I wanted to interview people trying to learn or teach algebra to see what their pain points are, but I didn’t know anyone personally!
My first idea was to take out a Google Ad and offer a $20 gift certificate to Amazon for 20min of your time.
I used their default “Smart” targeting with a bunch of algebra learning keywords, and set the budget to $13/day.
It ran for a week.
Cost me $90.10…
Made 39,700 impressions…
Drove 111 clicks to my landing page…
Where I collected 2 emails…
Which generated 0 leads.
Terrible.
It was almost my birthday, and I jokingly told my fiancee that I’d love to interview some algebra teachers as a present. She reached out to her friends and hooked me up with a bunch of contacts. So much better.
Here’s what I learned:
These interviews took place after the school shutdowns. I chatted with 4 Minnesota public school teachers. The state of MN has a set of math standards that all kids get tested on (MCA). Other states have different standards, unless they opt-in to Common Core.
Most difficult algebra concept:
Changing the problem context. Moving from word problem to equation to graph.
Pain points:
State standards have changed a lot in the past 20 years, so they have to keep adapting their lesson plans.
Missing the face-to-face communication and building relationships with students.
Accountability and feedback - much easier in the classroom. Hard to show work electronically.
Snowball effect, once a student gets behind it becomes harder to keep up. Math builds on itself.
Multiple choice questions are lame.
Teaching approaches:
Make videos that students can watch whenever.
Students regularly check in through quizzes (Schoology / Canvas).
Differentiation - trying different approaches on a student to see what sticks. Visual / manipulatives / etc.
Trying to come up with real world examples - volume of rolled up paper, moving cough through a window…
Each student gets a laptop or tablet through the school.
Observations:
Self-motivated students are thriving right now. They’re blowing through their work and asking pointed questions that get to the cause of why something works.
Regular kids are falling behind. Some are disappearing. They just want a quick way to do the work so they can move on with their lives.
Kids can’t do abstract reasoning until 12/13 years old, so sometimes a student is having difficulty because they’re brain hasn’t developed yet.
High correlations with autistic students and anxiety. They’re not held to lower state standards, but each have an Individual Education Plan which states their educational goals.
My conclusions:
Figure out a way to have students show teachers they’ve been practicing certain algebra topics, and/or allow teachers to give an assignment like “Do X random problems on topic Y”.
Can I do anything with changing problem context? I don’t have any sort of graphing or word problem interfaces yet…
Having a network of people is super valuable.
Taking out an ad on the internet to interview potential users is not as trivial as I thought it’d be… fantasy ruined.