Math is a skill, not a subject.
And like any other skill it must be practiced.
How our method works
We teach the mental math method, not every method.
There are many ways to multiply 35 × 12. There’s one students should reach for: 35 × 10 is 350, 35 × 2 is 70, so 420. Classrooms often teach a method that needs pen and paper. We teach with a focus on advancing mental math abilities, along with why it works, so students understand the logic and can apply reason rather than following a procedure.
We don’t stop at understanding.
A classroom teaches the concept, checks that most of the room can follow it, and moves on. That isn’t a failure of teaching — it’s what thirty children at various levels and a fixed calendar require. But understanding a method and having it committed to memory are different things, and only one of them helps students accelerate. We practice until it’s automatic.
We keep confidence high.
A combined twenty years of experience tutoring produced one rule we build every session around: a child should be getting roughly four out of five problems right. Above that and they’re bored. Below it and they lose hope and stop trying. Our tech is built so that difficulty adjusts as your child works, instead of sitting at whatever level the worksheet was printed at.
We come back to it. Then come back again.
New topics get introduced while old ones keep resurfacing, mixed in among current work, throughout every session. It’s the least intuitive part of our method and the one that does the most work. A topic your child nailed in October is worthless if it’s gone by February.
Spaced practice beats massed practice by about half a standard deviation, and the advantage grows the longer you wait. Mawson & Kang, 2025 · read the study
This is not a boot camp.
We work at the pace of each individual student, with speed folded in as an option once they’re ready. Accuracy is first, always. Speed only once it’s earned, and only ever framed as beating your own last time.
Getting started
The placement test
Your child works through a short adaptive test online, starting at their grade level and moving up until the problems stop being easy. It takes about fifteen minutes, and no account is needed to begin.
Your learning plan
You get a written plan: where your child sits on the map strand by strand, what we’d work on for the next eight weeks, and the stretch goal past that. It is yours to keep either way.
Matched with a tutor
We hand match based on level, schedule, and other preferences. If anything doesn’t feel right, let us know and we’ll change it. We work closely with every family.
Twice a week
Live video, a shared whiteboard, and problems your tutor shares in real time. After each session they file a structured report, your progress view updates, and the lesson plan for the following session is created.
What we recommend
| Grade | Session length | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-K – 1st | 30 minutes | Sustained attention is still developing quickly at this age |
| 2nd – 4th | 45 minutes | 60 minutes available upon request |
| 5th – 8th | 60 minutes | Attention has largely levelled off |
Sessions twice a week, on a laptop or iPad. From 2nd grade up, an iPad with an Apple Pencil or a drawing tablet makes a real difference to how easily your child can work on the shared whiteboard alongside their tutor. We’ll help you get set up.
FAQs
My child isn’t struggling. Is this for us?
That’s exactly who this is for. If they’re bored, finishing early, or asking for harder problems, they’re our student.
What if my child is behind rather than ahead?
All students are welcome, and we’d love to connect. The same system works — the placement test assesses your child’s level and the plan starts there. What we’ll be honest about is that our sequence is built to move quickly and our tutors are trained for acceleration. If what your child needs is targeted work on a specific difficulty, we’ll tell you if we’re not the best fit at this time.
A student is teaching my child?
Yes, deliberately. Our tutors are high school and college students selected for math far beyond what they teach, trained by us before their first session, and certified level by level. They work from lessons we wrote, so they’re never improvising. In the most recent meta-analysis of cross-age tutoring, student tutors produced larger gains for the children they taught than adult tutors did. See the study.
How do you keep sessions safe?
Children never get their own login — sessions run through your account. We record the audio and the whiteboard work from every session, which is what lets us build accurate progress reports and lesson plans, and it’s available to you on request. We don’t record video. Tutors have no contact with your family outside the platform. You’re welcome to sit in on any session, and for children under about ten we ask that a parent be home and within earshot.
How is AI used?
It reads the record of each session and turns it into the next lesson plan, adjusts problem difficulty as your child works, and drafts the progress report from what happened. Your child never interacts with it — they work with their tutor. Every problem and explanation in the system was reviewed by us, not generated on the fly.
Can we do once a week?
You can. We’ll be straight with you that it’s slower — most students forget enough between sessions that you spend the first stretch of each one recovering ground. Most families who start there move to twice.
Do you follow our school’s curriculum?
No, and that’s the point. We follow our own sequence, which covers every state standard so nothing gets skipped, but doesn’t wait for your child’s classroom.
What do we need at home?
A laptop or iPad, and somewhere quiet to focus. From second grade up we recommend a stylus — an Apple Pencil, or an inexpensive drawing tablet that plugs into a laptop. Your child should have the ability to easily write the problems out.
Is there a contract?
No. Monthly, cancel with two weeks’ notice.