the story behind MathQuest OS

Somewhere along the way, competition math in Singapore stopped being a test of how children think and became a test of how many hours their families can buy. The strongest coaching gathers where the fees are highest. The children who would gain the most from one devoted teacher — the ones who light up at a hard problem — get whatever is left over. I kept meeting kids with real mathematical minds whose only disadvantage was arithmetic of a different kind: hours multiplied by dollars.

That bothered me enough to do something unreasonable about it.

The standard we set for MathQuest OS is short to say and hard to live: verify everything, publish nothing unchecked. Early on, while verifying a solution nobody would ever have questioned, we found that the official answer was wrong. Not debatable — wrong. A child could have reasoned honestly to the correct answer and been told to mark herself down. That evening ended any argument about whether our standard was excessive. A child cannot audit what she is taught. Whoever publishes for children carries the whole burden of being right, and we chose to carry it completely.

So here is the promise. The quality of the best one-to-one tutoring — rigorous, patient, shaped around one child at a time — at closer to twenty dollars a day than two hundred an hour. And a founding cohort small enough that we will know every child in it by name.

If that sounds like your child, hold a place. We will write to you first.

Hardajit Singhfounder, MathQuest OS