Mackenzie Price

And there's never been a study that says girls are not actually good at math.

But it's the way that we go.

And the challenge and the reason that Simon, you and I both had that experience of not being great at math is because when you're going about the process of learning something like math, you start at the fundamentals.

You start with addition and subtraction, multiplication and division.

Eventually, you're working your way up to algebra.

Pretty soon, you're doing calculus.

If you don't have the fundamental concepts really, really solid, it gets very hard to work upon, you know, more sophisticated concepts.

So think about like a tower, if you're building a tower, and if you have holes in your academic knowledge, it's really hard to do well on that.

And so that's part of the reason that we're seeing such a problem in our education system globally, and it's gotten even worse since COVID happened, is that you can't take a fifth grader

In a traditional classroom and say, hey, let's go back and review some second grade, third grade, fourth grade knowledge that you missed so that you can understand fifth grade.

And I will tell you, it's one of the most exciting things that we see in our schools is when we can take kids and we put them in the level of.

of knowledge that they need to be learning at the pace that works for them, it totally changes the way they see themselves.

We believe that competence leads to confidence.

And so that little girl who was just like me suddenly goes, you know what?

It turns out I'm not bad at math.

I understand math now and I'm good at it.

And it totally changes the identity of how people see themselves, which we sorely need.

Well, I think a great way to think about it is, again, think about the experience that Simon mentioned he had.

Or, for example, my daughter, when she went off to kindergarten, when my daughter Peyton started in kindergarten, she already knew how to read.

But a lot of the kids in the class didn't.