David Ganzhorn

@CorwinTheGrey @jliemandt Same, my kid is joining the pilot next week. Very exciting!

@jliemandt "I'll show you selection effects."!! love it. My own minions are about to join the pilot-- absolutely stoked.

Critics: "The Alpha School model is all selection effects." Alpha's gifted school: "I'll show you selection effects." At GT School, we select for cognitive ability, not tuition. And we're beating Alpha students. Hundreds of Texas homeschoolers are applying for an ESA voucher to access this school for free. ⏳ 2 days left to sign up.👇

A million words is a million words. I especially like dual reading (listening with audible+kindle) for my kid's fiction reading. He gets to hear pronunciations for all the new words, but also fiction audiobooks are more consistently rich in delivery compared to nonfiction. He also seems to read longer and with more absorption when dual reading.

Some parents worry because their kid only reads fantasy novels. I don't. Even if they're reading one author's 10-volume series, they're developing focus and fluency. My strategy isn't to chide them into "real" reading. It's to interest them in something adjacent. If they love medieval fantasy, maybe they'd enjoy actual medieval historical fiction.

@nateliason Net negative tuition.

Agreed. There’s no reason high schoolers can’t make 1m by graduation. The main barriers are: 1. Time (school wasting it) 2. Access to good mentors 3. The right structure to get them started

@levelsio This reminds me of competitive video game communities. Not in the top 1% / master league? Garbage, low skill, zero game knowledge.

I'm always shocked by when you post your lifts here, or even just a photo of yourself, you instantly get hate from people that you lift low weights or you're not a giant bodybuilder (most who aren't natural btw) You know 75% of people are overweight and can't lift anything heavy at all? Just being fit and being able to lift more than your bodyweight, you're probably already top 5% of society!

The specific screen activity greatly matters for addictiveness. Someone can doom scroll tiktok in a half second and zero effort, but writing a page of math homework to get to yet another page of math homework is vastly less addicting. If my kid is alert, actively part of the activity, and naturally limiting their use of a particular screen activity, I personally don't worry. The one sort of addictive and relatively easy screen activity I don't mind is reading books. I noticed my kid seems mentally elevated after reading from either a book or screen, vs mentally drained from the worst screen activities.

@jliemandt @HowardHughesHQ @DavidOReillyHH How do you avoid having the kids become addicted to technology? I limit screen time as much as possible, but clearly there is a tradeoff that they are not accelerating learning through next gen digital/learning platforms.

Huge thank you to @HowardHughesHQ, @DavidOReillyHH, and Jim Carman. Alpha School’s #1 growth constraint isn’t demand. It’s real estate. To scale the best education, we need partners who aren’t just leasing space - they’re committed to bringing world-class schools to their communities. Howard Hughes gets it. Thrilled to bring Alpha School to The Woodlands in Fall 2026.

This could be helpful for ensuring a student has the prerequisite world knowledge for some Math Academy word problems. My kid's math knowledge exceeds his world knowledge, so I often get questions like "What's a bank deposit?" in the middle of him doing word problems. Having both knowledge graphs could allow for richer and more relevant examples and problems.

people sometimes assume such graphs can only be built in STEM subjects. but that's just not true. we've designed Flying Colors such that every novel concept is taught after its pre-requisites.

@JeffreyBiles The progress bars on the knowledge graph are delightful, especially seeing them fill after a lesson. This and the chapter level organization / color coding are two things I'd love to see Math Academy take inspiration from.

The Knowledge Graph for our Linear Momentum unit

@tunguz The best suggestion I got for photos of my children is to be in frame for many photos. My kid loves looking back and seeing his past with his.

PSA advice to parents of small children: no matter how many pictures of your kids you are taking, you need to 10X that number.

It's amazing to see new worlds open up for little readers. It's like a whole new sense! I was surprised by the secondary benefits from reading math lessons and problems. Reading in math requires a high comprehension and precision, so it improved my kids ability to notice and resolve their confusion.

@flowidealism My child can teach herself things, even new math concepts, because she can read. So simple but amazing.

If your child becomes a reader, about 80% of the education job is already done. That's my honest assessment after working in education for over thirty years. Everything else is secondary. Most parents think science education is important. Yes it is. But if you can't read the biology textbook, you're not going to learn biology. Reading is the meta-skill that enables all other skills. History requires reading. Science requires reading. Even math increasingly requires reading as it becomes more sophisticated. The child who reads voraciously will figure out everything else. The child who doesn't will struggle with everything.

Nice! Agreed that it's much less clear how to teach intuition. My (low confidence) understanding is that there is a less mature science of teaching intuition than the science of teaching procedures, but that the latter supports the former. Having more (and more varied) dots makes it easier to connect the dots. I do see this with my son, where he will occasionally find modified procedures to solve a problem, or alternative ways to prove something, and these feel traceable back to a combination of past problems.

@ganz @jliemandt @_MathAcademy_ I’ve got a lot of math skill here at home — 6th grader just finished geometry, 3rd grader several will surely get to algebra in a year or so — what I find baffling isn’t the drill on problems it’s the mathematical imagination.

@_MathAcademy_ is so good. If your school assigns math homework, that time is better spent in Math Academy.

It's a wild outlier, but I can personally vouch for a slower example trajectory. My 3rd grader is pacing to start pre-calc in a few months (working through third year integrated math), and I've seen him solve thousands of algebra, geometry, and stats problems across several hundred topic lessons. This is from at most 1hr per day of math (beast academy originally then switching to math academy), since kindergarten, and most of that earlier timeline was 30min tops and skipping days often. That still adds up to maybe 10,000 math problems, which was sufficient in this case but from what I understand there's a wide range for learning pace. The adaptive and interleaved nature of math academy helped a lot, since my kid got double/triple reviews on eg completing the square in quadratic functions and binomial expansions (more mistakes = more reviews), but gets far fewer reviews for geometry or trig. If my kid was even more interested in math, I would expect shorter timelines.

@jliemandt @_MathAcademy_ I’m genuinely dubious about this as calc bc level problem solving and math skill. The supporting skills and rest required to move from arithmetic through upper level calc is significant and non-linear.

My kid did beast academy through 5th then switched to math academy. Both were amazingly effective. I wish I had switched earlier in 4th, because I found that math academy had better systems for review, a more engaging pacing (mini-lessons between pairs of problems), and generally understood what my kid did or did not know yet. Beast Academy also tends to be less aligned with typical grade level content (often pulling on content 1-2 grades ahead) which while nice for challenge can be a spike in difficulty and generally lines up less well with other math progressions.

@jliemandt @_MathAcademy_ My son is absolutely crushing it with Beast Academy and Life of Fred right now too. Heard great things about Math Academy as well just haven’t tried it yet. Thoughts? Cc: @JoshuaSheats

@unrealNadja @_MathAcademy_ That's amazing! Your kid must really love Math to have made that much progress. I'm familiar with how unyielding Math Academy is in requiring mastery before proceeding, so this is an incredible achievement.

Today feels big. My third grader earned another stripe on his BJJ belt and then casually finished the last lesson of his Calc BC course.  This kid, who just over a year ago claimed he hated math, fell in love with the subject when he started @_MathAcademy_. He became thirsty for more and more math. He has been setting his own goals, and they vastly exceeded anything I would have dared set for him.   He finished 6th through 12th grade math in just over a year.  He hates reviews 😂 and loves new lessons. He doesn't like calculations but loves concepts. He takes math notebooks to restaurants so he can toy with proofs while he waits for his food. And he cannot wait for the MA Abstract Algebra course (@ninja_maths, counting on you!)

I tried to encourage my kid to write more neatly early on, but he wasn't actually hitting problems yet where it would frequently bite him. He saw no reason to write differently. But when he started solving larger multi-step problems like systems of equations, his messy handwriting got in his way and frustrated him to the point he quickly improved his writing clarity. I wonder what kinds of early math problems would best support kids in seeing the need for tidy math.

I know it seems overly-strict, but you need to teach your kids how to line up math numbers carefully As they move into more advanced athematic, it gets confusing SUPER fast if things aren't organized perfectly In math, it helps to be neat♥️

@AniseNot My kid loved wings of fire. Around that level he also loved fable haven, spy school, and fun jungle series.

My 7yo’s reading list: -Wings of Fire series -I Survived… -Who Would Win (animal vs animal) -Minecraft novels He was brought up on all the beautiful gentle classic children’s stories, I read to him 5-10 books every day for 90% of the days he has been alive But he didn’t want to read them. He likes dragons & natural disaster survival stories & predator battles & Minecraft Once I got him the right books he started staying up all night reading, bringing books in the car/restaurant/bbq. To the point where I have to regulate his reading time

@ThePrimeagen @bryan_johnson I'm no expert, but GPT 5.2 pro claimed it's mostly about light intensity rather than blue light. Dark mode and low brightness might be fine.

@bryan_johnson seriously though, does reading a book from your phone count? beautiful wife next to me needs to sleep and i am trying to read my papa Aristotle

Does spaced retrieval practice work in all subjects? New study suggests the honest answer is sometimes, and we do not yet fully know when. 🧵⬇️

I did both. At that age all the math is very simple and concrete, so any kind of numeric play is very effective. Food is a recurring opportunity to play more/less add/subtract etc. Also rehashing old content is great, all the core concepts need a lot of volume of practice to fully absorb them. If you want something more structured, beast academy (online or books) is a full curriculum that my kid enjoyed and put him incredibly far ahead.

@simonsarris I do fun little math puzzles with the 4 - 6 yr old, but I often run out of ideas that are both interesting and not too hard... yall do anything structured? or you just make stuff up?

I do ~10 minutes a night of math with Lu (age 5) and he is so hungry for this stuff that 2nd grade would be a bore to him now. He is amply ahead with barely any instruction. My most salient memory of school was not from learning, it was the waiting

That sounds wonderful! The extra ~20 hours per week for extracurriculars would be so helpful in my situation. My boy has been loving community theater, but on rehearsal days it is most of his remaining time after a full normal school day, which crowds out other opportunities he'd enjoy.

@ganz @angusdav My boys play on elite level athletic teams and they train for ~3 hours per day after they do their Alpha. They also do piano, a hip hop dance class, gymnastics, and church on Sundays. They help run a side business of mine. They stay very busy with extracurriculars!

The importance of taking time to fully answer a student's questions clicked for me after seeing a burst of recent AI research on the topic of "on-policy reinforcement learning". Essentially, an explanation that is crafted to the student's specific misunderstanding is far more informative than a generic explanation. This is extremely obvious in retrospect, but it hadn't 100% sunk in for me until seeing that research. Now, I take as much time as needed to understand their confusion and tailor an explanation.

I was in an Algebra II class today with one of my behavior students. Another student asked why negative exponents turn numbers into fractions. The teacher kept saying, “That’s just the rule.” After a few more “but why?” attempts, he opened a new tab on his Chromebook, googled it, and watched a YouTube video explaining why. It’s okay to pause the lesson and explain the “why.” Often in math, understanding the “why” helps connect the concept to prior knowledge and solidifies understanding. The problem is that many teachers don’t understand the “why” themselves.