Math CoTeacher

Generational Failing

• 60 years of failing math scores and a flat trendline. Five generations of kids thinking they’re bad at math because they were short changed in their education is a quiet tragedy.
• Parents are blind. Kids get A's or B's while building shaky foundations. No one sees they built a house of cards until it's too late.
• The core issue: no system actually models how understanding develops or where a specific learner sits on that path.
• It doesn't have to be this way. A great teacher + early intervention with a cognitive learning trajectory = any student can build a foundation to learn math to the highest levels.

Why Me

I built and proved the human version of this system in the analog world.

• Ran hundreds of 1-on-1 cognitive interviews.
• Developed a cognitive learning trajectory that spans from Arithmetic to Algebra
• Trained teachers at scale to use cognitive learning trajectories. I know how to scale human data collection and judgment needed to post-train a model.
• This is my life's work. Math Teacher of the Year. Classroom featured in research. Deep domain knowledge.
• Business Strategy consulting for multi-nationals, turned around a failing company, and a startup founder with 2 successful exits.
• Policy & politics I have learned how the sausage is made at the state and local levels. I can navigate a world of state legislators/state boards of education, teachers unions, lobbyists, and local politics. I can thread the needle of building an education startup in a world where "AI" is a dirty word without igniting an immune response that will reject it.

I have the framework, the data playbook, and the hard won understanding of classrooms, businesses, and state-level politics needed to build this responsibly and at scale. That rare mix is what this moment in education demands.

From Math CoTeacher to Universal Teacher

• [Now] Math CoTeacher ($70 billion)
• [Next] Extend to other K-12 subjects ($1 trillion)
• [Future] A universal teacher ($7.5 trillion)

How Math CoTeacher Works

1. Elicit: Student solves a problem. AI elicits the student’s reasoning, not just their answers.
2. Log: the entire interaction as training data, utterances, inferred state, chosen teaching move, and outcome as training data.
3. Diagnose: AI maps the reasoning onto a detailed cognitive learning trajectory: Ex: “Accurate visual fraction arithmetic, accurate multiplicative justification, fragile on formal symbolic identity, level 5”
4. Learn: Every interaction trains the system. Framework gets sharper. Instruction gets tighter.
5. Teach: Meet the learner exactly where they are developmentally with the best lesson, explanation, worked example, and practice problems to move them up the stack.

See what the data from a sample interaction in JSON or JSONL format looks like.

Experiment Power at Scale: Building the Factory That Takes Us From Now to the Future

1. Cognitive scientists know how to make maps called cognitive learning trajectories (CLTs). Teachers learn how to use them.
2. CoTeacher can learn to do both. This is experiment power AND diffusion of that knowledge at scale, which is unimaginable today.
3. Learning the meta skill of map making as we sharpen math and move into other K-12 subjects provides the training ground for learning a domain-general algorithm for building cognitive learning trajectories (CLTs).
4. Math CoTeacher will be the first instance of a larger thing, an engine for designing, testing, and scaling how humans learn anything.
5. This is building the first factory AND the assembly line for creating CLTs.
6. The power of compounding: each new CLT compounds making CoTeacher more valuable. Everyone wants a data moat. CoTeacher will have an ever widening one compounded by flywheel effects that it can ride to becoming the world's universal teacher.

Next Steps

Build the founding team. Raise a seed round. Deploy an MVP with design partners by December.

• Co-founder: AI/ML engineer who wants to do the most meaningful work of their life.
• Investor: who wants to back the team that ends education's 60-year plateau and gets to tell the canonical story about being the first investor in the most important company in history.

Email Me → mark@mathcoteacher.com