I just quizzed my daughter entering 5th grade and she understood the concept of decimal comparison, so score one for public education.
Open letter to Sal Khan
121–130 of 146 posts
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#122Many of the comments here boil down to: At least he's doing something - let him get on with it. If you think you can do better, then do so. To some extent, I agree with that. However ... In the past I've been faced with students who have a serious mental block about some operation, or some process, or some concept, and upon digging deeper into what they believe and why, I have usually come across a moment in their pa…
So why don't you just re-record it correctly and send it in? It would take about as much time as the blog post took to write up.
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#123This is the exact same kind of shit that got thrown at every person ever who successfully challenged a rusty status quo, especially when job security was at risk. Quoting the original piece in Washington Post: We have great respect for the stated goal of Khan Academy — “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” Yet, we have some serious concerns about the quality of the instruction providing this education…
It should be noted that the Washington Post owns Kaplan, which is effectively a Khan Academy competitor.
Kaplan Test Prep employee here. I of course don't speak officially for anybody but myself, but I will say that everybody I know at Kaplan all the way up to senior management has great admiration and respect for Khan Academy and all the other disruptive players in education these days. In fact, we have been hosting an educational technology startup accelerator with TechStars all summer.
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What we see in these two girls’ thinking is precisely the problem you set out to solve with Khan Academy. But you aren’t solving the problem, Mr. Khan. You are perpetuating it. > Mr. Khan, you have a team of teacher advisors. If none of them can identify these gaps for you, you need to ask for help from the larger community (and then to reexamine your hiring practices). > Or you could educate yourself (as we requir…
The problem is that without the snideness/personal attack, we wouldn't be discussing the article, and Sal Khan would never have seen it. Nobody wants to read a boring article about a better way to teach decimals. Sad but true.
That's why I read the article...
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#125Many of the comments here boil down to: At least he's doing something - let him get on with it. If you think you can do better, then do so. To some extent, I agree with that. However ... In the past I've been faced with students who have a serious mental block about some operation, or some process, or some concept, and upon digging deeper into what they believe and why, I have usually come across a moment in their pa…
So why don't you just re-record it correctly and send it in? It would take about as much time as the blog post took to write up.
KA doesn't accept community-produced videos. Which makes sense if you think about it; it would take more time to vet them than they're worth, on average.
Edit: additionally, if he just sent a video with a quick note, KA may continue repeating the same mistake, as they have done over the past year.
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we assume that students are rational actors making decisions between traditional teaching methods and KA...and we assume that KA, students, and teachers all have the same end goal of teaching the kids the material. It sure looks like, at an increasing rate, kids are choosing KA. After all they are held most directly accountable for their academic success or failure. Wouldn't demand then be a reasonable gauge of va…
Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. This lack of knowledge is a fundamental problem of markets in education. Students might say that method A "feels better" or "is more fun" than method B. However, it is entirely possible that method A is worse because, in the end, students will actually not have learned what they…
> Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. . . . it is pretty absurd to think that students could ever be objective in evaluating the teaching methods they are subjected to.
It's easy to recognize good teachers. They are first, understandable and second, motivating. If a teacher is not readily understood, or if they do not motivate the student to learn, then they are not very good. Children as well adults naturally use these metrics to evaluate not just teachers, but communicators in general.
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. This lack of knowledge is a fundamental problem of markets in education. Students might say that method A "feels better" or "is more fun" than method B. However, it is entirely possible that method A is worse because, in the end, students will actually not have learned what they…
> Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. . . . it is pretty absurd to think that students could ever be objective in evaluating the teaching methods they are subjected to. It's easy to recognize good teachers. They are first, understandable and second, motivating. If a teacher is not readily understood, or if they do…
It's easy to evaluate a Teacher by those metrics but that does not guarantee that the content the teacher is teaching is correct or accurate. Thus my point above.
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a poor way to quantify the quality of an educational product. While quality can and sometimes does drive demand for a product it's frequently possible for demand to be driven instead by fads, trends, and hype. If you want to measure the quality of something there are far more reliable metrics to use than demand. With that said I like Kahn Academy. This is a single issue in a large body of educational material…
If we assume that students are rational actors making decisions between traditional teaching methods and KA...and we assume that KA, students, and teachers all have the same end goal of teaching the kids the material. It sure looks like, at an increasing rate, kids are choosing KA. After all they are held most directly accountable for their academic success or failure. Wouldn't demand then be a reasonable gauge of va…
Your assumptions don't account for whether the content being taught is correct or not. Goals and rational actors notwithstanding one of the most relevant metrics here is the correctness of the content being taught and that is something the student is not capable of assessing. As a result student demand is no indicator of quality of the content. It may be an indicator of the quality of the learning experience but that should not be conflated with the quality of the content.
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#129This article is a partisan attempt to discredit Sal's great work. Pick one example where the content has a flaw and use it to claim that all of his content is therefore "useless". I don't know the author's motives. Is it an altruistic care about the children or a personal motive to protect his career and to defend the methods he uses to teach versus a new potential disruptive threat. I'm really excited to see how the…
Hi. Original poster here. I have amended the line in the post to make clear that the "useless" claim was not intended to apply to all of Khan's videos; only to the decimal ones. As for motives, I would invite you to read deeper on the blog to get a sense of what motivates my work. See especially the "Talking Math with Your Kids" series, where you will find the following sentiment expressed in multiple ways: "But I do…
> As for motives, I would invite you to read deeper on the blog to get a sense of what motivates my work. See especially the "Talking Math with Your Kids" series, where you will find the following sentiment expressed in multiple ways:
Do you have any videos of your own we can watch, so as to get a better handle on the way you think these things should be made?
Re: Open letter to Sal Khan
#130This is the exact same kind of shit that got thrown at every person ever who successfully challenged a rusty status quo, especially when job security was at risk. Quoting the original piece in Washington Post: We have great respect for the stated goal of Khan Academy — “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” Yet, we have some serious concerns about the quality of the instruction providing this education…
Look at it another way. You train for years. You spend more years, perhaps decades, working in a classroom. You read the research, you know just how hard it is to get kids to understand decimals. You work and work to find the right way for each child to understand this concept that trips up so many. Then someone else comes along, teaches it badly, and gets lauded for doing wonderful things. Well, it's true that KA is…
Then someone else comes along, teaches it badly, and gets lauded for doing wonderful things.
Are you arguing that KA teaches all or most things badly? If not, then I'd clarify because your statement above makes it sound like you are pissed that KA gets lauded even though its crappy.