I don’t dilute hard ideas. I find the right form.

Teaching the algorithm correctly

Students preparing for the carpenters union entrance exam were failing its math section. They had been taught arithmetic as procedure — steps to memorize, no reason attached — which is exactly the knowledge that collapses under exam pressure. I rebuilt the instruction from definitions, deriving every algorithm for whole numbers, fractions and decimals from what the numbers actually mean.

Pass rate moved from 40% to 80% in one cohort. The curriculum was then selected for national distribution across YouthBuild’s 270-site network. Measured at one site, one cohort to the next. Outcomes at adopting sites were never tracked — the program had no mechanism for it.

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Speaking API

Project managers sit in meetings where integration failures are discussed in language they can’t parse, then escalate badly — a vague ticket, or a rate limit reported to the vendor as an outage. This module teaches diagnosis and escalation rather than code, and assesses judgment rather than recall.

No scored quiz anywhere in it. The assessment is a three-decision scenario where every option, right or wrong, returns the consequence of that specific choice.

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Protecting student data: FERPA essentials

A primer on what FERPA actually protects and what it requires of the people building software for schools. Written for product and engineering staff who need the rules to be actionable rather than legally exhaustive.

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correctmath.io

The same definitions-first method as the YouthBuild curriculum, rebuilt as a web system instead of a stack of paper. Six lessons live, from the number line through adding rational numbers as vectors. I designed the instructional sequence and built every interactive element by hand — no authoring tool, no framework.

Built on H. Wu’s work on elementary mathematics, quoted with his permission. Every citation verified against the printed source before it ships.

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