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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Salman Khan
Read between
December 6 - December 7, 2019
It is often cited that American high school students now rank twenty-third in the world in science and math proficiency. From a U.S.-centric perspective, that’s distressing; but these tests are a very narrow measure of what is happening in a country.
It’s my belief that each of us has a stake in the education of all of us. Who knows where genius will crop up? There may be a young girl in an African village with the potential to find a cancer cure. A fisherman’s son in New Guinea might have incredible insight into the health of the oceans. Why would we allow their talents to be wasted? How can we justify not offering those children a world-class education, given that the technology and resources to do so are available—if only we can muster the vision and the boldness to make it happen?
My basic philosophy of teaching was straightforward and deeply personal. I wanted to teach the way I wished that I myself had been taught. Which is to say, I hoped to convey the sheer joy of learning, the thrill of understanding things about the universe. I wanted to pass along to students not only the logic but the beauty of math and science. Furthermore, I wanted to do this in a way that would be equally helpful to kids studying a subject for the first time and for adults who wanted to refresh their knowledge; for students grappling with homework and for older people hoping to keep their
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The next set of problems and exercises would constitute a challenge that each person could approach at his or her own tempo; there would be no shame or stigma in progressing slowly, no dreaded moment when the class must move on. The archive of videos would never go away; students could review and refresh as often as necessary. And mistakes would be allowed! There’d be no fear of disappointing a teacher who is looking over one’s shoulder, of appearing dumb in front of a roomful of peers.
Too many kids are having their confidence trampled; even many “successful” students acknowledge that they’ve gotten good grades without learning much of anything.
There’s an old saying that life is school. If that’s true, then it’s also true that as our world grows smaller and the people in it more inextricably connected, the world itself comes to resemble one vast, inclusive schoolhouse. There are younger people and older people, people farther or less far along in their education on a given subject. At every moment, we are both students and teachers; we learn by studying, but we also learn by helping others, by sharing and explaining what we know.
It was an arranged marriage, very traditional (my mother tried to peek during the ceremony to make sure she was marrying the brother she thought she was). Over the next several years, five of my mother’s brothers and one cousin came to visit, and they all fell in love with the New Orleans area. I believe that they did this because Louisiana was as close to South Asia as the United States could get; it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches, and a corrupt government.
During my own school years I’d felt that some teachers were more interested in showing off what they knew than in communicating it to me. Their tone was often impatient, occasionally arrogant and even condescending. Other teachers were scripted to the point that it didn’t feel like they were actually even thinking.
Perfectly describes a few teachers and professors I have encountered. Perhaps the beginning of my anxiety and contributing to self image issues. A huge reason I am homeschooling my children.
Unfortunately, however, the idea that smaller classes alone will magically solve the problem of students being left behind is a fallacy. It ignores several basic facts about how people actually learn. People learn at different rates. Some people seem to catch on to things in quick bursts of intuition; others grunt and grind their way toward comprehension. Quicker isn’t necessarily smarter and slower definitely isn’t dumber. Further, catching on quickly isn’t the same as understanding thoroughly. So the pace of learning is a question of style, not relative intelligence. The tortoise may very
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They could probably figure things out eventually—but that’s exactly the problem. The standard classroom model doesn’t really allow for eventual understanding. The class—of whatever size—has moved on.
that lessons should be paced to the individual student’s needs, not to some arbitrary calendar; and that basic concepts needed to be deeply understood if students were to succeed at mastering more advanced ones.
This forced me to acknowledge that sometimes the presence of a teacher—either in the room or at the other end of a telephone connection; either in a class of thirty or tutoring one-to-one—can be a source of student thought-paralysis. From the teacher’s perspective, what’s going on is a helping relationship; but from the student’s point of view, it’s difficult if not impossible to avoid an element of confrontation. A question is asked; an answer is expected immediately; that brings pressure. The student doesn’t want to disappoint the teacher. She fears she will be judged. And all these factors
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In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
But the truth is that well-credentialed educational theorists had long before determined that ten to eighteen minutes was about the limit of students’ attention spans.
Tutoring is intimate. You talk with someone, not at someone.
Human beings are also hardwired to focus on faces. We are constantly scanning the facial expressions of those around us to get information about the emotional state of the room and our place in it.
So if faces are so important to human beings, why exclude them from videos? Because they are a powerful distraction from the concepts being discussed. What, after all, is more distracting than a pair of blinking human eyes, a nose that twitches, and a mouth that moves with every word? Put a face in the same frame as an equation, and the eye will bounce back and forth between the two. Concentration will wander.
At its most fundamental, mastery learning simply suggests that students should adequately comprehend a given concept before being expected to understand a more advanced one.
In a traditional academic model, the time allotted to learn something is fixed while the comprehension of the concept is variable. Washburne was advocating the opposite. What should be fixed is a high level of comprehension and what should be variable is the amount of time students have to understand a concept.
Taking responsibility for education is education; taking responsibility for learning is learning. From the student’s perspective, only by taking responsibility does true learning become possible; studies of mastery learning dynamics make this clear.
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. —CONFUCIUS
I believe that the breaking up of concepts like these has profound and even crucial consequences for how deeply students learn and how well they remember. It is the connections among concepts—or the lack of connections—that separate the students who memorize a formula for an exam only to forget it the next month and the students who internalize the concepts and are able to apply them when they need them a decade later.
In gradually developing my own approach to teaching, one of my central objectives was to reverse this balkanizing tendency. In my view, no subject is ever finished. No concept is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow.
There is a very refreshing irony here. You can standardize curricula, but you can’t standardize learning. No two brains are the same; no two pathways through the infinitely subtle web of knowledge are the same. Even the most rigorous standardized tests demonstrate only an approximate grasp of a certain subset of ideas that each student understands in his or her own way. Personal responsibility for learning goes hand in hand with a recognition of the uniqueness of each learner.
Is it natural for kids to sit quietly for an hour, listening? No, it’s natural for kids to want to do something, to be busy with work or play, to interact. Students are not naturally passive. Perversely, they need to be taught to be passive; the passivity then becomes a habit that makes them more tractable, perhaps, but less alert, less engaged in what they’re doing. This trade-off may be helpful for maintaining order in a jam-packed conventional classroom, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way for students to learn.
Portability and self-pacing, then, are essential aids to active, self-motivated learning.
Human nature being what it is, those who prosper under a given system tend to become supporters of that system. Thus the powerful tend to have a bias toward the status quo; our educational customs tend to perpetuate themselves, and because they interconnect with so many other aspects of our culture, they are extraordinarily difficult to change.
Apprenticeship was based on active learning—learning by doing. The apprentice observed and mimicked the techniques and strategies of the master; in this regard, the apprentice system was a logical extension of learning by imitating a parent.
In fact, even today’s doctoral programs are really apprenticeships where a junior researcher (the PhD candidate) learns by doing research under and alongside a professor. Medical residency programs are also really apprenticeships.
The idea that a college degree is a prerequisite to any professional career is a quite new one, only about a hundred years old. The idea that college is needed for everyone in order to be productive members of society is only a few decades old.
Compulsory, tax-supported public education was seen as a political at least as much as a pedagogical tool, and no apology was made for this. The idea was not to produce independent thinkers, but to churn out loyal and tractable citizens who would learn the value of submitting to the authority of parents, teachers, church, and, ultimately, king. The Prussian philosopher and political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key figure in the development of the system, was perfectly explicit about its aims. “If you want to influence a person,” he wrote, “you must do more than merely talk to him; you
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Former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto has written that “the whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates.” It was not by accident that whole ideas were broken up into fragmented “subjects.” Subjects could be learned by rote memorization, whereas mastering larger ideas called for free and unbridled thinking.
Similarly, according to Gatto, our sacred notion of the “class period” was put in place “so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.”
Today’s world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, this is the type of student that the Prussian model actively suppresses.
Sheldon Richman in his book Separating School and State: How to Liberate American Families, “the state’s apparently benevolent goal of universal education has actually been an insidious effort to capture all children in its net.”
Writing in the September 2003 issue of Harper’s, John Taylor Gatto urged that we “wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.… School trains children to be employees and consumers.”4
What constitutes a passing grade? In most classrooms in most schools, students pass with 75 or 80 percent. This is customary. But if you think about it even for a moment, it’s unacceptable if not disastrous. Concepts build on one another. Algebra requires arithmetic. Trigonometry flows from geometry. Calculus and physics call for all of the above. A shaky understanding early on will lead to complete bewilderment later. And yet we blithely give out passing grades for test scores of 75 or 80. For many teachers, it may seem like a kindness or perhaps merely an administrative necessity to pass
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Forgive a glass-half-empty sort of viewpoint, but a mark of 75 percent means you are missing fully one-quarter of what you need to know (and that is assuming it is on a rigorous assessment). Would you set out on a long journey in a car that had three tires? For that matter, would you try to build your dream house on 75 or 80 percent of a foundation?
One large survey conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that the single strongest predictor of better achievement scores and fewer behavioral problems was not time spent on homework, but rather the frequency and duration of family meals.11 If we think about it, this really shouldn’t be surprising. When families actually sit down and talk—when parents and children exchange ideas and truly show an interest in each other—kids absorb values, motivation, self-esteem; in short, they grow in exactly those attributes and attitudes that will make them enthusiastic and attentive learners.
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In the United States, for the school year 2008–2009 (the most recent year for which comparative numbers are available), the average cost per student for a single year of secondary public education was $10,499. To put this number in perspective, consider that it is larger than the entire per capita gross domestic product of Russia or Brazil. In New York, the state with the highest education costs, the figure was $18,126 per student, more than the per capita GDP of such wealthy nations as South Korea and Saudi Arabia.
If we move away from the broadcast lecture, students can have more of the teacher’s one-to-one attention; good teachers will get to do more of what led them to teaching in the first place—helping kids learn.
It’s not enough to put a bunch of computers and smartboards into classrooms. The idea is to integrate the technology into how we teach and learn; without meaningful and imaginative integration, technology in the classroom could turn out to be just one more very expensive gimmick.
Duke University professor Cathy N. Davidson has written that “if you change the technology but not the method of learning, then you are throwing good money after bad practice…. [The iPad] is not a classroom learning tool unless you restructure the classroom…. The metrics, the methods, the goals and the assessments all need to change.”13
In education as in every other field, there are fads and fashions. Looking at it positively, these fads sometimes point the way to true innovation. But other times they prove to be overly generalized dead ends, costly in terms of both money and wasted time.
The human brain is so complex that we should never become dogmatic about a particular approach being the best way for everyone.
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD
Why isn’t it lifelong? Doesn’t it seem arbitrary and in fact a little tragic that we invest so much in learning through formal education for twelve or sixteen or twenty years, and then just turn off the spigot when we reach full adulthood?
Since we can’t predict exactly what today’s young people will need to know in ten or twenty years, what we teach them is less important than how they learn to teach themselves.