Khan Academy: the Teachers Strike Back

A field in its infancy by iceaxe · 2012-07-24 09:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

Online education is in its infancy. This is an area where many ideas are being tried. Some will work better than others. Probably nothing currently available is "the answer", but rather all are those little baby steps toward what will eventually emerge. It's a normal and pretty universally unavoidable process.

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WALSTIB!

Re:A field in its infancy by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:14 · Score: 5, Insightful

No, online education is just 'education'. We have been having this argument for at least 100 years regarding technology and its transformation of learning. Some things do get easier better with technology, but in the end what we have a is a teaching and learning problem -- not a technology problem. Using new technologies we figure out ways to improve teaching and learning but one technology will not be the answer.
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.
Learning is hard. Some parts can be made easier with computer technology. Some parts can be made easier by turning them into a game. Some parts you just need to sit down and memorize. Most parts are done best when there is a group who are trying to figure things out and working together to achieve a common goal.
This is how businesses grow and get better. This is how children grow and learn. Technologies including chalk, pencils, iPads and times tables are tools to help.
Re:A field in its infancy by grumbel · 2012-07-24 09:40 · 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:A field in its infancy by Seumas · 2012-07-24 09:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

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, not ask questions, and *most of all* never correct them when they spread completely inaccurate information to the class. All I wanted was a way to self-educate. To a degree, I accomplished that with a lot of school-skipping, when I spent day after day at the central public library, instead. However, I was often hindered by wanting to learn things, but not knowing where to start or what path to follow. For example, I would be far ahead of where I am, today, if I had someone or something to guide me into programming a decade earlier. Back when I didn't have an internet to tell me about C and C++ and Perl. Back when the furthest I could get was "I know I want to code" and reading a book in the tiny section at the library that only really had theoretical things with pseudo-code that didn't mean anything to me at the time.
Khan (and the internet, overall) is an autodidacts wet-dream. It is what could have changed the lives of so many young people in the past who weren't stupid or lazy, but weren't getting any real meat out of their "real" education.
Re:A field in its infancy by trout007 · 2012-07-24 10:09 · Score: 3, Insightful

I would think a combination of Wikipedia and Khan would be great. Have competing videos of the different subjects all online and let the viewers rank them. As for him making mistakes, so what? Are critics saying that professional teachers never make mistakes? How many would be willing to put their school year online for criticism? At least with Khan Academy you have people who know watching and commenting. That lets people track down errors.
I've always said that lectures are a waste of time. You say the same thing over every semester. If it was a produced lecture you could keep improving the quality of it and use class time more productively for hands on activities and interaction.

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I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Re:A field in its infancy by trout007 · 2012-07-24 10:13 · Score: 3, Insightful

Great points. I think my strongest quality is my ability to learn. I spend most of my leisure learning new thing or improving my skills. I get annoyed when people say your so lucky because your handy. BS instead of watching sports or getting drunk I am online researching new things. Luck has nothing to do with it. Why waste your time on fantasy when there is so much interesting stuff out there in the real world waiting to be learned.

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I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Re:A field in its infancy by DesScorp · 2012-07-24 10:26 · Score: 2

Online education is to education as phone sex is to sex.
A little yes, but mostly no. The old saying goes "He who is self instructed has a fool for a teacher". But that's not what online courses are. If you decide to learn by simply gathering materials yourself and studying them, then you're self educated. But in most online courses you have a teacher, he/she's just not physically present. And while we make this out to be new and revolutionary, students that live on distant farms and plantations have been doing it this way for generations, but used ham radio instead of the Internet. Even when I was a kid... a long time ago... there were kids in distant Alaskan settlements and Australian farms deep into the boonies and African missions that were educated essentially by a mix of correspondence and radio communication. The Internet just gives the whole world the opportunity to learn without a physical classroom.

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Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Re:A field in its infancy by foniksonik · 2012-07-24 14:33 · Score: 3, Insightful

This.
Learning is easy. Making time to learn is inconvenient for people who do not enjoy knowledge as its own reward.
Many want the fruit of the tree but don't want the labor and time required to plant, nurture and cultivate. They also do not want the risk of the tree not bearing fruit after they have invested the time.
People want a free, no risk lunch. That is why they say learning is hard.

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A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Re:A field in its infancy by firewrought · 2012-07-24 16:10 · Score: 3, 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!

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-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Re:A field in its infancy by docmordin · 2012-07-24 16:39 · Score: 2, 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:And the unions are pissed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:04 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.

Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?

Classroom vs. Kahn by DoofusOfDeath · 2012-07-24 09:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

If the teaching is going to be bad either way, then Kahn costs a heck of a lot less to get the same result.

If Kahn and a unionized teacher are both bad, for Kahn the solution is for someone to upload a new lesson that's better. For the teacher, the solution is to suck it up because teacher unions demand that seniority trumps all other considerations.

I have no idea if Kahn or classroom teachers are ultimately the better choice. But the teachers unions better cobble together some damn good arguments for why they deserve the compensation and job protections they get, if Kahn offers way better bang for the buck.

Re:Classroom vs. Kahn by CommieLib · 2012-07-24 09:15 · Score: 4, Informative

Exactly. If Khan doesn't work, it will fade away. The same is not true of public schools. 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. The reasons why are political, and don't really matter. But the system hasn't worked for about a generation and a half now, nothing is going to change from the inside.

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If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Re:Classroom vs. Kahn by dcollins · 2012-07-24 09:59 · Score: 4, 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.

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We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Re:Classroom vs. Kahn by jimshatt · 2012-07-24 10:00 · Score: 2

What do you think is more important: developing a student's intellect and preparing them to find solutions to problems not covered in the classroom, or having students memorize a bunch of formulas (and this is not just a math thing -- this is a problem in a lot of fields)?
Hmm.. maybe you're right. But often experience with something that you don't quite understand but can work with (because of the tricks you learned) can push you in the direction of understanding. Provided that you are at all capable of understanding the subject. Sometimes explaining something from scratch is harder than letting someone work with it via a trick and letting his/her subconscious work out why it works.

Disclaimer: IANAT
Re:Classroom vs. Kahn by geoskd · 2012-07-24 11:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

That is basically the point of the article -- the Kahn academy is not better than a classroom teacher, and it is not a substitute for the guidance of an expert. The Kahn academy is being criticized (and has been repeatedly criticized) for falling into the trap of giving formulaic approaches to problem solving, the typical vocational-minded philosophy on education that has been so destructive to the education system in America (and possibly else, but I am not familiar enough to comment).
I'm calling BS on that one. I think there is entirely too much emphasis on theoretical, and not nearly enough vocational training in the US. Its the core reason why so many companies are complaining about a lack of qualified applicants. Realistically speaking, theoretical researchy type work in any field only really requires a handful of people (and in any given field, only a handful of people will have the potential to do that work anyway). Trying to make everyone else into a theoretical problem solver is stupid. A better bet would be to train for vocations that are useful. For the vast majority of jobs, formulaic approaches are just fine, and if a person needs something they don't already know, being able to follow an existing formula is probably how they are going to achieve that end. Very few people are going to need to look at a problem to be solved, and be unable to find something similar enough to simply copy. Engineering is all about the shortest route to a solution, as is technology. Most of the time, this means re-using existing solutions with some modification to fit the details. This requires no real theoretical understanding, just practical "how do I make this fit" knowledge.

What do you think is more important: developing a student's intellect and preparing them to find solutions to problems not covered in the classroom, or having students memorize a bunch of formulas (and this is not just a math thing -- this is a problem in a lot of fields)? That Kahn academy seems to be based on the idea that teaching a student lots of formulas is the goal; if the students encounter problems that were not covered, then they should just watch another video, right? That is the kind of education that students should be paid to participate in -- free is not even a low enough price.
Finding solutions to problems almost never means solving fundamental problems from scratch, and rarely requires a deep understanding of the principles involved. Most of the time, it is a simple matter of taking a few known formulas, mashing them together and producing the result. Remember, the world only needs so many rocket scientists. The guy that designs the toilet on a 747 doesn't really need to know fluid dynamics, tensile material theory, or aerodynamics, just autocad.
-=Geoskd

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I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Re:Classroom vs. Kahn by sphealey · 2012-07-24 11:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

= = = Exactly. If Khan doesn't work, it will fade away. The same is not true of public schools. = = =

Thank Gaia, given that universal public education is incredibly valuable.

= = = 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. The reasons why are political, and don't really matter. = = =

You don't spend much time volunteering at your local public school, or working over a period of years with public school teachers, do you?

= = = But the system hasn't worked for about a generation and a half now, nothing is going to change from the inside.= = =

The US public school system works exceedingly well. You are taking a few failed large urban districts such as City of Detroit and City of St. Louis and projecting them onto all "public schools" (the talking point meme these days is actually 'government schools').
The fact is that the vast majority of US families live in suburbs or exurbs of large cities and/or in small cities (and some rural districts), and for the most part their public schools are doing just fine (and if you like/believe standardized tests, doing better every year). Where that isn't true there is generally a clear link to lack of money (rural districts).
However, many of those families get their news from a specific ideologically-driven source and have been told that "public schools are failing". Well, they know it can't be their public school district because they get the test reports, know the teachers, etc. BUT - it must be those people in the next district over who have failing public schools. Let's force them to privatize! Think there might be an agenda at work there somewhere?
sPh

Pretty hilarious by forgent · 2012-07-24 09:05 · Score: 2

Given the state of schooling in many countries. Post secondary school, especially, has the nasty habit of being massively bloated and wasteful in terms of resources, as well as teachers pushing their own books as courseware at insane prices, then not even referencing them in the course. At least with Khan, the price is right and you don't feel ripped off, or pressured into continuing education in a broken system with more administrative holes than swiss cheese.

I don't know .... by King_TJ · 2012-07-24 09:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

My personal thought is, who cares? You get what you pay for, right? Services like Khan Academy are great if they're helping people learn things they wouldn't otherwise take an interest in learning about, or if it enables learning they were interested in but couldn't afford traditional methods of education.

If you're already IN a traditional classroom environment, then no - I'm not sure Khan Academy lessons are so great. I mean, you have to ask, as a paying student, why you're paying your hard-earned money to get a personal classroom experience with supposed educational professionals, who turn around and ask you to sit through canned Khan presentations instead of presenting the material themselves.

As for the "precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere nitpicking"? Maybe it is, really? By that, I mean, most people are really only interested in learning math as long as it allows them to accomplish something. The minority who find the theory itself fascinating and want to learn more math for the sake of learning it are the ones who will probably move beyond whatever Khan Academy teaches, and consult other sources.

If you know enough math to get correct answers to the problem you encounter as part of your daily life or job, then that's likely ALL the math you really need to know.

Re:I don't know .... by geekoid · 2012-07-24 09:19 · Score: 2

"You get what you pay for, right?
That's probably the greatest lie perpetrated on the American people.

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The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re:I don't know .... by ceoyoyo · 2012-07-24 13:41 · Score: 2

As for the "precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere nitpicking"? Maybe it is, really? By that, I mean, most people are really only interested in learning math as long as it allows them to accomplish something.
Unfortunately true. I work in a field (medical imaging) where certain complicated procedures can now be done by pushing the right button on a computer. So that's what the neuroscientists want to learn how to do - push the right button and get on with it. That will give you very nice, believable results... that are often completely wrong. Quite often getting a superficial introduction without at least enough in depth knowledge to know what you don't know is more dangerous than nothing at all.

What about people outside of formal education? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:09 · 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.

Conflict of interest by Anonymous+Psychopath · 2012-07-24 09:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

This is article deriding free on-line math education written by a person who develops paid on-line math education.

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

Re:Conflict of interest by Anonymous+Psychopath · 2012-07-24 09:32 · Score: 5, Informative

"This was written by Karim Kai Ani, a former middle school teacher and math coach, and the founder of Mathalicious, which is rewriting the middle school math curriculum around real-world topics."
This is not only at the top of the TFA, but the information is also stated in the first sentence of TFS.

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

Slope as rise over run. by Vellmont · 2012-07-24 09:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

If the complaint about how "rise of run isn't a formal definition of slope" is indicative of the kinds of errors in his lectures, then I'd say Khan is right that the naysayers are just being picky. Yah, it's not perfectly accurate or a formal definition, but it's an excellent start to understanding a deeper understanding.

An educators job should be to get people excited about a subject, not to present the most perfect, gods honest truth answers to everything. Anyone interested in a subject will go on to learn more, and find out the more nuanced and correct answers. If you've ever become an expert in any field, you know that everyone (including the best teachers) don't always have time or knowledge to give the best possible answers. That's OK, since education doesn't stop once the class stops.

If your ultimate (and final) response when asked why you believe something is "because my teacher told me", then you really don't understand the subject matter very well at all.

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AccountKiller

Re:And the unions are pissed... by jimmifett · 2012-07-24 09:10 · Score: 2, Informative

I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour. It's only when one factors in the months they aren't teaching as lost wages does the rate seem to be lower. 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.

Wrong. Classroom PLUS Khan by eldavojohn · 2012-07-24 09:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

If the teaching is going to be bad either way, then Kahn [sic] costs a heck of a lot less to get the same result.

I think I should point out that I haven't found any place where Khan suggests that his youtube videos replace public education.

Khan's made a few mistakes. The first that is the worst is that the article mentions he was corrected about multiplying negative numbers and instead of praising the people for making a new video correcting him, he apparently just took his video down and replaced it. And then made some little remark about why people put up such a big fuss about this concept. His second and less grievous mistake was to engage talking heads and accept praise from politicians. I think if he had just focused on making videos, ignored the praise and let Bill Gates or some other public figure pitch the video, he wouldn't find himself the target in this back and forth. We need to stop looking at online education as a replacement and instead as an augmenting force in our children's learning.

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My work here is dung.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by MickyTheIdiot · 2012-07-24 09:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

yep... because they all put in carbonite for those two months off and don't have to eat...right?

Re:Adverse reactions? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:13 · Score: 5, Funny

I thought they just had an aversion to him. Apparently things are more serious than I'd understood!

Khaaaaan!

Motivation by silverhalide · 2012-07-24 09:14 · Score: 4, Insightful

Khan Academy is the greatest supplemental education resource I have ever seen. But, one thing it can't do is force you to sit down, block off an hour a day, and learn a subject. Let's face is, 95% of us do not have that motivation, especially where one tab away awaits an entire internet of distractions.

Having a physical obligation, to an in-face person in a physical location to show up and learn something is an exceptionally powerful psychological motivational force and something that online education simply can't replace.

But man, would have I killed to have Khan available when it came to exam time in high school and college.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by houstonbofh · 2012-07-24 09:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

But bad teachers who have been around forever are very highly paid. Good teachers that have not been there for 20 years are the under paid ones. And that is the problem.

RIght on about Math by spire3661 · 2012-07-24 09:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

There is so much of accessible math theory locked behind the wall of algebra. Mathematics is BORING until you can show people WHY they are learning this. Most math classes i have taken are just total wrote calculation with no rhyme or reason. Its 'do it this way, you'll figure why out later'. When the 'later' is 2 years of math classes down the road, Khan's kinda got a point.

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Good-bye

Re:RIght on about Math by lorinc · 2012-07-24 09:41 · Score: 3, Insightful

Mathematics is BORING until you can show people WHY they are learning this
Actually if you continue learning maths, there's a moment where they become interesting by themselves and not only for what you can do with it.
If you didn't felt this, I guess you stopped too early, like when you stop reading a very good book because the first chapter was boring. Or maybe it's just not your kind (say, like some musical taste), whatever practical use it has or not.

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Video of some good progressive thrash music

Re:And the unions are pissed... by houstonbofh · 2012-07-24 09:16 · Score: 3, Informative

Automatic pay raises based on seniority, and not merit... I am all for paying good teachers a lot more.

Re:Adverse reactions? by Russ1642 · 2012-07-24 09:17 · Score: 3, Informative

His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Zrako · 2012-07-24 09:18 · 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:Wrong. Classroom PLUS Khan by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:18 · Score: 2, Informative

How about this from wikipedia:

Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:

This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.[9]

Sounds like he is advocating a replacement to public education ...

Re:When "you're doing it wrong" is fun. by houstonbofh · 2012-07-24 09:18 · Score: 2

So you will teach the "abstinence" course?

Cult of the false expert. by MickyTheIdiot · 2012-07-24 09:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

We need to be wary of Kahn Academy, but we have to be wary of "experts" that are condemning Kahn Academy as well.

A lot of times the "experts" doing on the complaining in popular media are just as worthless as listening to your fat neighbor who is bitching over his beer on his porch. Most of the talking heads on TV are like this and more and more even the people that are high ranking in governmental and professional organizations are well is well. It's because they're better at bullshit then their "expert" subject.

So.. as far as Kahn Academy, it's likely a little bit of both sides are right and both sides are wrong. You have "educators" that don't want to absorb different ideas and you have Kahn who is also a bit of an ass himself.

Public schools are hardly first rate by atticus9 · 2012-07-24 09:19 · Score: 2

I read the article criticizing a few particular lessons, but by comparison the education in public schools can be much worse. Yes there's some amazing teachers out there that will blow Khan's Academy out of the water covering the same material, but for every great teacher there's dozens of mediocore ones and a handful of really bad ones that you probably would never want your child hanging around, much less be subjugated to.

I wonder if Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cares about that?

Eveyone hates to be made into a commodity by Bruce+Perens · 2012-07-24 09:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

Everyone hates to have their business made into a commodity, that's simple economics. Once it happens, you have to compete on cost alone and be hyper-efficient to make a buck. You can only stay above that if you have a clear and provable advantage over the commodity version, and such things are difficult to maintain as the quality of the commodity version improves.

Look at this like Wikipedia. There are obvious quality problems, but Wikipedia keeps improving and getting larger, and if you're Microsoft Encarta, there's just no market for you any longer (thus, the first MS product actually killed by Open Source).

The guild apprenticeship system really hated book-learning. Copyists really hated printing. Both of these were previous means to commoditize education. This is just more of the same.

There will be tremendous economic repercussions from the further commoditization of education.

Bruce

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Bruce Perens.

Re:Eveyone hates to be made into a commodity by Red+Flayer · 2012-07-24 10:10 · Score: 2

There is a difference between information delivery systems and education. Verbal instruction, demonstration, lectures, manuscripts, and books are all information delivery systems, and are subject to "commoditization" to some degree. Education is an individualized process.

For something to be a commodity, it must be fungible, and education, an individualized process, is inherently not fungible. One recorded lecture may work for some people, a different one for other people. For some people, a recorded lecture will not be enough for education. You can't simply swap recorded lectures and have them be equally effective... these are not widgets.

I think it's important to recognize this distinction between information presentation and education. I think it's important for traditional educators (and administrators) to recognize this distinction, and understand that their role must change. Educators need more than ever to be motivators -- this is the differentiation they need to be successful. Educational systems need to proportionately reward good motivators, rather than seniority.

As for your specific examples (book-learning, printing), these are all examples of an increase in people having access to information. I'm behind that 100%. But I don't think the economic impact is going to be tremendous. Access to information is but a piece of the educational process.

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"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai

exactly by poetmatt · 2012-07-24 09:20 · Score: 3, Insightful

People decrying this are the teachers who are in fear of change. Nobody said his solution has to be the final one but guess what - do you see any of these teachers who are complaining doing anything to create online teaching methods?

If anything, Khan should be commended for apparently doing what some teachers have not - and for free, no less.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Zrako · 2012-07-24 09:20 · Score: 2

I don't think you appreciate how much teachers really make, especially if they've been there for a while. Teachers get some of the most generous automatic raises you'll ever see, can get all kinds of salary bonuses for becoming nationally certified, etc. I used to work for a school district in an area where the average income is around $35,000/yr and some of the senior teachers in my district were making very close to six figures. The principals even more. They're hardly the poor street urchins the unions sell them as.

This is only if your school district does not have a freeze on raises like every single school district within 40 miles of where I live. With the budget crunch in education teachers are not getting their automatic raises for time spent teaching or advancing their education.

Ad Hominem by eldavojohn · 2012-07-24 09:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

This is article deriding free on-line math education written by a person who develops paid on-line math education.

That sounds like an ad hominem. Motives aside, is the argument valid? One part of the article stood out to me:

As a result, experienced educators have begun to push back against what they see as fundamental problems with Khan’s approach to teaching. In June, two professors from Grand Valley State University created their own video in which they pointed out errors in Khan’s lesson on negative numbers: not things they disagreed with, but things he got plain wrong. To his credit, Khan did replace the video. However, instead of using this as an opportunity to engage educators and improve his teaching, he dismissed the criticism.

“It’s kind of weird,” Khan explained, “when people are nitpicking about multiplying negative numbers.”

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.”

Why isn't Khan embracing criticism and review/removal/replacement of his videos by knowledgeable folks? I would be rewarding people proofing my many videos and trying to get more people doing that instead of dismissing it as "nitpicking."

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My work here is dung.

Re:Ad Hominem by Anonymous+Psychopath · 2012-07-24 09:34 · Score: 2

It's certainly possible the arguments are valid, but I'm deeply skeptical of criticism about a product that's written by a competitor. Especially one who fails to note the conflict, as is customary in journalism.

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Re:Ad Hominem by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 11:23 · Score: 2, Informative

Mathalicious is a site that provide innovative lesson plans for mathematics teachers. they didnt really explain that in the article anywhere. Thus, the product is for teachers not for students and therefore it is not a competitor with Khan academy.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by HarrySquatter · 2012-07-24 09:24 · Score: 2

Care to back this up with facts rather than us having to take your word for it?

Online education should mean one thing by betterunixthanunix · 2012-07-24 09:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

There should be exactly one goal in online education: to improve the quality of education. There is nothing else to discuss until that matter is settled, and it is nowhere near settled. "Transforming education" is only good if the transformation yields better education.

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.

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Palm trees and 8

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:26 · Score: 2, Informative

Does any other line of work that can be performed with a masters degree get the summer off?

Give *me* a break! No seriously, I'd love the summer off for 70 percent of my annual pay.

~Working Stiff :)

All of this is a waste... by Genda · 2012-07-24 09:26 · Score: 2

By all means include teachers in the process, particularly passionate teachers with amazing results because they have something to say, something to share, and they can shape this thing into a better tool to serve humanity. To those who are concerned that its threatening your turf, get over it, technology hasn't even begun to threaten your turf. You want to shape the future, ride the wave, become a meaningful part of the change. Those of you just putting in time, because its your job, sorry, it may not be your job much longer. There are a ton of great teachers out there who will find a way to use this technology to improve their educational process, and teachers aren't going away any time soon. People like people to people interaction in educating their children, its how human beings are designed.

That said, the only way to transform the vast majority of poor and suffering human beings on the planet is to bring enlightenment, and that takes education. What Khan is doing will change the world. Who cares if someone else designs the curriculum, and another person delivers the classes. The point is that anyone anywhere with an inexpensive tablet will soon be able to take their child from early grade school to college, at their own pace. Can anything be more important on the planet today. Hell, I'd love to have a few folks in D.C. sit through a few of those classes. We might get some sanity.

Re:When "you're doing it wrong" is fun. by Guignol · 2012-07-24 09:27 · Score: 2

No, he will follow the successful trend and brag about being unprepared and consider "foreplay" and "having your partner also satisfied" concepts to be mere "nitpicking"

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:28 · Score: 2, Informative

They don't get the summer off. They just don't get paid for the summer. Does any other job only pay you for 9 months out of the year.

The flipped classroom is on the way by rmcd · 2012-07-24 09:30 · Score: 4, Informative

I think a debate about Khan's specific videos is beside the point. For years, people have been talking about online education and we got these dreadful videos of a professor lecturing, shot from the back of the room. Khan shows us a realistic vision of how online education can happen at reasonable cost. It will not necessarily replace the teachers, but it will replace a teacher who repeats the same material multiple times a day. And it will help to level the playing field.

People in universities are talking a lot about is the "flipped classroom", which means the lecture is online and clarification and working of problems occur in the classroom. This model is most obviously applicable to STEM classes, and if you haven't been following the developments, this site at NC State offers an overview of what's going on with one kind of flipped classroom and where it's happening. The University of Minnesota has recently made a huge investment in this kind of classroom.

Whatever happens with Khan specifically, he's energized a process of transformation that everyone knew had to happen eventually. Kudos to him.

Re:The flipped classroom is on the way by O('_')O_Bush · 2012-07-24 11:03 · Score: 2

That is largely a cultural problem, and one that Khan tries to address. Oftentimes, "not caring" is a cover for being afraid to try hard and fail. Learn at you own pace type programs largely eliminate failure when trying. Most kids want to feel smart or make their parents proud, but there are always outliers.

As a society, we are obligated to provide everyone a standard, but not necessarily obligated to, say, make sure everyone goes to college (unlike what many current educational programs are geared for).

In that respect, online learning is an enabler.

--
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);

Re:And the unions are pissed... by gallondr00nk · 2012-07-24 09:30 · Score: 3, Insightful

I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour.

Isn't that something to work towards though, instead of something to deride?

Why does it always have to be a race to the bottom?

Re:And the unions are pissed... by dgatwood · 2012-07-24 09:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

Not when you factor in the fact that they have to spend significant parts of those summers preparing updated curricula based on new test criteria, new versions of the books, etc. Not when you realize that they need to rework their tests over the summer, or else the students cheat. And so on.

Besides, $25 per hour is not being "paid pretty well". It's three times minimum wage, but a pharmacist makes double that with only about two more years of education. A tech sector employee makes double that on a bachelor's degree. Supervisors in Ford factories make double that, often with no degree at all. And for this, the teachers attended four years of college, plus at least a couple of years to get their teaching credentials, plus additional classes (CPE/CPD) every few years to maintain those credentials.

Teachers have what is, without a doubt, one of the most important jobs in the world. Without education, society would not move forward. Yet somehow we as a society feel that they deserve no more pay (on average) than a 7-11 store manager or a construction worker. And those same people wonder why our education system has problems. Please tell me you don't seriously consider such low salaries to be reasonable.

--

Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

Khan Needs Guidence by KalvinB · 2012-07-24 09:31 · 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.

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Work Safe Porn

Re:And the unions are pissed... by edremy · 2012-07-24 09:33 · Score: 2

I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour. It's only when one factors in the months they aren't teaching as lost wages does the rate seem to be lower. 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.

I know- $25/hour for a job that requires a bachelors, a ton of certifications and increasingly a masters degree. I mean, who are these folks to demand middle class wages? I mean, they're only responsible for educating our kids. We need to cut their pay to something reasonable like $10/hour. We'll save a ton of tax money that way, and I'm sure the kids will never notice. (At least those unfortunate enough to have to go to public school, that is. The deserving wealthy can use their tax cuts to pay for private school tuitions.)

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"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

Bullshit. Ever seen the requirements to stay certified as a teachers? 9, sometimes 12 hours of study per year that they have to shell out and attend for college courses just to "stay certified." It's a small wonder most of them eventually get multiple Masters degrees or a Doctorate, there's no point in not for the amount of "continuing education" courses they are required to take just to stay employed.

And when do you think they're taking those courses, hmmm?

I hate right wing shitbag morons like you who misrepresent teachers and think they're "doing nothing" all summer.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Aereus · 2012-07-24 09:34 · Score: 2

You forget that the average teacher puts in more than 40hours a week during the school year. They're at the school for 7-9 hours, then they have to grade papers, work up lesson plans, etc. And there are a number of in-service days during the summer they still have to work.

If teachers were really living it up, the teacher's parking lot would not have the kinds of cars in it that they do ... they don't exactly drive around a bunch of Lexus'

Mandatory Attendance by giltwist · 2012-07-24 09:35 · Score: 2

I can sum up why Khan Academy is so popular in two words: mandatory attendance. To use the age old comparison, broccoli sucks when you are force fed it as a kid, but it can be quite good when you try it voluntarily as an adult. I haven't seen the recent vids, but when it was Khan by himself it was the same old chalk-and-talk you see in so many traditional classrooms, only with less precise terminology and no admitting you don't know the answer in front of the class. There's something to be said for what Khan is doing. It's rather like peer tutoring. It's a great supplement to teachers, but its no replacement. Much like Harry Potter is a great gateway to Lord of the Rings but not a replacement thereof.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:36 · Score: 2, Informative

Repeat after me. Teachers do not get paid in the summer. They get paid for nine months. Nine mouth pay is either paid at the full rate for nine months. Or they get paid at a reduced rate for 12 months.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by iamwahoo2 · 2012-07-24 09:41 · Score: 3, Insightful

Can you link to a "9" credit hour requirement in any public school system in the US? Otherwise, I find your assertion extremely difficult to swallow.

Re:Levels by MachDelta · 2012-07-24 09:43 · Score: 2

What's funny to me is that I once used Khan Academy to pass a (required) intro Stats course when my university prof turned out to be HORRIBLE. His accent was thicker than molasses, he couldn't actually answer a student's question when asked (he just repeated the same steps/examples), he didn't even have his own notes - he was working off of another prof's lessons! They might as well have put a parrot at the front of the room. I learned jack squat in class. So, I stopped going, and started digging into my textbook (helpful but tedious) and ripping through Khan's stuff (quick but not very in depth). KA was helpful for quickly learning the overarching concepts, where the text was better at dissecting specific problems. I doubt I would have had the patience to learn everything from the text; Khan was a lifesaver. I passed the course, rated the prof into the toilet on his faculty eval, sold the textbook, became a fan of Khan's stuff, and smashed my $4 statistics calculator with a hammer just for the satisfaction of finishing a terrible course.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Sir_Sri · 2012-07-24 09:43 · Score: 5, Informative

And? To be a teacher you need to have a bachelors degree. I train computer scientists for a living, 12 months after graduation (or if they did a co-op, straight out of graduation) they are in the 70-90k a year range with a BSc. If they were teaching they wouldn't get to that point for at least 15 years. Starting teacher salaries are more like 25-40k and creep up from there.

Teachers do get good benefits, government jobs are like that, they get actual pension plans, which is more an indication that everyone else is getting fucked than one that teachers are getting an unfairly awesome deal, and they get health care. They also get the benefit of all of the right time off (march break, summers, chrismas etc. ) so they don't have to pay babysitters for those times like everyone else. But it's not really better paying than any decent job for someone with a bachelors. In fact it's far far far worse pay to be a teacher than to go into the private sector if you are trained in any of the 'STEM' areas.

Now I'll be up front and say I think the biggest problem with teaching salaries (and professor salaries most places) is that everyone is in the same pay bracket regardless of what you were trained in. The market for BA's in English is a LOT worse than the market for BSc's in Computer science, but you get paid the same in both teaching and professorship.

Having standardized teacher pay for a large area is really important because you don't want all of the good teachers to go to big cities in rich neighbourhoods and all of the bad teachers in the poor neighbourhoods and so on.

http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/ actually gives a good look at teacher salaries in the US. The highest are just under 60k average, and I hate to break it to you, but finding someone with a BSc in math/chemistry/physics/comp sci/engineering who will get out of bed for you at 60k with 15 years experience is going to be tough in a lot of places.

It's not like teachers who can get full time gigs are destitute, nor should they be, but it's not some spectacular awesome paying job either. If your area happens to be full of people who scrape by on minimum wage well then maybe you need some better teachers so people will be capable of doing work that warrants more than 35k a year? Maybe you need something to attract people to the area that have decent incomes, so they could have a worthwhile lifestyle and attract and retain more people like that?

Oh and if you compare the link I just gave to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income, on average teachers are paid about well, average, and actually a little less than average. Admittedly, that doesn't count the benefits package, which is nice, but well, you'd think teachers are supposed to be in the top half of wage earners considering they're required to be in the top 40% of education attainment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States).

And yes, teachers get summers off. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to plan lessons for 5 hours a day for 10 months, but that takes a LOT of work the first few times you do it. During those 10 months you are marking and adjusting and improvising and trying to actually get the shit together for the class, so you have time 'off' where you're expected to independently figure out how to manage things for the 10 months you are at the front of the room, and that is your vacation time, baring some exceptional circumstances you don't get any other time off for a holiday (which is a fair tradeoff, but one should be clear that teachers don't get 4 weeks paid leave on top of the time they already get).

Re:And the unions are pissed... by barefoot_professor · 2012-07-24 09:47 · Score: 5, Informative

Okay, I have to interject here . . . I am currently teacher. Yes, my annual salary is $50,000. During the school year, I arrive at my building at 6:00 am and I do not leave until 4:30 pm. On a good day (all of my students are caught up on their work lol), I get a thirty minute lunch. I get exactly three 5 minute breaks throughout the day to use the bathroom, etc. I am told that at some of the other schools in my district that teachers are expected to be at their door monitoring/greeting students. They are only allowed to use the restroom if an administrator comes to fill in for them. Unfortunately, I am not able to accomplish all that is expected of me at school, so I spend an additional 5 to 10 hours working in the evenings or over the weekend. I do not get the summer off, but I do have a great deal of flexibility from mid-June to mid-August. I get to choose which workshops and trainings to attend during those two months in addition to all of the preparation I am expected to do for the year's upcoming classes. Oh, and of that $50,000 salary, I easily spend $2000 or more of that purchasing supplies that the district hasn't approved or hasn't approved in a timely manner. As far as teachers doing a "shitty" job, just like any other profession there are good teachers and bad teachers. Unfortunately, a lot of good teachers are discouraged by all of the stupid policies put in place to prevent the shitty teachers from doing too much harm. Anybody know of any entry level Software Development jobs in java looking to hire a slightly rusty Software Engineer!?

Re:Levels by glassware · 2012-07-24 09:51 · Score: 2

I've watched them.

Classroom lectures are somewhere between 30-60% of the educational value of school. The remaining 40-70% is direct communication with the teacher, interaction with your peers, homework, and performance evaluation.

I'm not certainly convinced that Khan academy videos are better than an in-person teacher, but they have a few key advantages: 1) they are free, and 2) they are available at any time.

Beyond that, I certainly hope there's a way to continue to improve videos and instruction. Teaching in general is ripe for open source improvements. Why do we keep paying for textbooks each year? Why not have a single open source textbook that can be read on a tablet PC, eReader, or printed as a PDF?

Frankly, we pay a lot more money for non-teacher parts of education. Even if teaching is abolished, we'll have to have someone take care of our kids and make sure they do their lessons. Whatever we call that person, the job description sure sounds like a teacher to me.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by BlueBlade · 2012-07-24 09:54 · Score: 2

I think people in the tech sector have a skewed perception of a decent pay. Perhaps because the cost of living in areas with a high concentration of tech jobs tends to be high, I'm not sure. Wages of $25 per hour ($50,000 yearly assuming 40h work weeks) are well over the median US income, (around $37,000), so I'd say that this is in fact, "paid pretty well". Your examples of earning over $50 per hour would put you in the top 10% earners in the USA, so that's not merely "paid pretty well", but exceptional.

--
Religion is the best example of mass psychosis

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 09:54 · Score: 5, Informative

Does any other line of work that can be performed with a masters degree get the summer off?

Give *me* a break! No seriously, I'd love the summer off for 70 percent of my annual pay.

~Working Stiff :)

Let’s talk real world. My school district in Arizona is one of the highest paying in the state (Mesa Public Schools). Straight out of college I would make $36352 a year with a bachelors. With a masters it goes up to $39289 and with a PhD/EdD it is $44322. Remember these amounts are all before Uncle Sam takes out his cut for taxes, social security, etc.

So if we say the average teacher works only 9 months out of the year that equals out to the following: $4039/month with a BA, $4365/month with a MA and $4925/month for a PhD/EdD. An average teacher I would say works between 40-60 hours a week between grading, writing lesson plans, parent teacher conferences and all the other work outside of teaching time. That seems like a decent amount of pay, at least livable (granted what I view as decent pay is a lot lower than most).

Now let’s look at that same salary divided out to 12 months assuming they get “summers off” as you say. Those values go to $3029/month with a BA, $3274/month with a MA and $3694/month with a PhD/EdD. Remember once again those values are BEFORE TAXES. That might give you a better view at how little teachers really make compared to other working professionals with the same level of education.

Oh and FYI those “summers off” usually consist of taking development courses that the teachers pay for out of pocket. The source of these figures is on the Mesa Public School district website http://www.mpsaz.org/hr/general/salary/

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Zrako · 2012-07-24 10:04 · Score: 2

Don't forget that $25 per hour figure does not add up to $50000 yearly because they do not work 12 months a year. It actually adds up to around $36000 a year which is below the median US income.

Re:Wrong. Classroom PLUS Khan by imlepid · 2012-07-24 10:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

Wrong. Classroom PLUS Khan

Yes, and there are examples that the Classroom + Khan is an effective model. The Economist has an article describing how the Los Altos school district is using Khan's videos to provide the "dry lecture" which is assigned for homework while classroom time is used for supervised problem solving with the teacher roving about helping any struggling students. That model makes complete sense to me especially since we keep hearing stories about how parent's can't do their kids homework (I've been called in to help my little cousin with her math homework at times when her parents were thoroughly confused).

Re:And the unions are pissed... by SomeKDEUser · 2012-07-24 10:15 · Score: 2

But see, this cannot happen in the "free" market: choosing more pay vs more free time is not in fact an available option to you because the employers always prefer employees who pick the "more pay" branch of the alternative. Thus a minority of workaholics can force everyone to woork extra long hours.

In Europe, people get more holidays because these are mandated by the government. And this improves hourly productivity because not-completely-burnt-out people do work better (no shit). This is how the French, with their incredible number of days of holidays get to be nearly as productive as the 60-hours-a-week Americans.

This is a case were collective preference (most people would prefer more free time even at the cost of some salary) can only be obtained through regulation, or alternatively powerful unions.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by DesScorp · 2012-07-24 10:17 · Score: 2

yep... because they all put in carbonite for those two months off and don't have to eat...right?

I have several family members that are teachers, and I don't know what state you live in, but where they are, they get a paycheck 12 months per year. Most school systems offer the option to spread their pay throughout the whole year, rather than just the school months. In some school systems, year-round pay is mandatory.

--
Life is hard, and the world is cruel

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Vancorps · 2012-07-24 10:28 · Score: 5, Informative

It's not hard to Google something. Of course parent had is almost right, to renew your teaching certification you do have to have 12 college hours or 180 hours of professional development activities. The certificate is good for 6 years in Arizona although this varies from state to state.

Many teachers will also tutor in the summer months, this is also why a lot of teachers starting out are also in the service industry. I don't understand all the hate towards teachers. They aren't paid a lot for all the bullshit they have to deal with. I have to deal with a lot of bullshit too but I'm paid in relation to how much I have to deal with.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by PopeRatzo · 2012-07-24 10:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

And they can usually get a job that pays something approaching real, professional wages during the summer.

I'm hoping you're being sarcastic and don't really have the idea that there are just all these "real" professional-wage paying jobs that are available for just three months that are being held open for teachers.

And we don't often require them to have a degree that's specific to teaching

Who would rather have teach you physics, someone with a degree in Education or someone with a degree in Physics?

I'm going with "sarcastic".

--
You are welcome on my lawn.

Fallacy of the excluded middle by jrminter · 2012-07-24 10:30 · Score: 2

As a couple of others have noted, there is no reason to posit a false dichotomy - that one must use either Kahn Academy (or similar) or a "live" teacher. Short lessons like Kahn does are useful to review concepts/unit operations where a student is rusty. My wife teaches physics, statistics, and calculus at a small high school and is an adjunct at a local community college, teaching the CC classes in the high school. The best bang for the buck for college credits around. Anyway, her biggest complaint is that too many of her students have been coddled in lower level classes and have either never mastered the pre-requisites or simply not retained them. Kahn's videos are one of many helpful resources for such students. The goal is to transform students into self-directed, life-long learners. This is really the only path to success, because the half-life to obsolescence of any technical course of study is so short.

Prof. Jean-Claude Bradly at Drexel discovered that students actually preferred pod/vodcasts of lectures (they could pause and watch on their schedule) and it freed up class time to work problems and answer questions. I see Kahn Academy videos in this same light. Are they perfect? No. can they be improved? Yes. Will polite, constructive criticism be better received than snarky comments? Absolutely! In this regard, the cliche "everything i needed to know, i learned in kindergarten" has some merit - things are a lot better when everybody is polite and plays nice in the sandbox.

Re:Adverse reactions? by InterGuru · 2012-07-24 10:31 · Score: 2

His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.

Not all students can learn as quickly and easily as most /. readers.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by PopeRatzo · 2012-07-24 10:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

Like all the other seasonal jobs like wildland firefighters are paid for not working?

So if there aren't any fires, firefighters shouldn't be paid? And if there aren't any crimes, police shouldn't be paid?

A teacher might not start out making great money, but with a few endorsements like ESL (which you don't actually have to speak another language to get), and a masters degree (which is just a few more easy classes) you will make more tax payer dollars than you can shake a stick at.

Wow, are you off-base. You don't really know anything about it do you?

And you can get intellectually lazy and morbidly obese...

...and still be elected governor of New Jersey?

and the union and the district will protect YOU over the young up-and-coming sharp teachers that graduate every year because of "seniority" or tenure.

You're getting all your information about teachers and teaching from talk radio, aren't you? That statement is not true, even here in Chicago, which is ground zero for the "thugs in the teachers' union.

--
You are welcome on my lawn.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Vancorps · 2012-07-24 10:35 · Score: 2

What is this based on? As someone that has many many familiy members who went on to become teachers, none of them have more money than they can shake a stick at, many also have their masters degree. My mother was a teacher for 30 years, 25 of them with a masters degree. Within 3 years of being an IT professional I was making more than she was by a long shot. I don't know any teachers driving Mercedes unless they are at the university level.

There are some seriously screwed up districts out their but they are not the only possible outcome. Teachers are also not allowed to become intellectually lazy as you say given that they need to either take additional classes or do 180 hours of professional development to get recertified to teach. This is an ongoing process.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by mopomi · 2012-07-24 10:42 · Score: 4, Informative

And I think you have a skewed perception of a real teacher's work day and a skewed perception of actual pay rates.

11.5 hours/day is the norm.
(http://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full_noapp.pdf)

The school year for students is 180 days. Teachers must be there a week early and leave a week later. They also have work days throughout the year that the students are not there for. This gives about 200 days per year of work.
200 days * 11.5 hours/day = 2300 hours per year.
The 40-hour work week gives 2088 hours per year.

The pay schedule for teachers in my area ranges from $30,943 for a BA, first year to $60250 for a BA+100 (or MA+60; A JD from George Mason requires a BA+89 hours) and 22 years experience.

$30,943/2300 = $13.45 per hour.
$60250/2300 = $25.56 per hour.
These include benefits, so the take-home is significantly less than this.

Re:Adverse reactions? by LateArthurDent · 2012-07-24 10:45 · Score: 3, Informative

His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.

Wow, I'm not the only one!

When I first heard of Khan Academy, I thought it was a great concept. I visited the website, saw a great deal many subjects and thought this was probably the greatest thing ever. And then I tried watching the videos...

Very small amount of content, presented in the most uninteresting way possible, in an extremely repetitive way. I couldn't make it through a full video.

Re:Adverse reactions? by bitt3n · 2012-07-24 10:55 · Score: 4, Funny

His lessons are too slow.

it's a shame he doesn't have a lesson on using Youtube, or you could learn about the slider that allows you to fast forward as required.

--
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?

Re:Adverse reactions? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 10:58 · Score: 5, Funny

I second that. My solution was to download the videos, then use mplayer to play them back at 1.5 times the speed.
It's fine, as long as you don't mind being taught by Alvin the Chipmunk.

Critics have it all wrong.. by michealPW · 2012-07-24 11:01 · Score: 2

Oh finally a topic I have real-world experience with! :)

Let me start by pointing out that the biggest criticism against Khan Academy is a strawman-argument. Khan Academy is NOT meant to replace the classroom. In fact Khan himself has explained this. Khan started it all with a few simple videos he posted to YouTube to help tutor his Niece who was being tracked into the lower tier math class'.

Now for my personal experience... There's a LOT of bad Math teachers in Canada. In my country, you don't have choice. If your teacher is crap, oh well. He's protected by one of the nation's largest and most powerful unions and he's not going anywhere. In fact my current Grade 12 math teacher is a prime example. He visibly does not care.. If you don't get a concept, oh well. At the end of the day the entire class moves onto the next concept whether you're ready or not. In a few days you'll be so far behind it can seem pretty hopeless.

For me, Khan Academy got me from the low 60s and 70s up to the high 90s and the top of my class'. Now I'm helping the other students in class and I'm being tracked at the Academic-level ( The highest tier in our school system, which opens up the door to any College & University I want :P ) and it's all thanks to Khan! I would say the biggest difference for me when learning at the Khan Academy is Khan has a very robust understanding of the math concepts and even history. I can't learn by having some teacher hand-out a sheet with 10 formulas on it and just be expected to memorize them... I need to understand why and how or I'll never remember. Khan always does a great job of explain WHY and HOW things work even throwing in some history at times to make things much more interesting ( I.E: Pythagoras feeding his apprentice to sharks for showing that 2^(1/2) is an example of an irrational number, which could not be expressed in a nice and neat fraction... Heck my teacher doesn't even know who Pythagoras was :| )

Re:And the unions are pissed... by badboy_tw2002 · 2012-07-24 11:03 · Score: 2

I know a lot of teachers and don't have anything against them, they do a great job and a great service that I would never want to do.

The main problem we have is as I see it is

a) High cost of education materials
b) Tenure
c) Lack of merit based pay

Working in schools can frequently be demoralizing because while you do get extremely intelligent, motivated people who are driven by the cause (and certainly not by the pay, which is of course primarily abysmal), you also get the burnouts and hangerons that work the system and can stay for years doing nothing and literally ruining kids lives with a shitty education. That number is low - like single digit percentage points. But its high enough that those individuals can demoralize the rest of the hardworking ones and burn them out (bad teacher zombie effect?), or more likely make them leave the profession. You also get the "lemon dance", where smart managers (aka principles) work the system on their end and get the bad teachers out of their school. They can't fire them, but the good managers will get them moved. These teachers tend to pool at the bottom onto the bad or inexperienced managers, who are at what typically end up being the schools all the poor & minority kids go to.

It shouldn't take two years to fire a shitty teacher, and places like the "rubber room" shouldn't exist. On the flip side, we should treat teaching like the professional job that it is and increase spending on merit based salaries for the excellent teachers out there. Keep them engaged, keep them employed.

On topic, I think leveraging technology like Khan academy is how we progress forward. Use tech to foster a 1:1 lesson plan for students so they can progress at the same rate. The teacher answers questions, directs learning, assesses the students progress etc. The content could probably use improvement, but 30 bored kids getting the same lecture when they didn't understand yesterday's lesson is probably not the answer either.

Re:Adverse reactions? by skids · 2012-07-24 11:08 · Score: 4, 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.

--
Someone had to do it.

Using Khan as a supplement by crrieger · 2012-07-24 11:13 · Score: 2

I teach AP Chemistry and I know several of my students need all the help they can get. I created a class website, making sure to include several pages to the best quality chemistry podcast-type videos I could find. While Khan isn't perfect by any means, I find his videos to be an excellent backup explanation to the topics we discuss in class. I separated his videos into categories that reflect the different units we cover so its was easier for the kids to find a link that meets their needs. I know one of my seniors last year found his website invaluable to pass a college algebra class that switched teachers mid-year, leaving the kids without the best instructor. Sometimes it's nice to have a second voice explaining a topic (we even swap students for tutoring between teachers for this reason), so I think his efforts are on the right track. There are three sets which are of very good quality for AP Chem - the NMSI AP Chem videos, Khan, and a site called Chemguy.com. Even college students in their 100 and 200 level classes would benefit from his offerings.

One huge thing I have concerns about is the concept of the "flipped classroom" where kids are expected to go home and watch some online video and then expected to go into to class tomorrow well-versed on the topic and ready for some activity. Many higher-order topics need that interactive teacher-student discourse to full understand the topic. I've spent entire periods just covering a single free-response question, making sure to cover a number of tangential topics and showing the full spectrum of the question. Two guys named Bergmann and Sams are pushing the flipped classroom in the sciences, but haven't ponied up the numbers to show progress.

In an nutshell, Khan and anyone else who produces quality educational chemistry videos is a resource I will encourage my kids to use. I want it to help support discussion and learning in the classroom, but not replace it.

--
"Remember,no matter where you go... there you are." - Buckaroo Banzai

Re:And the unions are pissed... by mopomi · 2012-07-24 11:14 · Score: 3, 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... by lgw · 2012-07-24 11:22 · Score: 2

Mine's working out quite well. Of course, I also make the hard choice to fund it fully, accepting a lower standard of living now for a higher one in retirement. Thrift is a shocking concept these days, it seems.

You would definitely need a bump in pay to accompany the switch from a pension plan to a 401K, but then compensation would be above board and open.

--
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 11:26 · Score: 3, Informative

Your link is...creative. It takes the length of Illinois' school day (300 minutes) and says that this is equivalent to the length of the teacher's work day, and then multiplies this work day by the number of days in the school session (176) to get the total hours worked. Add in daily preparation time, daily after school activity supervision (how few teachers don't have a sport or activity assigned to them?), grading, calling parents about low performing/absent students, lesson development, etc. and you will double that per day number. Add in mandatory meetings that take place outside of school days, teacher development classes, additional education, and you will probably add an entire month or more to their actual days worked. The pension plan is a filthy little bit of creativeness too: teachers don't get social security (save that from hours worked outside the teaching profession) and that pension is their replacement. So by the time we cut away all of Mr. Carter's creativity he's overstated teacher compensation by a factor of two at a minimum, and a factor of three would not be surprising.

Really the only commentary worth reading on that link of yours is in the responses to Mr. Carter and I suppose the humor value of his desperate flailing.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by ShanghaiBill · 2012-07-24 11:43 · Score: 4, Informative

Who would rather have teach you physics, someone with a degree in Education or someone with a degree in Physics?

Having a teacher with a degree in education is negatively correlated with student performance. Our schools could be improved if they refused to hire anyone with an education degree.

On the bright side, the damage is limited, since a teacher with a masters degree in education is no worse than someone with just a bachelors degree (but no better either).

Re:And the unions are pissed... by ShanghaiBill · 2012-07-24 11:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers

Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Penguinisto · 2012-07-24 11:47 · 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 . 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?

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Belial6 · 2012-07-24 11:58 · Score: 2

And they still are in the top 50% of earners in the nation.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by PopeRatzo · 2012-07-24 12:01 · Score: 3, Insightful

Anyone else notice that while teachers are in the top 50% of earners in the country on a yearly basis

So are garbage men. So are programmers.

Being in the "top 50%" of earners really doesn't mean shit any more. It just means their rations haven't been cut as much as yours.

--
You are welcome on my lawn.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by religious+freak · 2012-07-24 12:04 · Score: 2

Correct-o. Teacher unions are the problem. Don't believe it? Ask your kid about their oldest teacher that clearly doesn't give a fuck anymore. They've got a tough job? Sure they do, but when you can't hack it you've got to go. That doesn't happen with teachers.

--
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011

Re:And the unions are pissed... by PopeRatzo · 2012-07-24 12:07 · Score: 3, Insightful

Having a teacher with a degree in education is negatively correlated with student performance. Our schools could be improved if they refused to hire anyone with an education degree.

That's my point. Education is the worst academic discipline after Economics. Even psychology degrees require more rigor than Econ.

The university where I taught closed it's Education department several years ago, much to my delight. It's one of the top 3 schools in the US. They wouldn't listen to me and close the Econ school though.

--
You are welcome on my lawn.

Re:Adverse reactions? by Director+of+Acronyms · 2012-07-24 12:11 · Score: 5, Informative

Use VLC - it will speed up and correct pitch

--
Never look back at the carnage.

Re:Interesting graph on school expenditure by coun by galabar · 2012-07-24 12:11 · Score: 2

And a couple more: http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4f0b5867eab8ea4c24000033/spending-per-pupil-by-country.jpg http://www.supportingevidence.com/sitebuilder/images/PISA_Test_Scores_vs_cumm_edu_spend_by_country-820x565.jpg

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Sir_Sri · 2012-07-24 12:20 · Score: 2

The problem is that pensions have to last for more like 20 years than 10. If you're going to live to 85, however that happens, you have to basically save enough money to sustain you indefinitely. Which is what rich people have, enough yearly gains from investments to live indefinitely, and to keep their savings growing consistent with inflation.

You either need people to save a huge amount during your working life, or you need a huge cohort of young people who are productive to pay for the retirees to live.

the latter, not the former. One of the major problems in the labour market right now is that old people aren't leaving. We've done away with mandatory retirement (in canada at least) and because everyones investments tanked old people aren't getting out of the work force, leaving less jobs for new people.

Either you're stuck bailing out mum and dad when they're 75 and you're working, or you me, and everyone else spread the risk and responsibility of bailing out mum and dad around, but the net effect is the same, and bigger pools of risk are always preferable to smaller ones.

This problem hit the private sector earlier

other way around, this problem created by the private sector getting rid of pensions is now hitting the public sector, and it's a disaster. Unfortunately there's no such thing as a safe investment that will pay a return, except theoretically government bonds if you aren't in greece or spain or ireland or portugal or... you get the idea. But old people need stable incomes, because otherwise their spending fluctuates like the rest of us, and that would make existing economic shocks even worse. If it wasn't for social security still paying the same amount florida would have gone bankrupt already essentially (add in medicare to that too since that covers a lot of expenses for older persons).

When retirement was on average 5 - 10 years you didn't have this problem. But now, with medicare being so successful at keeping people alive who make it to 65 that if you make it to 65 odds are you'll make it to 80 or so, and that's going to get older and older, but the amount needed to sustain that is significant. Raising the retirement age to 67 or 70 or whatever could be seriously counter productive because you're forcing people to work who aren't capable of it. Where I am in canada you can't force someone to leave when they get old, the problem is that for years we banked on mandatory retirement to get rid of people who were counter productive, but you don't really want to fire a jovial 63 year old who put in 35 good years, and 3 terrible ones, but now those people cling on and suck jobs away from young people and productivity away from everyone else.

Oh, as point of interest, in canada we've been having the same discussion as you're having, and the recommendation here has been to actually increase the benefit paid to retirees from taxes, to provide more economic stability and to get old people out of the work force faster, despite the conservative government planning to do what you are essentially advocating (raise the retirement age).

Re:Adverse reactions? by Charcharodon · 2012-07-24 12:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

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. If you are such an amazing learner I would think you'd be smart enough to start another video with the volume muted on the 1st once you have the concept down or find some other way to entertain yourself for the remaining three minutes

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Korin43 · 2012-07-24 12:21 · Score: 4, Insightful

Or when we stop spending more money on administration and pointless toys like "Smart Boards" than on teachers.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Sir_Sri · 2012-07-24 12:32 · Score: 3, 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.

Risk to paid tutors by ternarybit · 2012-07-24 12:41 · Score: 2

Seems Khan Academy poses more a threat to paid tutoring services than formal education. I view Khan as a free, anytime, anywhere tutor rather than a replacement for earning a BS from an accredited institution.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by sphealey · 2012-07-24 13:02 · Score: 2

You might start by providing some evidence about the presumed failure and "deep structural problems". As I noted in another comment below, projecting the City of Detroit Public Schools onto the entire range of public schools in the United States - most of them doing quite well academically - is not appropriate. The vast majority of US children attend locally-controlled public schools that are quite good.

But yes, money is an issue. Others have demolished the "9 months work" fallacy, so I'll offer another perspective. Our district takes each year a certain percentage of transfer students from a failed big-city district similar to Detroit. A very limited percentage of our total student body. We are generally able to get them up to somewhere near grade level if they stay through high school, but the cost is very very high in both money and resources; perhaps 5x that of our local kids. That's OK, we have the money and I think our teachers and staff enjoy the challenge (although it does affect our No Public School Left Undestroyed scores). But Detroit and its equivalents don't have that money or extra resources - in fact they have less than we do. But yeah, you're right: money and resources couldn't possibly be the problem. In Galt's Gulch.

sPh

Re:And the unions are pissed... by gknoy · 2012-07-24 13:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

In contrast, my mother has taught high school french, italian, and spanish for at least a decade now. Her workload is insane. Not only does she have the normal hours of the day where she has to be on campus directly dealing with kids, she then gets to spend time reading and grading papers, as well as evaluate how well her lesson plans worked, and update them for the next time she teaches (or to adjust for faster/slower class progress). The net result is that she works at least twelve hours a day, often more, and regularly gets about four hours of sleep.

If you're teaching a class that requires grading of papers or has handouts. you get to create the material, make enough copies, teach it in class, read/grade all of the responses, and then repeat. God help you if you want to actually challenge your students with more than multiple choice, and have them write real sentences or prose. 30 students times 5 classes is 150 students' worth of papers to READ every day. How long would you spend on each? My teachers in high school, like my mother now, read their students' papers closely enough to be able to write corrections, and even write feedback on them. I imagine it's more than a minute per student spent correcting, and more than ten minutes spent per class evaluating the effectiveness of your curriculum and planning how best to ensure your students actually _learn_. So, that's another four hours on top of your "eight hour" day right there.

So, while teachers bring in some decent sounding dough, the amount of time they put into it depends a lot on the subject matter they teach and the degree to which they invest themselves in teaching well. (It's probably still a lot easier than being a sysadmin, though.)

Re:And the unions are pissed... by ceoyoyo · 2012-07-24 13:32 · Score: 2

Only when you count their time as six to eight hours a day. My father was a teacher. He got to the school around eight because teachers had to be there in case kids showed up early, and to prepare lessons. He left around five thirty on days he wasn't doing computer club, extra help sessions, science fair, science olympics or something else. Later on those other days. Then he marked and prepared most of Saturday, and took Sunday off (usually). All together, probably sixty hours plus a week. This for someone who has an MSc and wrote one of the first word processors for a personal computer.

I realize not all teachers do that, particularly (it seems) in the US's broken public education system, but certainly some do. Most of them here.

Re:Adverse reactions? by thePowerOfGrayskull · 2012-07-24 13:35 · Score: 4, Funny

His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.

Not all students can learn as quickly and easily as most /. readers.

Indeed. In fact /.ers are so smart that most of them don't even have to read an article to know all the answers!

Re:And the unions are pissed... by RazorSharp · 2012-07-24 13:37 · Score: 2

When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers

Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.

That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which? You can't survey the kids - they'll assess a teacher's ability based on how much they like the teacher, not on how good a teacher they are. I think most people are well aware of the folly of rating a teacher by test scores - things just get worse when you teach to the test.

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.

--
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."

Re:Adverse reactions? by J.+T.+MacLeod · 2012-07-24 13:44 · Score: 2

You don't even have to deal with a chipmunk: http://tux4life.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/change-mplayer-playback-speed/

Re:And the unions are pissed... by jim_deane · 2012-07-24 14:42 · Score: 3, Informative

About the only teachers that work any significant about beyond the 6-7 hour school day are teachers that must grade essays. So, your myth is already busted.

I teach physics. There are some problems with the statement I put in italics above. I recognize that the facts vary from district to district, but I have also never met a teacher in any district that had a regular 6 or 7 hour day.

Our contracted day is 8.5 hours long, which includes one 22 minute lunch. Technically, I'm finished at 3:45. Almost every day of the week, I am there at least one hour late, often two. There are labs to plan and setup, students who need help, and meetings to attend. If I average an hour and a half of extra time at school, that's already 10 hours per day. I also take work home if I can't get it done after school because, for example, students come in needing help or reassessment. Perhaps on average an extra half hour per night.

If I average 10 hours a day at work and a half hour a day at home, that's about 1880 hours per academic year. That's 90% of the 2080 hours a normal 8 hr/day full time job.

There are also the other professional activities and duties I participate in, such as continuing education, networking with other science teachers and scientists, and keeping current on research in physics and education. I take classes and attend workshops and conferences during the summers. For example, I have spent about four hours per week researching and planning, plus five full days on-site at workshops this summer.

I'm not complaining, I just prefer that people take a more factual look at teaching careers, not the mythical "6 hour day part time job" that many people would have you believe.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 15:14 · Score: 2, Funny

The university where I taught closed it's Education department several years ago

Looks like it closed its English department as well.

Re:Adverse reactions? by Nerdfest · 2012-07-24 16:37 · Score: 2

mplayer supports it as well. The key binding are '[]', and I think there's a setting that may need to be changed from 'auto' if you're using one of the GUI wrappers.

Re:Adverse reactions? by Teancum · 2012-07-24 17:03 · Score: 4, 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 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.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by datavirtue · 2012-07-24 17:51 · Score: 2

Oh Snap! We consume so much time fucking with smart-boards and other toys that get ruined. Don't even get me started on the mobile labs!

--
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock

Re:And the unions are pissed... by interkin3tic · 2012-07-24 19:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

How sure are you of the statistics behind that factoid? I've heard that among majors of students taking the MCAT, philosophy is often at the top of the list, with "pre-med" being average. That doesn't imply though that a philosophy degree will prepare you for med school better. It's more likely that only very exceptional people major in philosophy and then decide to take the MCAT, while the average or below people who want to go med school major in pre-med.

I'd guess a similar thing is going on there. The people who have no greater interest than teaching take the safe approach, while people who may be more interested in physics but decide to abandon it and go into teaching are more likely to be interesting people with active brains on their necks.

I guess the two explanations are not mutually exclusive, there could be some indoctrination in education degrees that encourages thinking inside the box too.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Aighearach · 2012-07-24 20:04 · Score: 2

In some places, teacher pay is far out of line.

Yeah, for example, on AM radio teachers make a bazillion dollars and only have to work part time.

They also get free ponies from the Socialist Party.

Re:Standard ./ line by __aaeihw9960 · 2012-07-25 00:19 · Score: 2

Actually, that's the standard teachers union line, where the fast learning kids get to teach the slower kids instead of learning farther ahead themselves. This makes them more manageable, and keeps everything on a nice grade-level basis so the teacher can read the lesson plan a week ahead of having to teach the lesson, instead of knowing the material cold. This is why it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion.

In my experience in education, that's a horrible spin on peer-learning. Methinks you had a poor experience.

Used correctly, peer learning is not only beneficial, but can improve grades in math for all students, can improve self-esteem and self-efficacy in young girls in math and science, and is considered one of the better cost-to-benefit options available.

Again, though, that's done correctly.

If you're going to be ignorant, that's great, but don't group all learning and educators into one group because of your own bias. Do you know the real reason that "it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion"? Because the P.E. teacher is a trained professional, believe it or not. S/he understands the basics of education and the fundamentals of teaching. This means that if the History teacher makes good lesson plans, prepares well, and does what s/he is supposed to do, then YES, there can be cross-discipline teaching in the short term.

Does it work that way all the time? Nope. But, can you tell me that you give 100% on every project you've ever done, and that every single hour of every single day of your working career has been spent working to your maximum potential?

Keep your ignorance in check, please, and don't equate sample size to population - it's bad practice.

You missed the point, just like TFA by wienerschnizzel · 2012-07-25 00:55 · Score: 4, 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.

Re:And the unions are pissed... by Oligonicella · 2012-07-25 01:27 · Score: 2

My daughter is a teacher with a Masters in education. What you wrote is wrong. The courses they take are more for increasing their wage than retaining their job.

I hate left wing shitbag morons who misrepresent facts and hide behind Anonymous Coward.

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