This is the long version of the story. If you just want the tool, skip it — it's a free download, and the eight rules and the daily protocol are on this site.
The situation
Scotty was born in 1999. His father — my brother-in-law — died in November 2000, when Scotty was a toddler. His mother died in 2005, when he was six. My wife and I obtained Full and Permanent Legal Guardianship in 2004, and Scotty went through the North Harrison Public School System from kindergarten.
In November 2009, the school told us he was failing math. They had taught him the concept of multiplication well; what he hadn't done was memorize the multiplication table. The proposed solution was to retain him in third grade.
His therapist warned us about retention. She had teenage clients still carrying the weight of being held back in early elementary school. We refused.
That left us looking for a tool. The tools that existed in 2009 were either tests — and I already had a report card telling me what Scotty didn't know — or flashcard apps that just showed him problems and waited for him to type answers he didn't have. Neither solved the actual problem, which was: how do you take a kid who doesn't know the multiplication table and get him to know it.
I'm a programmer. I started writing.
What I said to Scotty
Before I gave him the app, I sat down with him and said roughly seven things. I'm putting them here as testimony — what I said to my nephew — not as instructions for what you should say to your kid. Your kid isn't Scotty. You'll know what to say to your kid better than I would.
Here's what I said:
- I love you.
- Because I love you, I will not accept you failing math.
- I believe most parents would ground you until your grades improved.
- You're lucky. I'm a programmer and I wrote an app I believe will work.
- I don't care about punishing you, I just want you to pass the test.
- So every day when you come home, you are grounded until you show me you are done. No entertainment until it's complete.
- If it takes an hour, you're grounded for an hour. If it takes until bedtime, you're grounded all night.
I also gave him a choice between three methods, because I wanted him to feel like he had agency in this:
- Use the app I had written.
- Use traditional paper flashcards (with one of us sitting across the table to flip them).
- Write each problem ten times.
Failing math wasn't on the menu, but the method was. He picked the app. I let him use a calculator on the first two Katas.
The week
I promised him a $15 iTunes gift card if he could complete a Kata in fifteen minutes.
The first Kata took forty minutes. The third day he completed one in under fifteen, and I owed him fifteen dollars. That was fine; that was the point. Total study time across the entire week was about two and a half hours.
The next Friday, Scotty took the timed multiplication test and scored 100%. He was the first kid in the class to finish. He came home and told me, "I even beat [another kid] and he's the smartest kid in the class."
I said, "Well, I guess today you were the smartest kid in the class."
I wrote about this at the time, in early 2010. The thing I wrote then still stands:
This was one of the happiest moments of my life. I served in the Marines and I have been blessed with several other happy memories. However, I am more proud of this than anything I've done in my life. From the Math Katas history document, January 2010
Why this works
There's a piece of the story that took me a while to articulate, and it's the part that connects what happened to Scotty with something most parents will recognize from their own lives.
Before I went to Parris Island, I was sure I couldn't run three miles. I couldn't even run one and a half. My recruiter said don't worry, they'd start at one and a half and work us up to three. We ran one and a half on the first day and three on the second. Gradual, for the Marines.
A drill instructor — using methods that wouldn't survive a modern review board — eliminated my option of stopping. So I ran three miles. And then I ran three miles every day for four years without missing a run.
The thing that changed during that first run was not my body. My legs were the same legs as the day before. What changed was that I now knew, as a fact about the world, that I could run three miles. After that, the physical task got easier even though nothing physical had changed.
That's what happened with Scotty, too. Once he had taken the test once and seen 100% on the paper with his name at the top of it, the question was no longer "can I do this." After that, the only question was how many other tests it would work for.
Belief precedes ability. The protocol is engineered around buying a kid enough time to discover that the thing he believes is impossible is actually possible. One Kata a day for a week is the dose.
After Scotty
Most fourth graders in 2009 didn't have an iPod Touch. I built a web version of Math Katas so kids without iOS devices could still use it.
Madelia Public Schools, in southern Minnesota, used the web version for thirteen years. Hundreds of students went through it. In every case I observed where a student completed the protocol — one Kata a day for a week — they went from F to A on the multiplication timed test.
I want to be careful about the qualifications on that sentence. In every case I observed is not the same as every kid who used it succeeded. I'm not the teacher; I wasn't in the classroom. What I can tell you is that across thirteen years of conversations with the teacher who used the program, I never heard about a student who completed the daily protocol and didn't pass.
I also never heard about it working on a once-a-week schedule. Kids forget too much between sessions, and the next session feels like starting over. The protocol depends on the daily rhythm. That's the warning that earned the largest font on this site, and I'm repeating it here because it's the most important thing I learned in those thirteen years.
The lead teacher's observation
The lead teacher who ran the program at Madelia Public Schools noticed that English Language Learner students could practice effectively even when their English was limited, because the interface is mostly numeric. The student sees two numbers and an operator, types a number, and gets visual feedback. There's no English instruction in the loop.
Observed by the lead teacher, Madelia Public Schools.
This is the only secondhand claim on this site that I'm passing along. I'm passing it along because it came from a teacher I trust who saw it work for years in her own classroom. I am not making any claim about specific learning differences or specific languages — only about the structural fact that the math notation is universal.
Sixteen years later
Scotty is an adult now. He works as a dog trainer at a family business that's been in operation longer than he's been alive. He hadn't used the app for several years.
I recently installed Math Katas — the modern version — on his phone, replacing an older version of the same tool. He sat down cold and completed a Kata in under ten minutes.
Sixteen years. No practice in between. The facts I taught him in a week in 2009 were still there.
This isn't a controlled study. It's one human, my nephew, and I obviously have a stake in the outcome. But it's a real data point that runs sixteen years long, and it suggests something I think is the most important and least-marketed property of the protocol: it builds durable long-term memory, not test-week cramming.
If your kid isn't Scotty
I want to be honest about who this protocol works for and who it doesn't.
It worked for Scotty in seven days. It worked for the students in Madelia I saw it work for, over thirteen years. It works on a specific kind of math problem — memorizing the multiplication table — and it works under a specific protocol: one Kata a day, every day, for a week.
There are kids it won't work for, and I'm not in a position to predict which kids those are. I'm not a clinician. I'm not going to make claims about specific neurological profiles or specific learning differences. What I can tell you is the humane version of how to find out:
Try the protocol for a week. If it works, your kid passes the test. If it doesn't, you've spent a week and learned this approach isn't the right fit for your kid. Either way, your kid hasn't lost anything. And if your kid doesn't take to it, that doesn't tell you anything bad about your kid — it just tells you they're probably gifted in other directions.
That's the deal. A week is small. The downside is small. The upside is substantial.
Try it
If you'd like to try the protocol with your kid, the eight rules and the daily-vs-weekly warning are at /tips/, and the app is on the App Store. If you'd like a free promo code because you're committing to do the protocol with a kid who's stuck, email me at support@mathkatas.com and tell me about it.
That's the whole pitch.
—Bob Wright