For teachers, aides and caretakers

WE WROTE
THE EASY HALF.

A workbook on a shelf teaches nobody. It is paper until an adult opens it with a child, reads the week before the week happens, notices which student has gone quiet, and decides to spend the extra twenty minutes. That decision is the program. Everything we publish is the part that can be done alone, at a desk, by someone who will never meet your students.

The curriculum is the half of this that can be done alone at a desk. The half that decides whether a child learns anything is done by an adult in a room, and we are not that adult.

When people compliment this organization, they compliment the books. The books were the easy half.

The thing we cannot see

WE DO NOT KNOW
YOUR NAME.

Everything is published with no email wall, no login and no license. That was a deliberate choice and we would make it again. It also means we cannot see who is teaching this. We do not know your name, your school or your grade, so we cannot thank you by name and we will not describe you on this site as though we could.

Some of you have written anyway. The material is being taught. Teachers have written to tell us so, homeschool educators among them, and some of them wrote only to say thank you. Those messages are the entire evidence base for the sentence that follows, and they are worth more than that makes them sound: it is being taught, and if a child has learned one thing from these pages, an adult did that. Not the paper, and not us.

What we will not do is turn an inbox into a number. We do not know how many there are, where they teach, how far into a year anyone has gone, or whether any of it is working. Nothing we publish asks for a name, so there is no roster to consult, and we are not going to estimate one and call it a figure. A funder who wants to know how many classrooms are running this deserves a real answer, and the real answer today is that we do not have one.

It is the ordinary, unglamorous work that carries this: the aide who reruns week nine because half the room missed it, the teacher who photocopies on her own prep, the grandparent working through the money year at a kitchen table because nobody else was going to. None of that shows up in a download count. All of it is the actual program.

How it is delivered

TWO SPEEDS.
ONE DELIBERATE
BLANK.

The same ideas are shaped twice, because a nine-year-old inside a school year and a sixteen-year-old with a free summer are not the same delivery problem. Which shape a year takes is decided by who is available to teach it and how much of their attention we can honestly ask for. Where neither shape fits we have not written a year, and the third card below is that, along with the one thing that survives it.

Grades 1 to 6Running today

SLOW, WEEKLY, INSIDE THE SCHOOL YEAR

Thirty-six weeks, one assignment a week, sequenced against the California pacing guide so it reinforces what the class is already doing that month. The mathematics years run from Grade 1 and the money and venture years from Grade 3. It is built this way because it asks for the one resource an elementary school actually has, which is a little time every week for a long time.

Delivered by: The classroom teacher, the instructional aide, the after-school lead, or a caretaker at a kitchen table.

Grades 7 and 8No printed year

NOT BUILT, AND NOT FOR LACK OF TIME

No printed year is written for Grade 7 or Grade 8, and the reason is the medium rather than the material. A printed workbook holds a seven-year-old who has an adult sitting beside them, and eight weeks in a summer room holds a sixteen-year-old. We do not believe paper holds a thirteen-year-old. Writing thirty-six weeks of it for that age would be writing something we did not expect anyone to finish.

What stays: Leadership is the one part that stays. It is taught in a room rather than read off a page, so the medium problem does not apply to it, and the behaviors it teaches are worth having at thirteen whether or not a business is ever attached to them. A student walking toward high school can use them everywhere else in their life.

What would change the rest: That band needs a different form of delivery, almost certainly digital, and we have not built one. Until it exists the honest thing is a blank rather than a book. This is the argument of this whole page turned on ourselves: a curriculum is only as good as its delivery, which means there are ages we should not publish for until we can reach them.

Grades 9 to 12Not yet delivered

ONE COHORT, FOUR SUMMERS, EIGHT WEEKS EACH

The same ideas in the opposite shape. Eight weeks inside one summer, run the way a business school runs, and then the same students come back and do it again the next summer, and the next, across their high school years. An older student can hold a whole idea at once, and a summer can be given over to it in a way a Tuesday afternoon cannot. This is the Executives Track. It is designed and not yet delivered.

Delivered by: Taught by Cindy Ha, the founder, in person, for the first cohort.

13 full school years, 468 weeks in all, are written and free to download today. Which grades those cover, and which are still only designed, is set out honestly on the curriculum map, which says the same thing about Grades 7 and 8 in every strand it appears in.

Why it is a cohort

FOUR SUMMERS. THE SAME PEOPLE.

A group that has been through three summers together can attempt things a group meeting for the first time cannot. That is the entire reason this is one cohort rather than a course offered four times. There is still no test to get in and no prior year to have completed for the first summer.

Eight weeks a summer, four summers, the same room and the same people: for a student who has one, this is their business school. It is also not a business school. No degree, no credit, no transcript, and no tuition either. What we do and do not grant.

Our side of it

IF YOU ARE GOING TO
CARRY THIS, HERE IS
WHAT WE OWE YOU.

We cannot make the twenty minutes appear. What we can do is make sure not one of them is wasted on checking our work, hunting for an answer key, or reprinting something that came out gray.

Every answer, recomputed rather than remembered

The teacher guide carries the answer to every problem in the book, and each one is recomputed from the problem as printed by a script that refuses to build the book if a single answer disagrees. You should not have to check our arithmetic at ten at night.

Prep that fits inside a prep period

Each week is two pages, front and back, with the common wrong answers and what to say to a student who is stuck written out beside them. There is no training week and no certification.

It prints on the copier you already have

Every page was proofed in grayscale. Structure lives in the linework and color is accent only, so a black-and-white classroom copy loses nothing.

Nothing to sign, nothing to buy, no account

You can run a full year without ever telling us you exist. That is the design, not an oversight, and it is why the log is a count rather than a roster.

Tell us where it breaks

A teacher who writes in November to say week twelve falls apart is giving this curriculum something no funder can. We would rather hear that than a compliment, and we will say in the revision notes that it came from a classroom.

An open ask, and the only one on this site

WE NEED ONE DISTRICT
TO SAY YES.

We are looking for one school district willing to host the first cohort.

We are asking a district to commit to one summer. Eight weeks, a room, a schedule, and permission to teach a cohort. Nothing is bought, nothing is adopted, and nothing past that first summer is signed for. What we are building is four of those summers with the same students, so the conversation we would rather have is about the first of four than about a one-off. Nobody is handed a binder and wished luck, because a program has to be run by the people who wrote it before it can honestly be handed to anyone else.

Cindy Ha will teach the first cohort herself. She built a business without this material and met the formal version of it years later, which is the whole reason the organization exists. The first summer is where what she learned late gets handed over early, in person, by her. Her story is here.

If you sit anywhere near that decision, in a district office, a high school, a county office of education or a summer learning program, one email is the whole process. There is nothing to sign, no cost to the district, and no second year to commit to.

Young Innovators for Change · 501(c)(3) · EIN 33-1544346 · Programs aimed at San Gabriel Valley, California

Start anywhere

YOU DO NOT NEED
OUR PERMISSION.

Take a book. Take one week of it. Run it in an after-school hour, a small group, or a single kitchen table. Nothing is gated, nothing expires, and no one here will ever ask you to account for it.

If it works, that was you. If it breaks, write and tell us where, and the next revision will be better because a real classroom found the seam.