Episode 306 | Ellie & Jacob Smedley | Confidence Academics | The EdisonOS Podcast

Key Topics Covered

• Eight years of curriculum writing that changed everything - How spending nearly a decade crafting math questions for a national curriculum company gave Ellie a level of insight into how assessments are designed that most tutors never develop, and why understanding the intent behind wrong answer choices is the single most transferable skill from curriculum development to live tutoring
• The confidence benchmark that opens every engagement - Why Ellie's nine-session SAT prep course begins not with a timed diagnostic but with a four-domain ranking exercise where students order areas by confidence rather than ability, how that single step opens conversations about math beliefs and anxiety that scores alone never surface, and why naming what feels hardest first changes everything about how students approach the rest of the program
• Show what you know as a philosophy, not just a technique - How Ellie's core instructional framework shifts the student's internal narrative from pass-or-fail to process and growth, why encouraging students to write out all their work creates a visible trail they can actually review and correct, and how that shift alone reduces the all-or-nothing thinking that drives most math anxiety
• Wrong answer choices as misconception detectors - Why Ellie considers the design of wrong answers to be one of the most underappreciated skills in education, how a question like 2x as a wrong answer choice specifically targets the misconception that x times x equals 2x rather than x squared, and why every tutor should sit with a test and write out the targeted misconception next to every incorrect option
• A husband who handles everything when the alphabet gets involved - How Jacob's background running Smedley Digital, a full-service SEO agency, gives Confidence Academics a marketing and business infrastructure that most solo tutors spend years trying to build, and why the division of labor between math expertise and business development is the unusual competitive advantage that has kept their calendar full since launch
• Realistic pricing rooted in national benchmarks - Why Ellie and Jacob's first step when establishing their rates was researching the US average hourly rate for a tutor with a master's degree and 15 years of experience, how they use first-session discounts to lower the barrier for families who are uncertain, and why being honest about what people will actually pay is more sustainable than pricing based on what you hope to earn

Conclusion

This conversation is a warm and technically sharp look at what happens when deep curriculum expertise and genuine student empathy combine in the same tutoring room. Listen to the full episode for the complete methodology and actionable strategies that could transform how any student approaches math, standardized test preparation, and the belief that they are capable of more than their last score suggests.

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