If You Can Explain Math, I Have a Second Income/Retirement Offer for You.
If you know mathematics well enough to teach it in a one-on-one setting, you have a real possibility to change the lives of a lot of young people.
There's no question that Salman Khan has done a wonderful thing with his Khan Academy. His mathematics videos are very good. Well over a million students have taken advantage of these videos, and they are live all over the world. He has fundamentally changed the lives of more young people than any teacher in history. Yet he did this simply by posting YouTube videos on his site.
We know this much in education: "One size doesn't fit all." One teaching methodology doesn't work for everybody. Anybody who thinks that there is a single theory of education that applies to as many as 80% of the population does not understand the findings of modern psychology. The learning process is astoundingly complex, and no one can get a handle on it.
There are a lot of homeschool mothers who fear the day when they must teach advanced mathematics to their children. They know that at that point, that they will have to turn over the instruction assignment to somebody else. This may be someone in a local homeschool cooperative. It may be a course on the Web. But the mothers know that they will have to bow out.
RAY'S ARITHMETIC
One of the ways that this can be done is to adopt Ray's Arithmetic. This was widely used in the 19th century's public schools. It is highly sophisticated. The textbooks are online free of charge. They are available to download on the Ron Paul Curriculum site.
If someone were to take these digital pages and create video lessons on them, he could post them on his own personal website. If they are any good, I will post them on the Ron Paul Curriculum site. They should be YouTube videos, the same way that the Khan Academy's videos are.
I would like to believe that somebody out there would do this simply to help kids. This is what Khan did. But there are ways of monetizing this work.
If somebody produced a series of screencast videos, but he offered his services as a tutor for a fee, I think he would be inundated. Maybe he could teach a live online class this way. If somebody picked up 50 students at $10 an hour, life would get sweet.
I see this as a way for anybody who wanted to go into teaching to get into teaching, and he doesn't have to go through any kind of certification. He probably could make a nice living at it, but in any case, he could change a lot of students' lives. I think somebody who has taught for years in a classroom environment, and who is now retired, could leave this is his legacy.
When I say his, I mean anybody. There are a lot of women who can do math. My wife is a whiz at mathematics. But I find that they tend not to want to get in front of an audience. They don't want to shoot YouTube videos. I have asked a lot of them to do it, and every one of them has turned me down.
The technology is cheap. There are whiteboard systems. There are the wonderful drawing devices put out by Wacom. Here is an article on these tools.
If you own a tablet computer, you don't need a Wacom. You could do it with free or cheap whiteboard software.
You also don't need Camtasia Studio ($300) to do this, although the RPC instructors all use it. You could do this with a $15 annual subscription to Screencast-O-Matic.
I recommend that you use either a Blue Yeti or an Audio Technica 2020 USB microphone on a stand to produce screencasts. This would cost about $175. Put the microphone right in front of you. Narrate whatever you are doing on the screen. You could do this with an Audio Technica ATR-3350.
By tying the instruction to Ray's Arithmetic, you avoid the problem of copyright violations. These books have been in the public domain a century. The story problems are old-fashioned, but that adds to their charm. The student gets some sense of the late 19th century because of the story problems. There's nothing wrong with that.
Start with the first volume and just continue.
AFFILIATE INCOME
If you take the students through the fifth grade, and you create an affiliate link to join the Ron Paul Curriculum, you will get half the money that the parent pays each year to join the site. This means that if the parent renews, you get the renewal income.
You create K-5 videos, and then you turn the student over to Dr. Benjamin Richards, who teaches the paid subscription portion of the Ron Paul Curriculum mathematics program.
As the director of curriculum development of the Ron Paul Curriculum, I would certainly be willing to let somebody refer families to his own website if he's willing to complete an instructional program based on Ray's Arithmetic. That would certainly be a payoff for having produced the lessons for grades K-5. But I think it would be more profitable for somebody to set up the affiliate program with the Ron Paul Curriculum, and turn over the families to Dr. Richards.
START TODAY
Below are the links to Ray's Arithmetic books and the answer keys.
Ray's New Primary Arithmetic (K-2nd Grade) Ray's New Intellectual Arithmetic (3-4th Grade) Ray's New Intellectual Arithmetic (Answer Key for 3-4th Grade) Ray's New Practical Arithmetic (5-6th Grade) Ray's New Practical Arithmetic (Answer Key for 5-6th Grade)
We use this teaching format: 4/1. There are four videos, and then a review video for the week.
Limit the videos to 15 minutes, max. Don't overwhelm the young students.
Produce an introductory 10 YouTube videos, and post them on a free WordPress.com site or some other blog site. Then send me the link to the site: garynorth@ronpaulcurriculum.com. If I like them, I will post a link to your site on the Ron Paul Curriculum.