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Khan Academy: the Teachers Strike Back
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."'"
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.
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.
Work Safe Porn
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.
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 . 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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?