that the they end up going to the evening or early evening classes, because some of them start as early as 3 or 3.30.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Okay, so this has been such a great conversation. I'm so excited I got to meet you.
Speaker 1:I want to go do some math now.
Speaker 2:I know I'm like okay, let's learn, let's challenge ourselves. We can do it, katie, learning over comfort. So this is a question we ask all of our guests is who is someone who has kindled your love of learning, curiosity, motivation or passion? Because I'm hearing all of those things as we talk to you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I'd say that the teacher that enabled it most was Gwen Snoddy that I mentioned before was our math team coach for Austin High School and she, like I said, she drove us almost every weekend. We went somewhere in Alabama to participate in some sort of event, but the fostering interest was mainly my parents and that, like I said, my mom, first grade teacher. She was 21.
Speaker 3:Maybe she was 22 when she had me, so she had just finished school, so she's going to practice all of her first grade teacher wiles on me from when I was very young and all through my childhood. Like they would say no to candy, they would say no to toys sometimes, but they never said no to a book, and that, I think, was a big part of my childhood, was reading, and so that's another thing. People ask me how to? What should I be doing with my seven-year-old to get them to be great at math? I'm like feed them books, give them books, because that's where they're going to. They're going to learn about developing new minds. I still spend a lot more time reading than I do, uh, than I do solving math problems, so that's uh that's.
Speaker 3:That's the kind of culture you're trying to build in your homes as well. I can see all the books in your background.
Speaker 1:I love yeah, I love just imagining that your mom and that that teacher that you had, like sure it wasn't convenient all of the time, but I have and they have no idea like the ripple effects of like getting the kids in the car and drive, like you know, just doing all the things that we do as parents, like your decisions to step into a child's life. As a kindler, someone who knows how to, how to do that and how to change a life trajectory there, like you just can never know the ripple effects. So you're now affecting thousands and thousands of families and kids and even like that seems like a big work, but the ripple effects of your work will be ongoing. So thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today and for coming on the Kindle podcast.
Speaker 3:All right. Well, thank you as well.
Speaker 2:All right, we'll talk later. Thank you, all right. Well, thank you as well. All right, we'll talk later. Thank you, that's it for today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the kindled podcast and you're as excited about math as katie and I. We are going to go fail we are at math and get better so that we can learn things. And I love the fact, katie, that you said you talked to your brain. That is just so cool. It's a little secretary up there, so let's go talk to our brains about math and tell them that they can do it. So if this episode was helpful to you, please like, subscribe and follow us at Prenda Learn. Katie and I have been creating some really fun content that's for parents and educators and it's really packed with value. If you have a question you'd like us to address, please leave a comment or email us at podcast. At prendacom, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter the Sunday spark.
Speaker 1:The Kindle podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy for you to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the things we talk about here on the Kindle podcast. If you want to learn more about guiding a friend of micro school, go to Thanks for listening and remember to keep kindling.
