Khan Academy: the Teachers Strike Back 575
theodp writes "With his Khan Academy: The Hype and the Reality screed in the Washington Post, Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani — a former middle school teacher and math coach — throws some cold water on the Summer of Khan Love hippies, starting with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. From the article: 'When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it's because they're jealous. "It'd piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world's teacher." Of course, teachers aren't "pissed off" because Sal Khan is the world's teacher. They're concerned that he's a bad teacher who people think is great; that the guy who's delivered over 170 million lessons to students around the world openly brags about being unprepared and considers the precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere "nitpicking." Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it's a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it's a "revolution."'"
What about people outside of formal education? (Score:5, Interesting)
Show me a teacher who's willing to give me a random, informative, 5-minute lecture, for free, with a 30-second lead time in my own bathroom and we can talk.
Re:And the unions are pissed... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think there is anything preventing them from working in the off season. Just another form of seasonal worker like lifegaurd or Mr Plow.
So a working professional with a Masters degree should have to get a "summer job" as a lifeguard or in retail in order to survive the summer? Does any other line of work that requires a college degree require a summer job like they are a high school student? Give me break!
Re:A field in its infancy (Score:0, Interesting)
Learning is hard.
Citation needed.
IMHO learning how to learn may be tenuous at best, and difficult at worst. After one has learned how to learn, learning is actually quite easy.
I suspect (having no citations or research to draw from) that people think learning is hard because they have an innate fear of failing based on societal pressure, and that learning is quite often a series of failures.
Online education should mean one thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in the USA, education has become almost exclusively a matter of vocational training. That has been extremely destructive to education and to the society that education serves (and make no mistake, what is bad for education is bad for society). We spend all our time teaching people formulaic approaches to problems, and almost never take the time to help students develop their intellect or their ability to develop new approaches to the problems they need to solve. If the Kahn academy is not addressing that problem, then it is not addressing the most important issue that faces education here.
To put it another way, look at the state of computer education in schools. Students are taught how to use the prepackaged solutions that their school districts buy, and those students who dare to go beyond "here is how you make the font bigger" are often punished (you know, because they are dangerous hackers who know how to get a terminal opened on a system that is programmed to stop them from writing their own software). Even when we do bother to teach people to write software, we give them formulaic approaches to solving programming problems -- when I TA'd a CS101 course, the students were required to have their programs formatted in a specific way, to write their programs in a specific language, and my personal favorite rule, they were forbidden to use language features that they had not been taught about.
I do not want to discredit online education, since it may very well enable a better approach in some topics (I doubt all -- one cannot really judge a sculpture without being able to see it first hand). However, given that I have not heard anyone express any alternative philosophy on education (it's purpose or how best to carry it out), I have doubts. If someone believes that education is about training people for a job, they are not likely to develop anything other than a vocational training program.
Khan Needs Guidence (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used Khan Academy in the classroom a few times for Algebra 1 when doing my student teaching. While the video was playing my mentor says to me "it's so boring" and I said "I know, but they're addicted to TV so they're watching it." For one lesson I came up with what I thought was a great way to teach multiplying polynomials and I said to myself, if Khan doesn't teach it this was, I'm not showing the video. Turns out, he had the same idea so I showed the video. The students got it. But not without me running through a few examples and reiterating the prior knowledge that makes it "nothing new" to them. The video is nice way to introduce the material the first time, but it needs to be repeated by the teacher to make sure everyone in the class gets it.
At one point the video says "I'm going to use magenta because it shows up well." The students in the room were about to yell out "NO STOP IT!" because magenta does not show up when using a video projector in a classroom. Khan also makes jokes to which I pointed out "as a teacher I'm responding to you and making adjustments in response to your feedback, Khan is talking to himself and has no idea what's going on."
I now do tutoring and for my student I have him using Khan Academy. I can see what the site can't. For example, the student is decent at math but his handwriting sucks which is normal. Khan Academy can't see that. I can, so now I have the student work problems using 1/2" grid paper with one number per box. His handwriting is improving and silly mistakes are going down dramatically.
At best, Khan is a supplement to the classroom. It's not a replacement. My goal as a tutor is to get students to understand how to use it to improve their remedial math skills so I can focus on teaching them the new things. When school gets back in session I'll be tutoring a lot more students and working with them using Khan Academy to guide the material as well as working with their current material assigned by their teachers when available.
When I start teaching full time, most likely next fall, I'll be pushing Khan Academy but will not use it in the classroom. It's great for remedial work. It's not for classrooms. And it's certainly no substitute for a teacher.
Re:A field in its infancy (Score:5, Interesting)
Learning is hard.
The hardest problem with learning is that you get lost in all the unresolved references, when the teacher (or book) assumes knowledge from the student that the student doesn't yet have, not the learning new stuff itself. And that's something that could very well be solved by technology and by making use of an interactive medium. Of course it could also be solved by having much smaller classes and more teachers, but I don't quite think that will happen anytime soon.
Re:Classroom vs. Kahn (Score:5, Interesting)
"Look, I don't even think most teachers are going to disagree with this - the public school system doesn't allow for adjustment and experimentation - it just can't."
As a community college teacher (somewhat informed of education issues -- I deal with the depressing product), I will disagree with that. A major problem with American education is too much adjustment and experimentation -- education PhDs and textbook publishers are incentivized to "churn" their offerings regularly, and produce new pedagogies and new textbooks which are incompatible with the old ones (generating new sales). This, regardless of whether they're scientifically established to improve results or not (preferably above the level of placebo/pygmalion effect from self-interested researchers).
One thing that I really like about my own job is being able to interact with students and get statistics on what helps and what doesn't, and refine my presentations over and over again every semester. But elsewhere I see big, sweeping, politically-charged changes every few years that leaves teachers and the system constantly at sea.
Re:Adverse reactions? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was similarly dissappointed. Not that I don't appreciate the value for what is there, just that it could be so much more.
Like for example, math is confusing enough to some, why make it more confusing by leaving errors in the videos, and then watching the prof go back and correct them. I realize this is all "pro bono" work, but take a few minutes and edit that crap out.
Re:And the unions are pissed... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's do that, then!
Teachers work about 200 days per year.
Teachers work about 11.5 hours/day (http://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full_noapp.pdf)
200 days * 11.5 hours/day = 2300 hours per year.
A typical job with a 40-hour/week nets 2088 hours/year.
So, already your myth is busted, but let's continue.
The pay schedule for teachers in my area ranges from:
$30,943 for a BA first year teacher
to
$60250 for a BA+100 and 22 years experience.
(or MA+60; A JD from George Mason requires a BA+89 hours)
$30,943/2300 = $13.45 per hour.
$60250/2300 = $25.56 per hour.
These include benefits, and is before taxes, so the take-home is significantly less than this.
So, let's talk about equal pay for equal work.
In my area, A Senior Software Engineer with a BS+5 can expect to make between $65k and $131k/year.
65,000/2088 = $31.13/hour
131,000/2088= $62.74/hour
And this software engineer isn't at a gaming company with 80-hour work weeks, this is a 9-5+occasional hours job.
Re:And the unions are pissed... (Score:5, Interesting)
If teaching was really so easy and so well paid, then you (yes - YOU) could use your superior skills and abilities to make a real difference in the world and a substantial contribution to society by quitting your bit-twiddling, script-reading, Windoze-hating, printer cartridge-changing job and start teaching. So why don't you?
Teachers are becoming the targets of the new skinheads, with pogroms just around the corner. Wisconsin and Florida are leading the way.
Actually, I did just that... for six years.
As an associate CompSci prof, I pulled in around 80% of what sysadmins made in the area (near Ogden, UT), not counting the massive benefits*, and the additional pay for teaching a couple of night classes each week. Out of three CompSci profs on the campus, I was the only one who set up his own in-class network, did his own imaging, ran his own servers, etc.
I originally took the job in 1999 as a means to duck out of the dot-bust, but damn... it was a fine way to do it. I finally left when budget cuts meant low faculty on the various departmental totem poles had to be laid off. By then, IT hiring in the real world was back up in a massive way, so it took very little time to find what I wanted.
I can easily admit that this is not a typical case, but I will say that it is more common than the NEA will ever let on. Take a gander at what the fine faculty in Portland, OR (my current home)'s district will pull in: http://www.patpdx.org/salary [patpdx.org] . A fresh-out-of-school BA holder with 0 CE/credit hours gets an entry-level salary of $36k, which is kinda typical for most entry-level BA/BS jobs. Now here's the fun part: It's laughably easy to rack up the hours and get the raises. Most of these courses are usually some pet project of some prof somewhere, an easy "A", and I spent most of the required ones getting real work done on the laptop (seriously - I was even required to take early childhood literacy courses in spite of teaching at a collegiate level. Welcome to the Utah State Office of Education...)
The best part of it all was, my weekends and holidays were all mine. Name me a decent IT position that has that one carved in stone...
I won't say it was all cotton candy and unicorns, but compared to being a sysadmin out here in the real world? Shit, it was a relative vacation.
* this included 95% paid healthcare in-or-out of network for $0 premium w/ no limits, a very generous 401k matching program, a metric ton of days off in spite of teaching year-round, and a pension system that allows me, even now, to draw an extra $4k/year at age 65, in spite of only being in it for six years. Oh, and then there was the customary 50-60% off of std. tuition costs for most collegiate-level courses. Oh - and at a time when most folks were lucky to get 2 weeks vacation, I accrued 5 weeks per year, with no carryover limits... on top of all those days off. When I finally left, my severance check (3 months vacation backed up) was frickin' massive.
Re:And the unions are pissed... (Score:4, Interesting)
e. Are we saying that every single other profession is able to measure performance, except for teaching? Seriously, can we not spend a few months on identifying a way to do some type of qualitative 360 degree review?
No, I mean seriously, how do you evaluate good teachers? Suggesting there *should* be a measure of a good teacher, and knowing what it one actually is is the problem - this is a problem people have been wondering about for decades, and a few months long study isn't likely to solve it. Philosophically there should be some way to gauge teacher effectiveness that isn't easy to game, but unfortunately, no one has come up with one yet. So we're kind of stuck with trying the common approach of ask kids, ask parents, have the principle sit in on classes, that sort of thing. Whether or not my mother filed her lesson plans properly doesn't make her a good or bad teacher, I'm not sure which she was - but using things like that to benchmark doesn't help.
You *could* have a situation where classrooms are bigger but you have multiple teachers, when I was a graduate student teaching assistant we had labs with 100 or so students and 3 or 4 TA's and everyone just went wherever, there wasn't a 'Sir_sri's rows' so when we had 1 really good TA (we used to call him "The Egyptian" until we discovered that was Al Zawahiri's nickname, so this is a while ago) and one really bad TA (a chinese guy who didn't ever seem to actually try and help anyone) you kind of mitigated the damage. But that format would require significantly changing how schools are laid out, and I'm not sure it doesn't tend to just reduce everyone to 'well at least you're not that chinese guy'.
The latest theory is to use standardized testing every year, and then you identify good teachers by when their students perform better than they did in the past (so if every year they score an average of 70 on standardized tests, and then after this teacher they start scoring 80 while the average of everyone else is still 70 then you're onto something), and that's not bad, but you waste a huge amount of time on standardized testing, and you're showing the teacher is good at prepping kids for standardized tests, not necessarily good at teaching connections beyond standardized tests.
every single other profession is able to measure performance,
How do you measure the performance of a programmer? Quantitatively, and accurately. Lines of code is notoriously bad. It's not like teaching is the only profession to have the problem of 'there are metrics we use that aren't really very good', every other profession has the same problem, just teaching is relatively rare in that you are mostly alone and unobserved when working.
Re:And the unions are pissed... (Score:2, Interesting)
If all teachers were paid more then more people would go into teaching. With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
Now who's spouting bumper-sticker logic?
The inevitable result of more people wanting to go into teaching is additional certification requirements for teachers so as to keep the labor pool the same size, otherwise the per-teacher salary would go down when the supply of teachers increased relative to the demand curve.
I personally know a PhD in physics who is a college professor, and a PhD in history who is an author, and they both found out that they were "unqualified" to teach middle school science and history, respectively.
Re:A field in its infancy (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd have given a testicle for something like Khan Academy, when I was young. Instead, I got a bunch of angry overworked and under-performing teachers that just wanted me to shut up, go away.
Heck, I had good teachers, and I think having Khan+Wikipedia growing up would have been well worth a testicle!
Re:A field in its infancy (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make in relation to my post. Almost all of the references I listed, which the parent poster desired from the grandparent poster, were to neuroscience journals, not "soft science" ones. (Having worked and written articles with more than a few neuroscientists in the past, many of whom also had M.D.s and joint appointments as faculty in the schools of medicine at various universities, I can definitely say they are not, principally, psychologists; granted, some neuroscientists can dabble in psychology, but most tend to stay within the realms of biology, medicine, and chemistry.)
In case you're confused about the two, to illustrate the difference between psychologists and neuroscientists, it is instructive to consider how we parse space.
In the psychology literature, one of the more dominant theories says that, when we couple or descriptions of routes with directional relations, we form spatial mental models of the information [1]. We then, through imagined geometric [2] or perspective transformations [3-5], synchronize them with the environment to navigate. Similarly, when we encounter spatial and object information that portray a scene, psychologists argue that we construct internal characterizations of it [6-10], which can be linked to the real world [11-15], despite incomplete or poorly worded descriptions [16], object position/size differences [17], etc.
Now, according to psychologists, how we build up this information is a source of contention: one group believes that we form abstract, mental images, while another says that we fabricate a semi-relaxed rule-base, both of which have "evidence" to "strongly support" their claims. That is, some psychologists got together and designed some experiments whose predicted observational results could be loosely interpreted as supporting some of their conclusions.
In contradistinction to simply dreaming up a theory, and sometimes tailoring tests to yield results that mostly conform to it, neuroscientists actually dig into the nervous system and try to figure out what's going on, i.e., they work from the opposite direction as psychologists and typically move forward without any sort of preconceptions as to what they will find. Of course, it is important to point out that their work usually takes years or decades to reach fruition, as they first have to find specific area(s) of the brain that correspond to various functions, which is no easy task, followed by making sense of neuronal activity, chemical secretions, etc. (see e.g., [18-42]). (Consequently, while psychologists think they have space partly figured out, neuroscientists have yet to say if any of them are actually right!)
[1] B. Tversky, et al., "Spatial mental models from descriptions", J. Amer. Soc. Inform. Science 45: 656-668, 1994
[2] R. Maki, et al., "Processing location and orientation information", Memory Cogn. 5: 602-612, 1977
[3] H. Taylor and B. Tversky, "Descriptions and depictions of environments", Memory Cog. 20: 483-496, 1992
[4] H. Taylor and B. Tversky, "Spatial mental models derived from survey and route descriptions", J. Memory Lang. 31: 261-282, 1992
[5] H. Taylor and B. Tversky, "Perspective in spatial descriptions", J. Memory Lang. 35: 371-391, 1996
[6] P. Foos, "Constructing cognitive maps from sentences", J. Exper. Psychol. 6: 25-38, 1980
[7] A. Garnham, "Mental models as representations of text", Memory Cogn. 9: 560-565, 1981
[8] K. Mani and P. Johnson-Laird, "The mental representation of spatial descriptions", Memory Cogn. 10: 181-187, 1982
[9] D. Bryand, et al., "Internal and external spatial frameworks for representing described scenes", J. Memory Lang. 31: 74-98, 1992
[10] E. Ferguson and M. Hegarty, "Properties of cognitive maps constructed from texts", Memory Cogn. 22: 455-473, 1994
[11] M. Denis and H. Zimmer, "Analog properties of cognitive maps constructed from texts", Psychol. Res. 54: 286-298, 1992
[12] M. Denis and M. Concude, "Scanning visual images generated from verbal desc
Re:Adverse reactions? (Score:5, Interesting)
Both of you are idiots. All you are really complaining about is having to sit through the entire video just so you can get the green check mark next to the video and earn your badges.
I come from a background of collaborative editing of documents and content, so perhaps I'm biased here. By that I'm talking open source programming projects and stuff like Wikipedia.
A huge problem with Sal Kahn is that he presumes he is the font of all knowledge and the one and only who can produce the videos for his site. The central control over the content is part of what will eventually kill the site, even though the basic concept is fine. I'm even OK with an editorial review process that would fact check videos, but when Sal goes beyond mathematics he really doesn't know as much as he thinks he knows.
Eventually somebody is going to come up with a real collaborative and interactive way to bump up against Khan Academy, sort of like You Tube but for instruction. There were earlier attempts to do stuff like that such as Diversity University [wikipedia.org] that pre-date even the development of the web. There have been other similar projects over the years, so to say that Sal Kahn even came up with the concept of an on-line school is really stretching the truth too.
There are some things that Sal Kahn is doing that are original and innovative, so I don't want to completely diss the guy either. I have my reservations that the badges are as important as some people think they are, but the instant reward aspect of the learning that happens on the site is appealing to a base instinct of people when they visit the site. The mathematical exercises are in particular quite interesting. Still, the comments above that suggest the videos are lacking has some merit. There are ways that such content could be improved over time as well.
You missed the point, just like TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Nor will Salman Khan's idea that he is going to build Charter schools where students watch and hour of his videos a day to learn all the math they need to know and spend the rest of the day playing guitar or making paintings.
You completely missed the point of Khan Academy. The point is not to reduce education to watching an hour of videos and it's not to remove teachers from educational process. To the contrary - it's to use the teachers more effectively.
Here are the important points:
1)Teacher's time
At the moment, teachers spend 50% or more of their classroom time delivering a lecture. This is a complete waste of their talent. Instead, kids can look at the lecture themselves online - they cannot interrupt the teacher to ask a question, but they don't do that during a lesson anyway - with a video they can at least rewind it and listen to it again. Then, they can spend the time in the classes doing creative work, discussions and exercises with the teacher's assistance.
2)Student's speed
At the moment we require that all students go through the material at the same speed. This is terribly inefficient as it results with most students either underachieving and getting bored or moving on through the material without learning what's needed. With Khan's approach you can let students go through the material at their own speed. You can still challenge them to do better but you don't need to abandon the slower students because the class has to move on
3)Tracking
The teacher can track each student's development in a comprehensive way - he'll be able to easier identify who has what kind of problems or strengths and use this information to develop the kids to their best possibilities.
Yes, the education process has been developing a long time but if Khan's approach catches on, it will be a pretty big step forward.