one of the most unique and surprising requests for quazar read we have had is from a pediatrician who wants to make her clinic a more welcoming place for children
I believe reading is one of the most important skills a child can build. So at the start of this month we launched Read, a monthly science & maths read for kids.
In under a month: 1,000+ users and 4 school integrations. Here's what we've been up to read.quazar.school.
Every expert was once embarrassed by a beginner question. Theres a famous theory that says if people knew hard a goal they have really is, they would never get started, the good thing with hard work is that its almost always beneficial, even when you don't get what you want.
The best trick I learned to avoid procrastination as a student: stop waiting for the “perfect” time. If it’s 5:46, start at 5:46. Don’t wait for 6:00. The best time to start is always right now the clock doesn’t matter if you are free.
It’s good to be smart, but it’s better to remain ethical. What good is knowledge if it’s not used for the betterment of society? Across evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, and sociology, evidence suggests that individuals often do better when they cooperate within a group for its betterment than when they act purely alone.
The current education system does not seem optimal. Instead of fixing a weak curriculum, we lower difficulty . Grades get easier, pass rates go up, and even capable students learn less due to the year barrier.
Self-learning is a solo hike while Guided Personalized learning is a journey with a dedicated mentor.
While self learners often waste time just finding the path, a wise guide helps you:
Find and select a correct guide
Target specific blind spots
Keep you in the high growth zone
Find anyone who might and can help you. Efficiency over wandering.
Always considered my participation in high level academic competitions to be an important reason for my success. The average curriculum isn't built for challenging the minds of children.
This....
Have taught my 3 older kids a wide variety of skills now — music, sports, academics. I am consistently shocked at how much more effective 1-on-1 coaching is than any other method.
You would think having them "practice" skills on their own would work pretty well. "Practice makes perfect" as they say.
But I have observed that practice on its own is nearly useless. If I had to put a number on it, I would say 1:1 coaching is 10x more effective per minute. This is especially true when they are beginning a new skill.
I think I know the reason. Learning is not a function of time, as people think. It is a function of *course corrections.*
With 1:1 coaching, learners make more course corrections per minute. Without coaching, people will tend to make the same mistakes over and over.
With coaching, not only are mistakes corrected, but the student learns when they have done it RIGHT. Knowing you got it right is equally important. Now the student knows what it feels like to succeed, and can begin to course correct on their own if they drift from this "known good."
Software can emulate a great coach. Building the software itself is no longer a bottleneck. The bottleneck is the knowledge of what mistakes students tend to make at each stage of learning, how to identify those mistakes, and how best to correct them.
A really great coach or teacher must be equally attuned to the student's psychology, perhaps more so than the subject matter, as demotivated or demoralized students cannot learn effectively.
This is something we spend a lot of time on at Synthesis. I am quite good at identifying when our Tutor gets the psychology wrong, but I have had less success than I'd like transmitting this knowledge to others. It is intuition more than anything. I can feel my shoulders slump when the Tutor says something that seems innocuous, like "That's not quite it."
Every great teacher or coach will have a slightly different style, but the psychological aspects of great coaches are similar. The primary way they pay great attention to how they give both course corrections and praise. A common mistake I see in youth sports coaches is forgetting to ever tell players when they got it right. Even without the demotivating effect, this is ineffective coaching. Students need to know when they get it right. If you don't tell them, they won't know.
Failure to praise is the masculine failure mode of coaches and teachers. The feminine failure mode is too much praise, which can be equally damaging. With too much praise, students either get a false sense of confidence, or they realize you are praising them too easily, which means you don't think very highly of their abilities. Either one is demotivating.
Unfortunately, there are no rules to get this right. Master-student relationships are complex, depending on the abilities and personalities of both master and student. Maybe the best we can do is be aware of the constraints and constantly course correct when we get it wrong.
Let's do this experiment. Try solving the 2 problems below:
In 2D, an ant walks from one corner of a rectangle to the opposite corner. What’s the shortest path? A straight line. Immediate. Intuitive.
Now in 3D: an ant walks from one corner of a cuboid to the opposite corner, but only along the surface. What’s the shortest path?
Most people pause.
That pause most people take is the whole story of why math feels hard.
Mathematics fundamentally relies on pattern recognition and logical reasoning, the same skills we use every day to predict outcomes from what we observe. Children are naturally good at this too: they pick up social patterns almost effortlessly, often just by mimicking their parents.
However, the nature of mathematical patterns presents a challenge. They’re far more complex and far less intuitive than everyday patterns, largely because they’re expressed through symbolic notation rather than plain language. And once a pattern is hidden behind symbols, many students struggle to even see it, or to translate it back into something they can understand.
Then there is this pressure of a rigid timeline: “finish this chapter by Friday, test on Monday.” If a student misses the intuition at the start, they fall behind, lose confidence, and math starts to feel like memorising random steps.
Math isn’t the problem.
The patterns are there, they’re just buried.
Parents often ask me:
“Can you charge hourly instead of monthly?”
I don’t. And it’s intentional.
If I charged by the hour, I’d be incentivised to add more hours,
even when the student doesn’t need them.
That’s broken.
I don’t charge for time.
I charge for outcomes.
Some weeks need more sessions.
Some weeks need none.
Real learning isn’t linear.
So we pause. We adjust. We move fast when needed.
The goal isn’t clocking hours.
It’s helping the student actually get better.
Lately, this is what I’ve come to realize:
The things I want, ideally, don’t really exist in the real world.
There isn’t an ideal job out there for me. Some roles don’t click, some feel misaligned, and others just don’t feel meaningful enough.
So what do you do next?
You build it yourself.
You create the work you believe in, and you execute it in a way that feels true to you.
And the more I walk this path, the more I see that making things closer to what I believe in is the ideal I was looking for all along.