Parody Critiques Popular Khan Academy Videos

This video is perfect as a Khan Academy parody - they just throw some shit together, and maybe it isn't very good, but it's better than nothing.

The more criticism, the better

"But the professors say their bigger gripe is with the procedural, rules-based approach in all of Mr. Khan’s videos."

Well, that's how they teach it in public school, here are the steps, no explanation of why it works, just accept that it works and memorize the steps. So if you want to attack teaching the procedure instead of the concept, look at just about every math teacher in K-12 first.

What is a good non-rules-based approach to teaching why a negative times a negative is a positive? I've seen a proof-through-absurdity showing that if -1 * -1 = -1, then you can make 0 = 2, and a proof using all three negativity permutations, and setting two different distributions equal, showing that ab = (-a)(-b), but the math for both of those approaches seems to be more advanced than the rule.

I went to a government high school in the 90's in South Africa. Experienced teachers were given early retirement and replaced by younger teachers who, through a combination of ineptitude and inexperience, struggled to teach.

My grade 10 and 11 maths teacher couldn't factorise polynomials consistently. She'd often get stuck while halfway through a problem while working on the blackboard. Euclidian geometry was a challenge, and she failed to communicate theorem proving techniques. My Grade 12 (final year) maths teacher was promoted out after 3 months, and replaced by someone who didn't appear in class regularly.

I went for additional after-school maths tution, and I did very well during the exams in the topics that were covered there, but unfortunately we couldn't redo the whole syllabus. So my Higher Grade C for maths, although better than the majority of students in my school (and the country I guess, which has very low, and still-dropping educational standards) was disappointing.

We also had serious problems with our science teacher - retired, and replaced with someone who also never really used to pitch up. My parents bought me physics videos from the Learning Channel, a video-based system, and I managed to get an A. Unfortunately their budget didn't stretch far enough to buy the maths videos as well.

I have watched Khan's videos and I always wish that that sort of service was around back when I was in school. Yes, I, and most of my friends may have been deprived of some conceptual understanding, but at least we would have gotten some teaching. Something is better than nothing, at least for those of us who don't live in US College towns.