The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined by Khan Salman

Author:Khan, Salman [Khan, Salman]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Education / General
ISBN: 9781455508396
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2012-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

The Khan Academy Software

Let’s do a quick rewind to 2004 to revisit how all this began.

Back then I still had my day job at the hedge fund. The Khan Academy, as well as the YouTube videos that have come to be its most visible feature, was far off in the future. I was just a guy who did a little private tutoring by telephone.

Right from the start, I was troubled, even shocked, to realize that most of my tutees—even though they were generally motivated and “successful” students—had only a very shaky grasp of core material, especially in math. There were many basic concepts that they sort of half understood. They might, for example, be able to describe what a prime number was (a number divisible only by itself and 1), but not explain how that concept related to the more general idea of least common multiples. In brief, the formulas were there, the rote stuff had been memorized, but the connections were missing. The intuitive leaps had not been made. Why not? Chances are that the material had been gone over too quickly and shallowly in class, with related concepts ghettoized by their artificial division into units. The bottom line was that kids didn’t really know math; they knew certain words and processes that described math.

This half-understanding had consequences that showed up very quickly during the one-to-one tutoring sessions. In response to even the simplest questions, students tended to give very tentative answers—answers that sounded like guesses even when they weren’t. It seemed to me there were two reasons for this lack of assertiveness. The first was that because the students’ grasp of core material stopped short of true conceptual understanding, they were seldom quite sure exactly what was being asked or which conceptual tool should be used to solve the problem. To offer a rough analogy, it was as if they’d been taught, in two different lessons, how to use a hammer and how to use a screwdriver. Told to hammer, they could hammer. Told to put in a screw, they could use a screwdriver. But told to build a shelf, they’d be paralyzed even though it was just a combination of concepts that they should have learned.

The second issue was simple confidence. The kids gave wishy-washy answers because they knew deep down that they were bluffing. This, of course, was not their fault; their previous education had been of the Swiss cheese sort and had left them teetering on an inadequate foundation.

In terms of the live tutoring sessions, these deficiencies in core understanding became a big headache. Identifying and remediating each student’s particular gaps would have been hugely time-consuming, and would have left little time or energy to move on to more advanced concepts. The process, I imagine, would also have been painful and humiliating for the student. Okay, tell me what else you don’t know.

So with the goal of creating a time-efficient way to help repair my tutees’ educational gaps, I wrote some very simple software to generate math problems.

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