SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, Bloom's Taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. Most tep prep companies teach the math side really well, but on reading and writing, they've really got nothing. That's why students plateau. In the next hour, Sol Lee, a University of Chicago trained reading specialist with 14 years of experience, is going to break down the exact methodology he uses to crack the SAT verbal section. If your kid struggles with the reading and writing portion, this is the episode you've been waiting for. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian. Families often ask me how to navigate the maze of college prep without wasting thousands of dollars and hours of time. The answer usually involves finding the people who've cracked the code and understand the rules of the game the schools aren't telling you. That's why I'm thrilled to have Sol Lee here today. Sol is a specialized SAT and LSAT reading strategist, the founder of Increments, an educational platform tackling the hardest problems in literacy education and a University of Chicago graduate whose deep reading training has been distilled into the methodology that helps students master the toughest section of the SAT. He's been tutoring for 14 years. He's been growing a YouTube community, and now he's building technology to scale his system.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Sol, welcome to the show. Joe, thank you for having me on. And honestly, I am flattered and honored by how much research you did just to get that intro.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

My team did some good, some good diving here. The most important question I have to ask, because I just had I had an ACT person from University of Chicago. Why is it that fun goes to die there? I need to start with that. That's probably the most important thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Fun goes to die at the University of Chicago. If you don't know what true fun is, which is putting your nose in the classics and ignoring everyone around you for like four hours while just debating ideas with yourself in your head. So that's where the true fun is. It's just that it's just such an unreachable kind of fun that most people have never really tasted that fruit, you know. Uh so no, fun doesn't actually go to die, it goes to actually flourish. It's a complete misnomer. It's a complete misconception.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

So your degree you were mentioning before we started recording, his degree from the University of Chicago. What motivated you to get that degree? And then walk us through when you left, like what did you what did you intend to do with it before starting a test prep company?

SPEAKER_00 3:03

So that degree had maybe 0% of planning going into it. It was a lot of impulse. Uh, and so the background for that is uh I was always good at math. I was always good at hard sciences, except for memorization heavy stuff. So I I didn't particularly like biology or or chemistry, but uh everything else I was really, really confident in growing up. And and when I went to the University of Chicago, I was just, you know, like I was gonna challenge myself on math and physics. So I took the honors level classes and everything. And up until that point, I had known from the from my experiences thus far, you know, just some kid from Las Vegas, I had always considered myself like out of all the people in the world, like maybe the top 1% of people who love math. Um maybe even higher, maybe top 0.1% of people who love math. But then once I was in those honors classes at the University of Chicago, I was like, these people are crazy. These people like love math way more than me. And I had had this sort of lingering, especially when I was back in Las Vegas, I had this sort of lingering like hunger for like learning more about things that I wasn't really exposed to, which was, you know, uh philosophy. I would go into like Barnes Noble as a kid and be like, oh, who is who is Aristotle? Who's Aquinas? You know, I like I had no one around me had ever talked about this stuff. Um, and so I was at the University of Chicago, which is famous for the great books program, and I was like, man, I kind of I mean, math is cool and all, but you know, you guys do your thing. I want to sort of I felt like I was cheating a little, I was cheating on them a little, but I was like, I need to go and check out some other stuff. And so that's how I got into the great books.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

So you love math and you went to University of Chicago with the intention of something in math, and now you teach reading and writing.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Is yeah, I would say that's a big yeah, the that was a big pivot in my first year in college. I was like, no, no, no more math, no more physics, gonna switch. Let's do something else. Let's scratch that itch.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Yeah. I mean, you and it sounds like you fell in love with with a lot of the aspects of the humanities, the classics, philosophy. So you get you get out and you just we're gonna do a test prep company. How does that how does that come about?

SPEAKER_00 5:37

So I think there is a clear through line if we start with my frustrations in maybe like middle high school, mostly in high school, I think. I remember in high school, I remember in high school like getting more or less good grades in English, uh, in like the honors and the AP and IB English classes. And I had this feeling that what I was really doing, what I was competing or out competing the rest on was like taking the five-paragraph format and just sort of being like a hyper sophisticated LLM, like a ChatGPT. Every synonym I could use that was more sophisticated, I would use a more sophisticated pseudonym. And just like, just like set the vocabulary setting to like 11. Uh and the same thing with grammatical syntax, like any simple sentence that I can write, I can do a more complex version of that and just make the grammatical syntax of it just ludicrously complicated. And just like again, put the grammar up to 11 and then and then just have some semblance of you know, checking off all the, what do you call it, the claim and the evidence and and the commentary, and just making sure to just fit within that format while putting the grammar and uh grammar and vocab to the max, right? So to me, that felt like not really good, but it was giving me the rewards. I was getting my A's, and I was like, okay, I guess that's what English is. But I never was satisfied by that, that sort of like my hack for the system of getting the GPA that I wanted. So when I was in Chicago, I, you know, actually like this method was proven to be fraudulent, and uh I had to like relearn a lot of things there. But then after graduating, uh I went into test prep uh more more just for practical reasons. I needed to pay off debt. I was in Korea, I had a humanities degree. I want to, I want to like relieve myself of the pressure of that debt. So I got into test prep. And then there I started really taking my observations from high school, my lessons from college, and starting to think about like how to start applying that uh in like uh especially in one-on-one, where you can do a lot of RD. In one-on-one context, like how do you actually get a student to like read better and write better? At the time, you have to also write and read better and write better. So that was that was my start there.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

And you get into it and you basically realize there's a lot of stuff that's fundamentally broken with how we prep kids in the system. What what did you realize kind of early on? Is there like a specific student that comes to mind that you realize how we do this is wrong and I have to develop a better way? Or, you know, what is it about how most people teach the reading and the back then the writing of the SAT that's fundamentally wrong or broken?

SPEAKER_00 8:37

So I I don't have a specific student in mind. I just remember going through the motions because I was when I was just beginning, I was going through, they just gave me a book, uh, they gave me stuff to teach, and I taught it. And I uh I remember largely at the time just trying to be as entertaining as possible while getting through the material. But what I you know, as I gained experience, what I started realizing is uh with reading passages on the SAT or any hard test, okay, with reading passages, what we're doing, what the sort of basic script is in these group classes in particular, is you take a passage that's hard and you kind of bullet point it for them, you make it simpler so that you at least understand the moves. And then you take the answer choices. And as a teacher, you already know what the correct answer is, right? And so all you're doing is you're reverse engineering why an answer is right or wrong, and you're explaining it to it from the vantage point of already knowing what is right or wrong. This is to me, it's like um like a personal trainer, right? Uh is supposed to make you do like the bench press or like the squat, right? And so you're supposed to be doing it while the personal trainer watches and observes and tries to see where maybe your form is, you know, cracking, where you maybe you're like starting to, you know, maybe put some strain on your lower back or whatever, right? And it's supposed to give you cues to how kind of help you manage that rep on your own. But actually, what I was doing is I was like, well, I know the answer. Let me just make it easy for you guys. And then I would just get on the bench and I would just do the reps for them and then be like, that's how it is. Follow me. And it's not bad. It's not bad per se, because it it definitely I don't know about the American uh cram uh school like systems, but in Korea, like if you do the reps for them and if you do it in an entertaining enough way where they pay attention in class, and if you just if you just shove like 12, 24, 36 practice tests down their throats, they will get better on average. The median student will get better. Uh maybe not the bottom 25%, maybe not the bottom 40%, but like definitely the top 60% are they're all gonna get better. It's just that it's just um it's just I I think uh the the tool is quite crude, and I think there are smarter ways of doing it, is is um is what it is. And the smartest way of doing it is have them do the reps. Like do not reverse engineer the answers for them. See if they can get to it somehow on their own.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Wow, I'm I'm laughing because you sound a lot a lot like me early on, like when I started teaching, you know, trying to make ends meet, you do all these odd jobs, right? So like summer, and I was in Virginia, and I don't I don't know if you are familiar with the area, northern Virginia around BC, but there's two like two communities that are exclusively Korean. And so like one is Centerville, and I don't know how I I applied so many things. I like, hey, can you test prep for the SAT? I'm like, I probably could do it. I sure I'm I can figure it out. So it's at a Korean like summer school, and it's just I go out and it's like it's all it's all Korean kids, maybe one white kid. Like, and we're like in a room, I'm like, what do you want me to do? Like, well, just prep them. I'm like, what? And they're just like, here's the book, do all the tests. Like, really? That's that's like you're just gonna pay me to do like that's it. So, like when you say that, that is I'll give flashbacks too. I was just in a room watching them do a test and then go over the answers, and then we're gonna do another test. I'm like, this is your guys' summer. I'm like, I am so sorry. But that's like what the parents were, that's what they expected. This is how they get better. And it's funny because coming up through as a school leader, uh principal, we go through this induction program in Pennsylvania, and they're uh NISL, like the National Institute for Like School Leaders, they we look at different school systems, and so they're all like, why are Finland, Singapore, and Korea better than America? And they're all different models, but Korea is that like exactly what you described. And so a lot of that, I think, in some in some sections of our country where people are super competitive trying to get into top schools, that is the old school method. That is like you just spend you don't have a life, you just spend hours of your life test prepping and memorizing. Why is that the incorrect way to do test prep? And why is your way better?

SPEAKER_00 13:32

All right. So I think in terms of pure time and effort spent, there are ways to minimize that time and effort. And it comes down to like being obsessed and concerned with exactly what the student is concerned by, uh concerned with in real time in that moment, and to be thinking about the same thing simultaneously, and for me as a tutor to be sort of predicting what problems will arise as they're navigating some sort of challenge, right? And if we if we can do that, we can undercut a lot of these sort of brute force methods by just having more, more learning per minute, you know, uh just have more of that. And so you can you can earn a lot of time back. And why that's important is not, I don't know, time for time's sake. If you're just gonna spend all that earned time on like Fortnite or Roblox, I mean, I don't know what the value of that really was, but you actually, you know, if you have a student who is curious about something and interested in maybe creating a little bit of something in that domain. And I guess it could be Roblox too. They could start coding Roblox. I mean, I'm not uh I'm not trying to downplay the modern world, but you're gonna offend a lot of eight-year-olds right now. If you know, but if you can take that time and actually divert it to something like, you know, when I was a kid, I just kind of wanted to like break apart computers and see what made it take, right? Like if you could take that time and do something with it, instead of, like you said, just not having a life and just being sweaty in a in a in a sort of white room uh with floral bright fluorescent lights just like slaving away over practice tests. I mean, I mean all the better, right? You want your student to have be enriched uh with a diversity of experiences and different types of stimuli, right? Not just slaving away at one number. So I think that's the win. I think that's the motivation for um for trying to try different ways of educating a student, you know, the reading, writing challenges and the SAT.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

What is the what the can you explain your uh your prediction method in terms of how like how it works, right? We have a typical question. Does the predict and match framework like kind of walk through families through that? And does it apply to not just the SAT, but the LSAT?

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Uh yeah. Let me start with the second question first. The LSAT and the GMAT and these other tests are harder than the SAT, right? Let's just start there. Um it requires you to be able to read at a collegiate level and just and to be able to read very, very dense material. Um as a result, and also because there's there was never a sort of like test optional thing for these schools, for these like you know, master's level schools, um they never really made the tests as watered down as the SP actually became in the last uh since uh well since especially the digital SAT. So what you had is are these really hard tests. And if you try to use what we all learned basically when we were younger, right? What we all learned, which is you know, look at A, double check if A works, look at B, double check if B works, look at C, double check if C works, look at D, double check if D works. The thing is, each one of those answer choices is very complex. So just like processing whether it's even possible for A to be correct takes time, right? And then when you're doing that for A and B and C and D, it's like you're juggling four balls simultaneously. But you're not a clown. You were never training to be a clown. Why are you juggling four balls suddenly? You are a reader. In college, you had to read a lot, at least back in the day. I don't know about these days, but you had to read a lot. And so why don't you just use that one skill, which is reading, right? And just read the passage and then read the question and then formulate the correct answer in your head first instead of going straight to juggling ABCD. And it turns out that a lot of students, they're actually better at reading than their own test-taking habits give them credit for. Their habit is to barely skim the passage and then look at ABCD and start juggling them all. And this really is like it's like taking a high school varsity athlete and assuming that they can't do basic squats and stuff, and you're kind of forcing them to go through the motions of checking A, B, C, and D, when really they already have the muscles to read the passage and predict the answer. It's already it, they're in it, they already can do it. It's just once you allow them to do it, that hey, it's okay to slow down on the passage and just read it a little bit, uh, and then to pause on the question prompt and then be like, what is it asking me? And then to formulate that in your head or on paper sometimes. And then once you formulate it, A, B, C, D becomes obvious. It becomes trivial. You're like, oh, B C and D are just wrong. Like you don't even need to slowly process it. A is clearly the correct answer, and you just jump straight to it. The process elimination, it's not something you should avoid. We we do you should use process elimination. It's not it's not like a villain, but I think it's more of a secondary tool, not the primary. The primary should be you should predict the answer and then find which answer choice matches. And practically what that means is does that mean you spend 30 seconds on the passage and 90 on the answer choices, or does that mean you spend 90 seconds on the passage and 15 seconds on the answer choices? You actually save time. You actually save time if you just pretend to match in a lot of cases.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

This episode is brought to you by supported tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focus on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supported tutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. Basic so let's let's talk it after you mentioned something really, really uh interesting because So the SAT got watered down, in your opinion, or in real life. You're saying it got watered down, or did we did uh schools also move in that direction? Like over inflammation.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Yeah, I uh maybe it was more spicy than I intended. I mean I can't I can't well but I can't contain. I can't pretend that I don't believe that though.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Well, real quick, before you before you answer that, what did you get on your SAT to get in the University of Chicago?

SPEAKER_00 20:30

So I got so I was taking the 2400. SAT I was one of the early the first cohorts. Um so there was a separate uh there was math and then there was reading and then there was writing. So I got 800 on math, 800 on reading, and I didn't know grammar, so I got 700 on writing.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Okay. But I mean, because like right now, I'm sure you work with similar students, it's like you have to get above a 1500. You're not getting into the university, you're not getting the to Ivy Leagues without like in the fifth in the mid-1500s, which is like now unheard of that there's there's such high. So, and we're seeing those scores. So you're saying it got watered down.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Yeah, I cannot talk about the statistical wizardry that is making that possible, uh, where at a personal level it does seem like there's quite a bit of score inflation. I I felt like, you know, an 800 or even a 790 was just crazy. It was crazy back in the day. But maybe I don't know, maybe, maybe it's psychological. Maybe it's just because I'm in the industry that I'm seeing so many more 800s and 790s and 780s. But so I don't wanna like I'm sure the college board is doing, you know, their thing to make sure that the scores are being normalized or whatever. But but when uh when I say got watered done, I really I really just mean the test itself, like the questions itself. I basically the metric is. When I solve an older SAT test, how tired am I compared to when I'm solving uh the current incarnation? And the current incarnation does not tire me out. Like it's just so much easier. I just to finish that one test. And part of that is, you know, is maybe things that could be kind of relatively irrelevant, I guess. But is it really like, which is like just the test itself is shorter, right? But you know, the ability to sit down and do a hard thing for three hours versus now sit down and do a medium hard thing for two hours, like you know, are we maybe potentially losing some information capture when we're like making it all easier and stuff? That said, I think one concession I must make is uh, you know, obviously the SAT can't change the literacy levels of everyone. That's crazy. And there is a literacy. Uh I don't want to say pandemic. That sounds uh like I'm just trying to accurate.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Accurate, I think.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

There is a crisis though, right? Literacy, we're we're having problems with literacy nationally and internationally. Obviously, the you know, if the actual ability, the actual ability levels of students is dropping, then the measurements may also have to accommodate. But but yeah, it does feel watered down.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

This is probably 10 years old now, but there's more kids getting like A's in Harvard that there's ever been before. I forget like there was a report like this. So we have great inflation, and we have like we everyone is amazing. You're no you're you're fine, you're smarter than you, but we don't we can't read and we can't think critically. And I and so just so you know, 2023 was like a seminal moment for us in test prep because like it was kind of when we got off, we really started having kids through the program. And AP US history statistically was the second hardest exam to pass, let alone get a four or five, outside of AP physics. And I have I have AP readers that work for me and in inside as tutors as well. And so she, the it was a retired US history teacher's like college boards, like they're like, hey, we're making some changes in how we're gonna grade this, and that it's not because of dual dual enrollment, which means it's because of dual enrollment in college and high school, but we're easing up on how we grade the LEQ, we're easing up how we grade the DB, like the so like so we went from a 48% pass rate nationally in the US history to like a 73% in one year, which is like unheard of in an AP class because of that. So they're they're easing up, it's not that kids got instantly better, it's that the grading criteria changed in the how the readers are reading the exams.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

Yeah, I that seems like a little different from actually what's happening on the SAT, but but to the to your point, I think there is basically no incentive at any level in the structure to like deflate someone's grade. Like every every school, every middle school would ideally want some of their kids to go to like a good like private high school if possible. Every high school wants their students to also go to like a good, you know, name brand, university, college. Every college wants their kid, uh wants their students to go off and you know get their consulting gigs and whatnot. And so at every level in the stack, like if you're if if any given agent, any given actor is like, should I give them a B or a C? Like every incentive is pointing towards B. Like give them the B. Like uh it's just way less friction. Just give them the B. And then the same thing with the college board, which is like a meta layer on top. You know, just give them a little bit more, you know, just make it a little easier and kind of push shunts the responsibility a little further down the line to the next layer, right? And then it's only when they become it's only when these students have to go out and actually make money where you're like, okay, well, maybe you know, I've been sort of pumped up this whole time, you know, but now I have to actually like prove my capabilities. And then now we're using AI to help with the interviews. So I don't know. I don't know what's gonna happen there with the with the job market. But we're just like pushing the responsibility just further and further down the line. And I I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that is.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

Yeah, I I don't know either. I think we're I think we're sowing the seeds of our own destruction before even AI has the opportunity to do it because um and I and I said, and this is this well, maybe have to re rephrase this on the podcast, but I so I've I've been out of teaching now for almost 10 years. But even in that even one of my seven years of teaching from 2012 to 2016, I they said the non-politically correct thing. I'm like, I think the kids are getting dumber. But like my first year teaching, I taught IB history, right? And it's all writing. They I had to become a writing teacher, I had to become a history teacher that teaches writing, which is not really something I knew how to do at the time. But my first year, the kids actually knew how to write a well-structured essay. By the time I got to that fourth year of teaching it, like, can you write a topic sentence? Like, do you even know how to like make an assertion? And so I think the standardization movement, the move away from literacy-based assessments. I actually, not to brag, I spoke at uh the American Historical Association at a like a conference uh in one of my speaking series was like, move to literacy-based assessments. They're a pain in the butt to grade, but boy, do they tell you more about your teachers. And looking back on my education now in high school, we I don't even know how this curriculum was, but we have basically my 10th grade year was all in the Civil War. But that teacher, all he gave us was essays. And not that I was great at writing them, but you got the content through that literacy. And I'm I'm a big believer in it. And it's like now we have more tools than ever to make it easier to grade, to give feedback, and there's less literacy-based assessments. And so I think that's what we're both experiencing that matriculation.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

Yeah, I I would say the um there's there are people who have done a lot more research on this on early early literacy education than I have. So I'm gonna defer to the the sort of the nerds that are into the research there, but you know, the phonics, just the basics, just phonics and not like aping, like not like aping that you know what you're reading by just listening to cues from your teacher and kind of just like copying what they said, but like kind of putting a spin on it, but actually just reading the thing in front of you, right? Like, like there's some sort of some sort of fundamental disconnect, or maybe multiple disconnects that are happening early on, and we're just seeing a lot of those effects. I mean, as a as a SAT teacher, I'm just seeing the effects of that downstream. And of at a very distant sort of research level interest, you know, I am very curious about you know early literacy development. But yeah, right now I don't think it's a little beyond my purview. So, but yeah, I think there needs to be solutions at every level of the stack. And I I applaud everyone who is trying their hardest to solve the problem in front of them.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

So for a parent listening right now whose kid is scoring, say, 1550 on a reading, writing, and needs to get 700, what's the roadmap? What are the stages to get there?

SPEAKER_00 29:28

So let me just get the framing right. So on the reading and writing, they're scoring what, seven, they're scoring like 600 and they want a 750. Yeah. Yeah, they want to get up in the 750s. So 600 to 750 is um it's actually multiple journeys. Uh, I think the initial um kind of sanity check that you want to do is uh does this student already have the basic background knowledge uh and the basic vocabulary, the basic grammar to be hitting uh something like a 750 in the first place. And so if you just have a student solve the SAT, not once, but maybe around four times, just see if they're naturally gonna start growing from 600 to maybe around 700 uh within just those four tests on their own. Because what happens is a lot of times um parents will jump the gun on trying to get them tutoring uh without actually validating whether their skill level is actually a 600. I mean, it could just be a 600 because it's just it's just their first time ever seeing the test. Like, and they just don't know what the questions are. And so there's they're just wasting time the first time around, just like learning what the test feels like. So first, just validate that 600 is actually their level by having them take four tests or so spaced out. Once they're used to the format and once a sort of score is sort of settling and it's around 600, now we have multiple journeys to go on. The first the first is to just get the grammar out of the way. Like there's just grammar is just not intentionally taught in the US curriculum. So it's just this sort of big gap in the in the students' like knowledge pool. And you need to fill that gap in. Uh because if there are 600, it means that there's a fairly large gap in their grammar. Uh like they just need to learn that stuff. Uh so fill that in. And you can use various curricular materials for this. You know, there's a lot of uh resources out there. And so get that, get them to a point where they're solid on the grammar level questions, because those are pretty much once you know the patterns, once you know how to apply them, you should be good. Then the second journey is then to start taking uh if you could take out of the SAT and you could filter out all the questions that would be rated 700 difficulty or higher. So basically any question that would be rated as a difficulty between 700 and 800, filter all of those out and focus on all focus on all the reading questions, the non-grammar reading questions that are 700 and below. Um what you want to do with this is you want them to be able to predict the correct answer for every single question type without looking at answers. Okay. And uh, if they're relying on process elimination to get the correct answer for these 700 level and below questions, then that's just like that's like being happy that you're back, you can shoot a basketball into the hoop by bouncing it, you know, like off the backboard when you should be aiming for the swish, right? You should be aiming for like a clean connect. Like I read the passage, I know the answer. Oh you revealed the answer choices. I see it. I see the answer right there, right? You want that feeling, and you want to really train that feeling in that student because it's exciting. It's actually quite exciting to be able to totally circumvent the arduous, the strenuous, just the just the tiring process of reading A and double checking all parts of A, reading B, double checking all parts of B, right? You can you can circumvent it all together and you can just be like, oh, that's the answer, right? And you want that O over and over and over. You want to train that on all the questions that are 700 level and below. Uh, because those are the ones that are relatively predictable. Um and then the final journey, the third and final journey uh is from the 700 to the 750. That gets a little bit more complicated because now you have to um use multiple skills, like all the skills that you've developed so far, you need to start being able to orchestrate like the triggering of the skills at the right time and sort of sequence um, like layer multiple skills. Uh, so it's not just like we're not working with one ingredient anymore. You know, you're gonna have to do multiple different things at the same time. Um so that gets pretty complicated. Uh that gets a little like students are pretty different from each other once they're at once they're above the 700 level. Uh, some of them are still worse on grammar than you would expect. Some of them are just just haven't done a lot of reading at school. So some of them they just don't know like enough biology terminology, and some of them, or maybe they just don't know enough like economics terminology. So it is a little bit more, the plan is a little bit more custom from 700 on, but but if your student is overall a very good student at school, they've read a lot, or they've read as much as they should have read at school, and you know, and they're able to predict the answers uh for all the 700 level questions and below, then um then mostly it's just test taking mechanics and repeated practice that'll get them to SF50. And what I mean by test taking mechanics is does your student fall into this spiral uh where if they cannot predict the answer and they look at ABCD and they can't find a match, and then they go into process elimination and do A and B and C and D and they still are not satisfied, do they start spiraling and do they start kind of like fragmenting their thoughts where where out of panic, they'll start, they'll do what they think is good, which is like increase the speed of their eye flickers, right? Where they're just like moving their eyes faster and faster. But really, all that's doing is like kind of catching random words here and there from B. Oh, there's a word from B, there's a word from D, there's a word from the passage, and they're just like going in circles over and over. So this spiraling is quite quite actually any anyone I feel like who's taken a test and remembers that experience probably remembers this experience of like rushing to try to find any answer. Uh so you wanna you wanna you wanna win that psychological game and figure out how to how to get them to not spiral uh how what to do instead. And so these are what I call test taking mechanics. And so uh yeah, if again, if they have the background knowledge, they have the vocabulary, have the grammar, they can predict the answers to the 700-level questions. After that, it's mostly test taking mechanics and just like getting more comfortable uh with um uh with managing the test part of the test.

SPEAKER_01 36:27

So you you're building an app right now? You're are you transitioning away from one-on-one?

SPEAKER_00 36:33

No, um, I am not transitioning away from one-on-one, and yes, I am building an app. Um and the way that that the two kind of relate to each other is uh I want my group classes to be able to have something resembling the experience that I'm able to provide to my one-on-one students. And with software, you can actually software even without AI, you can actually replicate a lot of the moves that are happening in a tutoring session at the individual level for motivated students who might who may not be able to afford, you know, like bespoke one-on-one tutoring. Yeah. So that is the initial motivation there. I do think, you know, not all students will be like software, may never well, software certainly cannot replace certain aspects of the human experience, the human tutoring experience. Like there will be some kinds of students for which the software version of tutoring will never really be enough. You know, and some of the students that I'm really thinking about are kids like maybe kids who have struggle, like who struggle with like motivation, and so they just need to hear more stories, you know. Students who sh have who are maybe undiagnosed ADHD and you know, and have trouble with like just like anything requiring attention, like reading a boring passive for like three minutes or more, right? So, so you know, software may not be able to help in the same way that a human tutor can help. But for I do think for a large number of students, you can actually replicate a lot of this tutoring experience with software. And that comes down to just those little micro moves that happen within a tutoring session that you can't really provide for a group class. A group class, I'm more of an entertainer. I'm an entertainer that's following a script that I know will be good for them. Uh uh, but yeah in a one-on-one tutoring session, I'm I'm actually I've talked very little. Uh I I try to aim to have my students talk maybe 80% of the time in a one-or in two one-on-one tutoring session. Uh so with software, it's not them talking so much, it's more them interacting and running, but still, uh it's the same idea. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

Okay. Well, um I probably have quite I have one more I have one more question to get to. Um I will I hope you'll come back on the podcast. It's been great to get to know you. Oh, there's a part two. We definitely welcome come back because I think we're both aligned. We're trying trying to build a platform as well. I'm interested in democratizing my aspects of prep and creating a really cool community to support you know cross-the-board education. So would love to potentially collaborate on that in the future. Sounds good. My million dollar question though, this is like this is important. How much, much better is the Korean barbecue in Korea?

SPEAKER_00 39:32

A barbecue? Actually, I don't know about your your region, but when I compare to LA, barbecue specifically, that vertical, okay, because Korean food is a lot of food. But that slice of Korean food, yes, honestly, LA LA Korean barbecue is really good. It's different because the meat is usually different. So there's the meat tastes more American, uh, whereas at Giran Asia, the the cows are fed grass, and so there's a sort of brighter taste to the meat. In America, I think cows are fed wheat or something like that, or some mix of things. Grains, yeah. And so the taste is different, but like, you know, you can't knock the amount of love and effort that goes into the pancha and the side dishes and all the little absolutely yeah, yeah. It's it's really good in the in the States as well.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

Yeah, it's uh my my partner, he's I was telling you before the show, it's like spend some time in Vietnam, spend some time in Thailand. He's like finding like he's back ali fa is like ten times better than anything you get here, which is like you know, I mean it's good.

SPEAKER_00 40:42

There's some really good places here, but yeah, I'm interested if it it's I would say if you're in the mother country, what you want to explore is maybe the less um highly competed after categories of food. Yeah. When you think of, yeah, um when you think of like Korean food, I think most people just think barbecue and some people think peeping pub. And you know, Americans once they know it and once they're set on making it, they'll make it fine, they'll make it great. Yeah. But there's gonna be a lot of dishes that are in the motherland that are very hard to find or just not very not popular enough to make money in America. And so those are the dishes that I would actually nudge you towards.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

Okay. Well, I'll have to hit you up for that because we're all into the exploring the different things. So it's been uh a pleasure to have you here. If people are listening and they're like, man, my kid needs help on the reading and writing, and it sounds like this guy, or even the LSAT, where uh they need help and where can they find more about you?

SPEAKER_00 41:50

So you guys, thanks for that. Anyone can just email me Saul at increments.me, or I should probably just update my LinkedIn because I haven't touched it. You have a website. I've touched it in a decade. And I have a website called learn.increments.me. Increments, I-n-c-r-e-m-e-n-t-s.me.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

We'll put all of those links in the show notes and we'll put them on the YouTube description so people can find more out about you. All right.

SPEAKER_00 42:23

Joe, thank you so much for your time.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

So thank you. Enjoy your day since you're just beginning there. And uh yeah, we'll hopefully connect in the future. Sounds good. I had I had a lot of fun. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks for joining the Supported Learning Podcast. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us on the Supported Learning Podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.