Dreading math time every day? Feeling unqualified to teach it or overwhelmed by the daily battles? In this conversation with Nadim from CTC Math, we're exploring how to shift from being the teacher to being the coach—and why that makes all the difference for busy homeschool families.

Nadim shares honest insights about building math independence, the truth about screen time and dopamine, and why short explanations with lots of practice work better than long lectures that confuse kids.

In this episode:

✅Why 5-minute explanations with 25 minutes of practice beat 30-minute lectures every time

✅The truth about screen time, dopamine, and what's really damaging our kids

✅How adaptive questions meet your child at their level and bring them up (instead of widening the gap)

✅The freedom of K-12 access, anywhere/anytime learning, and a 12-month money-back guarantee

✅How CTC Math helps overwhelmed or unqualified moms outsource the teaching while staying the encourager

Ready to end the daily math battles?

Try CTC Math with their free trial at CTCMath.com—no credit card required, and full memberships come with a 12-month money-back guarantee!

Recommended Resource:

Free trial at CTCMath.com

Nadim El-Rahi serves as the COO and CMO of CTCMath, where he leads product development, marketing, and family engagement for one of the world’s most trusted online maths programs. With a background in mathematics, economics, and education, he works closely with homeschool parents to understand their day-to-day challenges and build tools that genuinely make learning easier. Nadim is passionate about helping kids develop confidence, mastery, and a love of learning through clear instruction and self-paced progression. Representing a program used by tens of thousands of families, he brings both practical experience and a heartfelt commitment to supporting parents in their mission to help their kids thrive academically and personally.

Follow Nadim and CTCMath on their social media accounts:

Facebook

IG

TikTok

YouTube

Show Notes:

Hey everyone, Kerry Beck here with Homeschool Coffee Break, where we help you stop the overwhelm so you can take a coffee break. I actually have coffee. Nadim's my guest today. He has coffee, too. We are ready.

Y'all don't know this—Nadim represents CTC Math, so it is 3 o'clock my time in the afternoon. He's over in New Zealand, so he's definitely getting his cup of coffee. I guess I'm getting my afternoon coffee, because it's morning time over there when we are recording this. I appreciate you just getting up and being available for us today.

We're going to talk about math, because I know that's a struggle for a lot of moms. They're not sure what to do, because if they're not a math person, they're just like, oh, here comes my math time.

Before we do, Nadim, could you just tell people a little bit about yourself with maybe CTC math?

Nadim: I appreciate that, Kerry. Well, I'm Nadim. I've been working at CTC Math for over 13 years now. I'm the COO here, with a special interest in mathematics and education, especially childhood all-rounded education, I would say.

CTC Math is an online math curriculum from K-12 with short, concise, to-the-point video tutorials.

Let's just begin our time. We're going to get straight to it with math and some of the struggles that moms have, because some of them are overwhelmed, but some people just feel unqualified to even teach math. We either have the overwhelmed mom, we have the unqualified mom. What would you say to a mom who just dreads the part of her day that has to do with math?

Nadim: Great question, Kerry, and I would say that you're not alone. Math anxiety is common, even among parents who loved math at school.

I think we can shift the thinking, especially in today's day and age. There's a lot of outsourcing that can occur, and we can outsource those subjects that we don't particularly feel comfortable teaching, or want to teach, and then our goal as homeschoolers isn't to be the teacher as such, but to be the coach or encourager.

I think kids build independence through this process, and parents can really focus on guiding, rather than planning every step or teaching every concept.

That's such an important thing for each of us to decide. What are we going, as moms or dads, what are we going to actually teach, and then what can we use as resources? I'll be really honest. I loved math in high school. I was a math minor in college, and then we moved forward 20 or whatever years to homeschooling my kids in math.

When we got to high school math, I was like, I don't really like math as much as I used to. I loved teaching the elementary, I taught that and everything, but sometimes I got to the point—now, this was 20 years ago—I had to find things that would work with my kids and with me.

I also had to build in habits and routines so that it would become consistent. From your experience, can you give us any habits or routines that might help kids stay consistent in their math without stressing through the whole homeschool time?

Nadim: Yeah, for sure. I'm a big fan of being consistent and implementing routines, but I will say each child is unique, and it's important to implement what's important for your child, knowing your child and their needs.

But I would generally say that it's better off having a little bit of math every day, rather than a whole day worth of math. You might integrate a short regular session, say 15 to 20 minutes long, more frequently, perhaps 4 or 5 days a week, rather than longer sessions on 1 or 2 days a week.

It is important to have that consistency, that time, and that time may alter on different days of the week, but you know in advance, or your children know in advance, they will be doing math at 10:30 on Wednesday, for instance.

I would also say that with consistency, there has to be structure. I heard a lot of people talk about rewards. I don't know if I'm a big fan of rewards. I don't know if rewarding your children for doing something that they should be doing is sending the right message.

But what I would say is that you can flip it. If there's something that they want to do, or something that they're requesting, or something that they're asking for, make sure that they do their math, or whatever chore, or whatever they're putting off, to unlock that thing that they wish to do next. That just teaches them a bit of order in life.

Again, each child's unique, your family situations are—you know your children best.

I think you're becoming my new best friend, because I love that, because I'm not like, yes, I think kids need to do things because they're expected, and that's just part of life and learning some self-discipline as well. Yet, you can build it into, you gotta finish all this, and then you go outside and play, or whatever the thing happens to be.

I know moms get busy a lot of times, but yet they really want to support their kids in math, but they're busy with other subjects, or let's just face it, cooking 3 meals a day and trying to balance it. How do you encourage parents to support their kids in math in that situation?

Nadim: I think there's a few things here. I think we need to encourage independence. And how do we do that? Well, we need a structure or a framework for that. We need a system for them to use and adapt that will promote that. If the current system is not creating that environment, you may need to look at alternatives.

I'm going to talk a little bit about CTC Math here, because it really does lend in with the busy parents. If you've got video tutorials that explain each and every concept, if you've got automated reporting and questions and grading, if you can set tasks in advance, then receive the reports to ensure the accountability is there, then checking math doesn't become a 30, 60-minute exercise. It becomes a 5-minute exercise.

You're just there to add the polish, to add the encouragement. Perhaps if there's a certain concept that they're struggling with, show them how to unlock or view additional material.

It's really about that structure. If you've got the structure in place, it allows for independent learning. Now, at the same time, if they go quiet for weeks, you need to check in, because sometimes they've gone, well, if I don't bother mom or dad about this, they're not going to bother me about this. They're very clever. Our kids are super clever. We also need to have those frequent check-ins when they're not checking in with us.

I love that independence work. You may not know this about me, but I teach moms about leadership education and learning independence and critical thinking skills, and that they eventually—I mean, okay, a 5-year-old may need a lot more help than a 15-year-old, but by the time they're in high school, they should be working independently, and they should even be helping plan their week, I believe, so that they can actually be able to launch into adulthood and know how to live a life.

I love that independence, and I did not know about CTC Math back in 2004, 5, 6, when my kids were teenagers. So I did go find something that helped them, and that would do those short little lessons, because that's what would help be consistent in there as well.

You want moms to be intentional, but they don't want to—this is the other thing with leadership education, you don't want to just be checking off a bunch of boxes and moving forward, because you need to think about the full realm, and are you really raising your child educationally and intentionally? How would that translate for homeschool moms or families so they're not just checking off the boxes?

Nadim: I think if you're going with the mindset that everything is a teachable moment, that really resets your thinking. Even the good is teachable. The bad is great, because that's teachable.

I'll share a bit of a personal story. My eldest daughter, she's 9, and she is very smart, and has a great sense of justice, but to the point where it overrides charity. She thinks that if someone else is being mean, she has the right to be mean back, because that's what they deserve.

We were having this conversation, and it really offended my wife and I that we've got a child who's not the kindest. But we both realized that this is actually great, because no child is perfect, everyone has character defects. I wasn't working on my character defects until my 20s.

But this ability to see that you can help your children as soon as possible, and I think that's very much not checking the box. If we go in with this attitude of teachable moments, that is great. That, of course, extends to math as well.

I would say that checking a box is very easy in math. Even we think, if we get a long 40-minute lesson, and we get a 20- or 30-minute explanation with just 10 minutes of practice, the 5-minute explanation with that 25 minutes of practice, or 35 minutes worth of practice, is far more effective.

Often, the long, drawn-out explanation confuses the child. Less is more.

We can have a mastery approach in our teaching of our children, where they build up their skill, but then incorporate spiral review, perhaps on a Thursday or a Friday, and have that combination going. But if we teach too many concepts at once, if we don't go with that mastery explanation, the children are drowning in it.

Again, that's not to dismiss spiral learning. You can have the spiral review once a week.

I love that, and I think that's—we think like moms. They start talking and teaching, and they're thinking, the more I talk and the more I teach, the more my kids are going to learn, and that is not happening. I love this idea of a 5-minute explanation, and then let them put it into practice.

I'm a big believer in mastery, especially in math, because if they don't master a concept, you don't just keep checking the boxes and moving on to the next concept. You've got to make sure they understand it, because it all builds on each other. I just thank you for sharing that. I think that is so important, and the idea of the spiral and the review of past concepts as well.

I want to talk about CTC, but before we do, can you just share a story of a homeschool family, maybe, who saw some real change in their child's math confidence or results, and what made that difference?

Nadim: Yeah, we've got quite a few stories, actually. Amber springs to mind. She's been using CTC Math with her nine children for quite a while now. But I think the theme that comes through, and we've got countless testimonials on our website, if you go to our website and click what others say, you'll be forever scrolling.

But I think that the consistent theme that comes through is that the daily battles have not completely ended. They never do. We've always got daily battles. But certainly when it comes to math, they're not what they used to be, and the tears are no more.

It can become incredibly stressful when you're trying to teach something and it's just not getting through. I think that stress builds up between parent and child over time, and the starting point of that stress on a given day is at a higher point.

I think removing those daily battles comes through, and they're real stories that we consistently get. Our mission is to have a positive impact on as many families as possible through the enjoyment and learning of math. We hope that we continue to help confidence grow in these children.

Well, I personally have not used it because my grandkids, they're doing other—they're little—but the families I talk to that use CTC Math, it is amazing. They're just like, oh no, this is what we're using, and we are going to keep going.

I know one of the things, and I like this, is that you want to let children learn at their own pace through the videos and the questions and everything. How does that structure of letting them learn at their own pace support both the parent and the kids in a homeschool?

Nadim: Well, the heavy lifting's done for you, so no explanations are required. Those video tutorials are there, so you don't have to do that heavy lifting.

I would also say that whether the child's 5 or 18, they're able to access the material themselves. If they can't read, the questions are read out to them. They watch a video tutorial, get a short, concise explanation. They jump to the interactive questions that are adaptive in nature. They change in difficulty level based on the student's ability, your child's ability. So they go up.

Sometimes what happens when we learn from a textbook or a non-adaptive material is that the child's ability might be here, and the questions are here. The questions get gradually more difficult, but the child's ability doesn't improve, because they're just not getting it, so the gap widens.

What's really important is that the questions meet the child at their level, and bring them up. That's what we do with the adaptive style questions.

There are also—we for sure promote pen and paper math, so we want children to have pen and paper in front of them. There's printables that they can have, and we've got that spiral review with the weekly revisions and the diagnostic tests.

There's also a whole bunch of great features that automate this whole process and help busy moms with that structure. You pick and choose the tools that best suit your family's needs. That's really important. You don't go in using all the tools of CTC Math, because it would be overwhelming.

But you pick the ones that you need, whether it's setting tasks, and you can set an entire year's worth of tasks through a couple of clicks of a button. You can create custom worksheets. You can choose and select the various reports that you want. You can use the diagnostics to go back and fill those gaps.

Math is a building block. If there are holes, we need to go back and review them. Because you have access from kindergarten to calculus, you can identify and pinpoint previous lessons. But at the same time, if your child's doing really well, why hold them back? Let them go on, let them continue at their own pace.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It sounds like such a great fit, because some kids are really going to struggle, and they need those questions brought down a little till they actually understand the concept, and then other kids are getting it like this, and they just need to move on forward.

I know this program's all online, so if you have parents, maybe, that are like, I'm not sure about an online math program, what would you say to them? What are some benefits? I know I work with some parents, they don't want their kid on the computer all day long, but there are, like you said, you pick and choose where mom's going to actually be teaching face-to-face, and then where kids are. What would be the benefits of doing an online program?

Nadim: Yeah, and Kerry, I'll start by saying that my kids are 9, 7, and 5. No one has an iPad, no one has their own personal device, no one has a computer, and no one will be getting any of those for some time.

We do have a computer in a public space that every family member has access to and uses. I am very strongly against the social media for my children, and anything that is addictive in nature. Anything that was built to be addictive.

I don't know if it's the screen time that impacts the child. I don't know if it's looking in front of a screen. I think it is, if it's for hours and hours and hours, don't get me wrong. But I think the thing that's doing the most damage is what's impacting the kid's dopamine levels.

Everything is built to be addictive these days. Even I see a lot of ed tech companies now switching and going, oh, let's build avatars, let's unlock missions, let's have stars and this and that, and let's play with the kids' dopamine levels so that we keep them on. There's language programs out there for kids and adults that are a perfect example of this.

I would say that I am concerned too. CTC Math is built to improve student outcomes. It's not built to keep your child on the screen any longer than they need to, to learn that concept and understand that concept.

We do have some levels of encouragement, but it's not to the level of keeping them hooked. That is really, really important. Anything that is addictive should not be placed in front of our children.

I'll give you a very simple example as well. Kids' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. If we go back to when I used to watch TV, which wasn't that long ago, I would have to sit through commercials. I would have to sit through some boring commercials, while watching one episode.

Now, kids, through online streaming, can watch an episode commercial-free. The other thing was, I'd have to wait one whole week to see the next episode. So there's some resilience, there's some patience built in there. Perhaps TV wasn't the best thing. It wasn't as bad and as addictive as it is now.

Now, children can watch an entire season in a day! What took us 6 months? They're consuming in a day or two. This is the real problem. This is what we have to look at and really assess.

Now, I would 100% respect anyone that doesn't think screen time is a good fit for their children, and I think pen and paper style math is a great way. But then, it comes with its—who does the teaching? Because the child cannot learn reading a textbook. It does not work. You can't read math and absorb that information.

The other thing is, with technology these days, the things have advanced, so these adaptive questions are very powerful, because they really do build confidence. They're not seeing anything too difficult, and they're not seeing anything too easy. So, their attention is constantly switched on, and they're constantly learning at the same time.

A lot of pros and cons. We gotta balance these things out, we gotta take it all in, and we gotta make an evaluation for our family.

You just spoke my language, especially when you brought up dopamine and the addiction, and I read a book I guess this summer, called The Anxious Generation. I mean, there are a few little things I didn't agree with them, but so much—I was a child of the 60s, and when you see that playground, and the kids are hanging off these metal things that our parents—parents today, or helicopter parents, they're like, we never let them, gotta have a safety net.

It was so good. That's a whole other conversation, but I do want to just reiterate, we need to be careful with what we put in front of our kids and screens.

I was a little concerned, because I have an older granddaughter, not a teenager, but for some reason, I thought my daughter had said, oh, I think we might give her a phone, and in my head, I'm like—and I brought the conversation up this summer, and she was like, oh, no, Mom, and we're not having social media either. I mean, they need to be almost out of the house, which gave me a lot of peace and comfort, because I just was like, so it just made me feel good that we were all on the same page.

That's a whole other story, but thank you for bringing up the dopamine. I do think there's a difference, and I interviewed someone else, and she was saying all screens aren't bad. It's the ones that are addictive, the ones that are gamifying everything, and that's the thing. She started talking more about the brain and the mind and all of that kind of stuff, which made me remember that online teaching can be good, and it can be a tool, and it can help lessen the overwhelm of everything that a mom's doing, because you can't do it all, even though people may say that.

The other thing I've been curious about, CTC talks about giving families freedom to sort of fit math into their unique schedule, handle catch-up or advancement, the kid that's struggling, the kid's moving ahead, and then monitoring. Can you just tell us a little bit about how that works?

Nadim: Yes, so access from kindergarten to calculus, so your children can go in to any grade level that they need help with. That's super important for flexibility, because you don't want them at a level that they're not ready for.

Also, you can do it anywhere, anytime. We hear of families who are sitting in the doctor's waiting room with their device, and watching the video tutorials with some headphones, and completing the questions. We're actually very popular in the RV community.

RV families will always have an internet connection, because they're always on the road. All you need is an internet connection. There's countless testimonials, and countless photos of people doing CTC Math in the greatest places, in front of nature.

It really is, and if you miss a lesson, or you want to catch up on the summer slide, it's always available for you. And again, if they're doing really, really well, move them ahead. Just continue on to the next lesson.

Parents can adjust tasks and skip topics once they're mastered, and there's real-time progress. You also have access—a family plan gives you access to all your children. There's no cap on it, as long as they live under your home. So that makes it very easy.

That sounds great. If a family is interested, they just want to be introduced to CTC Math in their homeschool, what would you suggest for them?

Nadim: Yeah, two things. One, visit our website, and there's a free trial. No commitment, no credit card. It is a light version, a guest version, and that's because, two, a full membership comes with a 12-month money-back guarantee, so there's no questions asked.

If you try CTC Math, and it doesn't work for you and your family, send us an email, give us a call, we'll refund your payment, no questions asked. This is because we do not want you using a curriculum or a program that is not benefiting your child. We don't want to be a roadblock for you to move on to something else.

We asked parents, what's your biggest concern when selecting math curriculum? And it was that it won't work, and I'm stuck with it for the entire year. It shouldn't be like that. We need to support the greater cause, we need to push the cart in the same direction.

I don't say CTC Math is 100% fit for everyone, because each child is unique and different, and there's plenty of wonderful tools out there. There really is. It's amazing. Across all subjects. So there's something more important at play, and we would say that we believe that CTC Math certainly works for the vast majority. But please reach out if it's not for you.

That's so good. Remind everyone what your website is, and we will put that in the show notes as well.

Nadim: Yeah. CTCMath.com. Cut through curriculum. CTCMath.com.

That is awesome. Thank you so much for being here today. Just in closing, is there anything that you would like to leave us with?

Nadim: Keep up the good work. It's amazing that we are the primary educators of our children. That is so important. It's something so special. Keep up the good work.

That sounds great. Thank you, Nadim. I really appreciate you spending time with us today.

Ready to end the daily math battles? Try CTC Math with their free trial at CTCMath.com—no credit card required. Full memberships come with a 12-month money-back guarantee, no questions asked. Visit the website today and see how short video tutorials, adaptive questions, and automated grading can transform math time in your homeschool!