In this episode, we sit down with Jessica Gerson, a former math‑anxious student turned educator who refused to let the next generation suffer the same way she did. After years of trial, failure, and deep reflection in the classroom, Jessica built MathQuest—a math enrichment camp that looks nothing like a traditional tutoring center. Instead of rewarding speed, memorization, and perfect answers, MathQuest rewards slow thinking, resilience, mistakes, patterns, and sharing one's ideas. The secret sauce? Critical thinking, productive struggle, and play. Jessica transforms fractions and division into whimsical adventures involving wizards, healing potions, astro nuggets, and stranded astronauts. Children work together on open‑ended tasks that are just a little too hard for them, fail forward, laugh, and then celebrate their brave thinking in front of their families. What emerges is not just math fluency—but a child who believes, "I am someone who can do hard things." This is the story of how one woman turned her own childhood pit‑in‑her‑stomach into a treasure hunt for courage.
Reach out to Jessica, and she can share what she has done to engage Math learners experiencing Math Anxiety.
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