Obsidian Delta

Part 2 of 5 · Opportunities: built on open infrastructure

  1. What is already solved
  2. A tutoring practice with a kit for every hard topic
  3. French editions: a business in a gap
  4. The first week on the job, from one page
  5. Run an initiative on the desk

October 18, 2026 History

A tutoring practice with a kit for every hard topic

A private tutor has two things to sell that cannot be made in bulk: the hour, and the relationship that makes the hour work. The preparing around them can be done once: the plan for a hard topic, the way into it, the write-up afterwards. A kit does that work once, and the hour goes to the person in front of you. At Obsidian Delta we build kits like that on the open Meta DAX infrastructure, done for you, and a tutor can run the free recipe instead. The practice starts with one topic.

One topic, one kit, many Editions

Words into Algebra began as an interview. A maths tutor who taught O-level in England was asked what learners find hardest and what he found hardest to teach. The hardest topic was turning a sentence into an equation: learners who can solve 3x + 4 = 19 freeze when the same thing arrives as words. The hardest problem was the clock.

Open the kit and there are two pages, one for the tutor and one for the learner, and five interactive 3D scenes. The tutor’s page hands time back. Three routes, Quick, Standard or Deep, are chosen before you start; each is complete on its own and ends with a note that tells the next session where to begin. A fast path shows when to skip ahead and when to drop back. Six slips are named in advance, with what to say when each one happens. And before every example the learner says the sentence back in their own words while you wait, which was the tutor’s own idea. The page’s rule: “If you are short of time, cut an example, not the pause.”

Then open Nova’s Edition: the same kit, re-made for one learner, a fifteen-year-old who loves space. Nova is made up. The five equations, the slips, the routes and the pause are kept; the sentences, the look and the tutor’s page change, and the page tells the tutor “Don’t explain space to her: let her correct you.” One kit becomes an Edition per learner.

The writing-up is the other evening job. The Tutor’s Desk follows Nadia and her learner Theo, who is twelve (both invented), through one session in three panels: her rough notes, the parent-ready report, and a free coaching prompt on the problem she keeps hitting. It returns moves to try, a script for the first two minutes and a twelve-minute plan. The sample report shows the same turn twice, once in maths and once in reading, each report beside the rough notes it was built from.

What the evidence says

Start with the hour itself. Indeed Canada’s page for tutors, last updated on 5 October 2026, gives an average of 24.05 dollars an hour from 5.4k reported salaries. That is pay, not what a family is charged. We found no survey that isolates independent tutors’ rates, so we quote none, and no credible figure for how a tutor’s week divides between preparing and teaching. The nearest is about teachers: a Gallup survey for the Walton Family Foundation (2,232 U.S. public K-12 teachers, March to April 2025) found that those using AI tools at least weekly estimated saving 5.9 hours a week. It is a self-estimate, and an hour saved matters for what it is spent on.

The closest test of a tool that stands beside a tutor is Tutor CoPilot. In a randomized controlled trial of live tutoring, learners whose tutors had access to it were 4 percentage points more likely to master topics, and learners of lower-rated tutors improved mastery by 9 percentage points; Stanford lists the study with the same two figures. That tool coached tutors during the session and is not ours; we cite it for its direction: support for the person in the seat, not a replacement, lifted what learners mastered.

Ours is earlier. No Meta DAX kit has been measured with a tutor. The Foundation’s measure of human delta value says of its own measurement plan that all of it is “designed, not run”, and the tutor skill is labelled “draft, untested” in its own file.

What to do this week

List your three hardest topics to teach: the ones where you re-explain the same step every time, or dread the session. The first kit is the one you dread most.

Then pick a route; either is a way in. The free one: the tutor door sets out the tutor skill and the plain prompts, and the Words into Algebra page carries a short prompt that re-makes the kit around your own learner. It runs on the AI subscription you already have, and you read what comes back before a learner sees it. The done-for-you one: you bring the topic and the way you teach it, we build the kit and the Editions, and you read them before they go to a learner. That is the packages door on our opportunities page.

What the kit cannot do is the part you keep. Its tutor’s page says it cannot read a face or decide that today should end on something the learner got right, and it gives that work a card called “What only you can do.” The preparing it takes off you is what we call reclaimed cognition; human delta value is what you then bring that the kit could not.

This is part two of five on building on open infrastructure. Part one, What is already solved, lists the free pieces under all of this; part three, French editions: a business in a gap, takes the Edition idea into a second language. The same seat, read from a parent’s table, is in the Foundation’s piece, If you are the tutor in the group.

What would you do with the two hours a week you no longer spend preparing? Message Jason on LinkedIn with your answer.

Sources

Where this connects

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