The school and the method

A short account of where the teaching came from, how a course is built, and the boundary the school keeps on what it will claim.

How it started

Teaching began in 2018, in Trondheim, Norway, as a set of worksheets written for one team. They existed because the same handful of figures kept being read the wrong way round for the same handful of reasons, and writing the explanation down once was cheaper than giving it again every quarter.

What made it worth publishing was the shape it had taken: short lessons, a written handout for every one of them, exercises on figures that had really been published, and somebody reading the work that came back. That last part is expensive and it is the reason the catalogue is six courses rather than sixty.

What is taught here

One subject, in six pieces: reading a table, percentages in everyday use, basic probability, building a spreadsheet from an empty one, reading and building charts that do not mislead, and checking a statement line by line. Every one of them is something an adult already does on a Tuesday, taught in the form it is actually met.

Each course publishes its syllabus, its hours and its assessment before anybody enrols. A syllabus that only appears after payment is a syllabus somebody is ashamed of.

The method

Four commitments carry most of the weight, and none of them is complicated.

One idea at a time. A lesson has a single objective, stated at the start, and ends when that objective has been demonstrated rather than when the hour is up.
Everything is also written. Video is convenient and useless to search. Every recorded lesson has a handout carrying the same content and the same worked examples, so the material can be reread at the desk where the figures are.
Work gets marked by a person. Exercises are returned with comments. An automatically scored quiz measures whether a page was read; a marked exercise measures whether the reasoning transferred.
Say what a course will not do. Each syllabus carries a short note on what it leaves out, so nobody enrols expecting the neighbouring subject.

A steady pace is part of that design rather than a limitation of it. Material delivered faster than an adult with a job can absorb it is material that gets abandoned in week three.

How a course is built

A course starts as an outline written by somebody who works with the figures being taught. It is run first with a small group, whose questions are the real editing pass: the places where a lesson has to be asked about twice are the places that get rewritten. Only then is it recorded and published.

Lessons are prepared and recorded by practitioners rather than by presenters. We do not publish a wall of portraits, because a course should stand on its syllabus and on the work it gets out of people, not on a photograph.

How the material is kept current

Each course is checked once a year and revised in place when a tool changes underneath it or a public dataset used in an exercise is republished. Where a revision is substantial, the participants of a running intake receive the revised material rather than the version they started with.

Corrections reported by a participant are the most useful mail the school receives, and they are answered by name. In a subject made of arithmetic, an error in a handout is not a small thing.

What the school does not do

It does not place anyone in a role and it is not an employment agency. It does not award a regulated qualification, a licence, or an equivalence to a state examination. It makes no claim about pay, hiring or the result of any test, because none of those is within the gift of a teaching operation.

It does not teach a method for predicting anything. The probability course teaches how to read a proportion that has already been stated and how to reason about independent events; it does not supply a system, and no course here suggests that one exists.

Nothing published here is individual professional advice. The statement-checking course in particular teaches general practice; a question about your own accounts, your own obligations or your own contracts belongs with a qualified professional who can see the whole picture.