Margaret Wente has a very interesting story about an American fellow named Salman Khan who has quickly become an educational maven. Here’s one of his videos, which I watched, that is absolutely excellent.
Bill Gates has given him some money to help him form The Khan Academy.
As more & more kids use his videos to actually learn something, watch for teachers unions across America and Canada to actively try to destroy him. 🙁
Khan’s no lefty. I’ve met him briefly. Once this got big on him and he started rolling with it, it was meant as an escape from the public system for kids to actually learn what they needed for real life, not imagining it would actually get adopted by the system. He actually thought some people would be able to yank their kids our of the public schools and home school, with this taking the burden off mom to remember all the trivial material bs.
Biggest problem is when it is adopted, some teachers are too dumb to get how to use it. Fortunately the kids figure it out themselves. His videos don’t grapple much with identity and feeling and all that.]
He’s got enough material to put someone most of the way through an engineering or science degree, but not so much a class warfare strategies degree.
I always thought to be a “moby” was to be “d*ck”, as in Moby Dick…
YES WE KHAN!
I used Khan Academy for calculus and LOVE IT! I couldn’t make head or tale of my textbook until I watched his videos, and confidently expect that Khan will be getting me through my calculus exam.
Alternative education = the greatest.
“I used Khan Academy for calculus and LOVE IT! I couldn’t make head or tale of my textbook …”
Looks like you should have used it for English, also.
Its rote learning, with an ability to keep at a student until they pass a section.
Its been done before, and is opposed to the “creative self directed learning” of today.
Which is why it works on students and will fail in the union-leftysphere.
That’s a very interesting way of teaching math and I think I’ll recommend it to a friend of mine whose daughter has been struggling with math.
What it also tells me is that there are a lot of people who have trouble reading. I’d be totally bored in class listening to (in my opinion at the time) a very slowly talking teacher explaining something that was immediately obvious when I read it and most of the math I taught myself was from books that had lots of problems and solutions to the problems at the end of the book. Even now I find myself getting very impatient listening to something being explained too slowly such as in the example video on derivatives.
What I found helpful was a hypertext approach where one would read a book which had a problem one would do, and depending on what solution one was closest too, would turn to the page number associated with that solution and either get extra instruction if one got the answer wrong or move on to a more complex topic. This would be trivially easy to implement in html and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone has already done this.
Because of the proliferation of youtube videos using immense amount of bandwidth to express often trivial amounts of information, that tells me that there are some serious deficits in symbolic processing that are occurring among the N. American population. Rather than having almost 16 minutes of instruction, a single page of an old math book would have all of the information provided in that youtube video and would take a fraction of the time to read and comprehend. Where the detailed approach that Khan uses would be useful for me would be if I’m bashing my head against the wall in some arcane area of mathematics and need to figure out where I’m going wrong.
While people do learn in different ways – I never went to lectures at med school unless it was my turn to take notes, other people seemed to need to hear someone speaking the information before they could learn it. It was amazing to see the wide variety of techniques that people came up with that worked for them personally to comprehend medicine but which didn’t coincide with my particular way of thinking.
Education is way overdue for a major overhaul and the classic teacher will be extinct soon. What there will be a market for will be 1:1 online tutors in specific areas of knowledge. Likely these will get paid on an hourly basis with rates negotiated between tutor and student in a system like Neal Stephenson described in his book The Diamond Age. Right now the primary function of schools is as very expensive daycare centers and, daycare services for children can be provided at a fraction of the price we currently pay in school taxes.
I worry about the symbolic processing deficits which appear to be more and more common in western civilizations and, in Piaget’s stages of child development, that last stage which Piaget figured should be reached by age 16 is reached by only a small fraction of the adult population of N. America at present. Maybe that’s why there was such a dramatic period of scientific and technical innovation in the early 1900’s before people devolved. Devo was way ahead of its time.
Robert, sometimes your finds can be real time wasters;-) Went to Khan’s site and am reviewing differential equations and will probably do a review of matrix algebra next as have gotten a bit rusty in these areas. He doesn’t seem to have anything about chaos related topics but I guess it’s just a matter of time.
Just realized that the beauty of his approach is that you can just sit there and let the information flow into your brain – I don’t feel like sitting down with a book on differential equations after a long day at the hospital, but Khan and his pen just work out the examples for you and it’s not long before you’re into Laplace transforms. All of this is review for me, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve had to utilize this stuff on a daily basis so I guess I’ll be giving the math topics a try.
3:1 chance I’ll take a look at first year stats again.
had a problem with khan’s st-st-stuttering.
Khan is a part of the Currie Home School program. As much to open a subject up as to actually teach it.
Khan is the forerunner of the great revolution which will occur in industrial schooling. All of a sudden, parents will realize that their children are not actually learning very much for all the time they are putting in. At which point those parents will demand alternatives and if they can’t get them they will pull their kids.
Home schooling, private schooling, after school tutorial sessions – does not matter, the public school system is on its way out. Killed by inefficiency and political correctness.
the only thing I was taught in school was power, weapons, violence, force, intimidation ALWAYS win the day.
the rest of it was pretty much self taught in between ducking behind my desk.
oh, p.s. it was the teachers using the power, weapons, violence, etc etc.
p.p.s. what’s a moby?
“Home schooling, private schooling, after school tutorial sessions – does not matter, the public school system is on its way out. Killed by inefficiency and political correctness.”
Couldn’t agree more!
In the 70’s the Japanese started to give US auto companies serious competition, which caused major changes. Even today some would argue that US auto companies have not fully caught up to the Japanese (and now Korean) competition.
Now China, Korea and India are starting to give our educational system competition. Smart parents will soon realize that if they want their kids to have a reasonable shot at a good life in the future, they will have to give them something better than what the existing education system offers.
Changes are in the air, and it is good thing. If you are a parent who cares about your child doing well, then the current education system in North America is nothing but a stressful experience. Parents will jump at the first viable alternative that they can afford.
I’m only being mildly sarcastic when I write that computers are finally beginning to achieve their potential.
I use his site with my kids. Give it a try.
Another great math guy is Canada’s own John Mighton with his JUMP Math program. He also challenges the way math has been taught in the public school system but is doing a lot of work to try and change how math is taught there as well, for the better, IMO.
PS — Some of you obviously will denigrate any good work someone does based on how you perceive their “politics”. Get over it, stop with the one-track mind.
Thanks for this link, Robert.
I sent it to my 10 yr old grgrson and he has just emailed to say he is doing Computer Science and loves it.
The Khan Academy is all very well. But if you don’t do your homework, do you not risk… the Wrath of Khan?