Comment by skulk
6 hours ago
Overall, I do agree with the thesis but:
> Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn?
> Watch a video.
I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding. I don't think Khanacademy ever sold itself as a magic learning resource that removes the need to work out problems yourself.
The attacks on Khan here personally irked me.
I grew up in a small rural town where math teachers were rare and good ones were nonexistent. I still remember watching Sal Khan's videos on calculus after struggling to get any grip on it from my frustratingly uninterested teacher who was forced into the position after our actual teacher retired. After I saw them I came back with a fire in me because for the first time he exposed me to the beauty of calculus.
This guy is completely wrong about Khan not inspiring students to care. Sometimes all students need is to see what caring looks like to ignite it in themselves. You can feel how much he cares just by watching him because the video is the product of all that caring, and he does it for millions of people.
But thank you to this blog author for being brave enough to call out Khan's failures, I am sure it'll help education much more than Khan did.
Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.
Khan Academy is a treasure, and is how I re-learned math in my 20s after not taking it seriously in school. Then moved on to MitX for science [re]fam.
I am having my kids learn math with Kahn academy if we don't have anything better by that point.
Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos.
"Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..."
Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.
While it depends entirely on personal opinion, I believe that it helps significantly. It helps build up the problem/solution from the ground up and he goes through each step out loud to help a student understand. I get that some people hate it and think it is so childish for such simple steps. For other people, it helps a lot. Learning on KA works best if started aat a young age and done consistently (you get used to the style and you learn everything from the ground up).
YMMV but I found the style very helpful
In my case, it's not so much that I find it childish, it's that I find it incredibly distracting which means I can't focus as easily on the content. Instead of "oh, now I understand how that equation works" I catch myself thinking "why is he repeating the same word over and over - that's so annoying!". Then my brain starts obsessing over "when is he going to do it again?", even though I don't want it to. It's a bit like trying to deliberately ignore something. It becomes all you can think about.
OTOH creating neural connections takes time. It's a real distance. Small for us, but great for the cells. That's why explaining difficult concepts too fast, while cool for people getting things instantly, is not good for general population.
I very much agree and it saddens me often when I see folks dial it up to 1.5x or 2x "because it is boring otherwise". They might think they just get as much, only in half the time, but I'd hypothesize that they retain less because the mind needs some time to digest.
Similar with the trend to auto-cut pauses that speakers make, just to cram in more text into a youtube video. Destroys not just the pacing but any chance for the mind to take its time.
I'd love to see studies about this.
3 replies →
There's a difference between pacing (good), and repetitive speech (bad). Between pacing and repetitive speech.
2 replies →
It might be annoying if you already know the content. Frame it for the least common denominator (pun intended) - the person who has the time and needs the repetition to pick up a concept.
I originally learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang's OCW videos, and I was only able to stick with them by 2x'ing the playback rate; at this point, hearing Strang at his normal speaking rate sounds to me like hearing him after a Robitussin bender.
I wish YouTube let you increase the speed of videos past 2x. I play almost everything at 2x now, and I have no problem comprehending videos at that speed. I’d like to try 2.5x or 3x but the ui doesn’t have that option.
This is exactly what my kid said about why he doesn’t like Kahn academy.
What would you recommend over khan academy?
2 replies →
I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).
He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching assistants. It was the vision that utopian minded technologists craved in the early aughts.
It's not a bad idea in concept, but the core problem is what he delivered was:
"essentially global learning via all the Khan videos, in math, by him, and in other subjects, by his team."
Khan Academy is 2010-era state-of-the-art for rote learning and procedural knowledge. That's a helpful resource, but as one world schoolhouse, there is:
- No room for creativity, or much of anything similar from students (outside of the fantastic JavaScript projects).
- No room for outside innovation.
- A personality cult. Any ideas MUST be attributed to Khan.
Creativity isn't learning, it's the application of learning, and that's not what school is for. There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems. It's not creative but it gives us the skills to do useful things in the world - including creative things. Even pure rote learning (such as reciting the periodic table) is useful so you can later draw on that knowledge without interrupting your attention on the higher level thinking (such as creativity!) that you're doing.
1 reply →
My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.
The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.
This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.
The idea of Mastery Learning seems to resurface every couple decades. I guess because it pretty appealing but requires more per-student customization; there’s always a hope that now, finally, we’ve got the tech to let everyone advance at their own pace.
IDK. Maybe some sort of RAG-on-textbook solution will let us do it.
The article is indeed uncharitable. Nowhere does the article mention the fact that there are exercises AND that you can explore the website and the different resources in the way you like. You don't even need to watch videos if you don't want to.
You also do not need to linearly follow the topics/videos. You can take a few quizzes from some topic, notice you don't understand something completely yet and instead pick up more trigonometry instead.
I've worked through Khan academy in a way similar to what the author describes as a good flow, but then all within the Khan Academy platform. The platform even allows for discussions and questions.
To me the problem is much more that motivation or a destination is not something that Khan Academy will give you. Then again, so won't most teachers. I much preferred Khan Academy over most of my math teachers, but occasionally I've had teachers who helped me love a subject I barely knew beforehand.
The idea is for the students to watch the videos outside of class and this frees up time for the teachers to provide individual help.