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Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

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Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#41
[Self-promotion] If, nevertheless, you need personalized tutoring in undergraduate or graduate mathematics, I am providing private lessons in person and online.

From my perspective, the benefits of one-on-one tutoring is that we can talk live, select material of your interest/needs and problems to target you specific weaknesses, solve problems together (like pair coding!) and immediate feedback on progress.

If anyone is interested, here are my services:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GtBrEfwT34y-61SZHaDRCFB9wPE...

and my CV:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1woxVNcJ4AmT7dD2WEnYr9BHEEY7...

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#42

Just a note, looks like you're using google fonts (or similar) for your icons, so people (i.e. me) with strict unlock origin settings will just see big text labels. Here's a screenshot https://i.ibb.co/qFc0X2g/image.png

ublock right ?

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#43
post #23

I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…

The failure mode I've seen with ChatGPT in technical things is it's right often enough that when it's wrong it's hard for you to catch unless you know more than it does. I guess that's true of teachers sometimes as well, but it's easier to rely habitually on ChatGPT's judgment.

For linear algebra specifically, the software tools like Matlab, Octave, Sage, and R are so good that they can answer a lot of your questions. You can even ask ChatGPT e.g. "3x3 matrix A having columns (4,2,2), (-1,1,-1), and (6,6,8) and an eigenvalue of 2, print a GNU octave command to find the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of A."

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#44
post #23

I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…

I wish there was a Discord community of people who are teaching themselves Mathematics with the help of books, videos, etc.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#45
post #23

I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…

As someone who has used linear algebra, statistics and calculus as part of my day-to-day work for years, I would be very cautious of relying on ChatGPT as your "tutor".

Occasionally I've tried to substitute ChatGPT for the shelf of reference books in my office and nearly always had poor results.

The trouble is that the outputs of these models, by their very nature, look convincing. Even as an expert it takes a fair bit of background to realize when ChatGPT is making a mistake. The results virtually always look good at first pass.

I would strongly recommend sticking to text books for self study.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#46
I am always curious regarding new education solutions. I firmly believe the US pre-college education systems are fundamentally broken most benefit from edtech (huge fan of Khan Academy).

As an MIT alum myself ('89), I am surprised to hear your description of your experience at MIT. Did you experience this across all classes and departments or only for a few (e.g. 18.01 which is required for most freshman)? While certain professors were not the most helpful, I found most of the teaching staff to be incredibly helpful when I made the effort to engage them. No doubt the focus was on attendance in lectures.

In addition to lectures there were: - Recitations - each class of the larger classes had recitations with a TA to allow smaller groups the opportunity to ask specific questions. - Office hours with the lecturer. I did not avail myself of them as I considered them useful for bigger questions (should I be a physics major if I don't understand this) rather then review of homework questions. - Bibles. Each living group (I was in a fraternity but dorms had them as well) had a library of class notes, exams, quizzes, etc for each class assembled by people who previously took the class and did well. Often the Bible author was still available for questions. - Friends/Fellow Students. MIT has an incredibly open policy on working together. My recollection is some classes could not be reasonably completed by people working alone (e.g. Aero/Astro's Unified Engineering). A fellow student may simply have looked at a topic from a different perspective which drove their comprehension.

Today, MIT offers OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) which hosts complete courses online (video, lecture notes, syllabi, additional readings, quizzes). This is an incredible resource that I have found helps my lifetime learning goals.

Again, I am always excited for edtech. I think its development needs to be tempered with an understanding of why current systems are not working. What problem are you solving? Is your solution simply remote tutoring? If so, how is it different that a job board with zoom?

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#47

Are you trying to create a tutoring version of fiverr/upwork? If so, the economics doesn't seem to work. I think you are saying that you'll create a product, charge $10/wk to customers and, through volume, give the tutor approx. $100/hr. Fair enough, but I think you're overestimating how well tutoring scales - which is not well at all. If I'm a tutor, and I want to break even with my in-person rate, I need to satisfy…

I agree with your assessment re this being similar to fiverr/upwork. I do think the economics can work for tutors that generate high credibility/success ratings. Codementor.io focuses on providing programming mentors to help people solve a very specifc question or class of questions. It is not meant to be a weekly scheduled session, but rather an on-demand service.

Additionally, many of these services could be useful as incremental money for the tutors rather than the primary income source. Definitely would pay better than UberEats!

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#48
post #23

I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…

As someone who has used linear algebra, statistics and calculus as part of my day-to-day work for years, I would be very cautious of relying on ChatGPT as your "tutor". Occasionally I've tried to substitute ChatGPT for the shelf of reference books in my office and nearly always had poor results. The trouble is that the outputs of these models, by their very nature, look convincing . Even as an expert it takes a fair…

Yes. This.

The primary problem with using ChatGPT in mathematics is that by the time you can classify a ChatGPT answer as right or wrong, you are already more than capable of solving the answer independently.

So, for this field, ChatGPT is like having a research assistant that assists you, but one that occasionally gets frustrated, and tries to destroy your project from within by reporting good looking, but completely inaccurate information. You can't trust their work, and the validation of their work basically means that you'll have to do their work again by other means.

A faster and more accurate approach would be just to do the work without the subterfuge of an unreliable assistant. At least then, you are only subject to your own errors (which would still be present in validation of ChatGPT) and not subject to your own errors and those that ChatGPT induces.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#49
post #23

I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…

I wish there was a Discord community of people who are teaching themselves Mathematics with the help of books, videos, etc.

A sea of non-experts is only helpful for learning if you are further behind on the trail and have obvious questions.

That said, a community is good for other things. And many times the issues people have are "obvious" questions.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#50
post #23

I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…

As someone who has used linear algebra, statistics and calculus as part of my day-to-day work for years, I would be very cautious of relying on ChatGPT as your "tutor". Occasionally I've tried to substitute ChatGPT for the shelf of reference books in my office and nearly always had poor results. The trouble is that the outputs of these models, by their very nature, look convincing . Even as an expert it takes a fair…

Can I jump in and ask what you do? My oldest kid has those courses lined up for her next few years because she really enjoys math. I studied some of them in college and then ended up spending 20 years making web sites.
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