Khan Academy Ed Talks with Ned Johnson - February 2, 2022

Hello and welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy! I'm Kristen De Cerva, the Chief Learning Officer here at Khan Academy, and I'm excited today to talk to Ned Johnson, who's an author, speaker, and founder of PrepMatters, which is a company providing academic tutoring, educational planning, and standardized test prep. We're going to talk today about lots of topics including anxiety and test anxiety. So if you are interested in learning more about how we can reduce the stress in our lives and our learners' lives, stay tuned.

Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that at Khan Academy, we are a non-profit, and if you go to khanacademy.org/donate, you can give to help us continue to complete our mission and to work towards providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. I also want to thank our corporate sponsors who have stepped up in the time of COVID, including AT&T, General Motors, and Vassily.

If you want to re-listen to this discussion or find other discussions between myself, Sal, and other folks in the ed tech space and education sphere, you can join "Homeroom with Sal," the podcast, and get the audio version wherever you get your podcasts. So take a look out for that.

As I said, I'm excited to talk to Ned Johnson today. He has written three books. The one that I first learned about was "The Self-Driven Child," and we'll also be talking about his most recent book, "What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home." So looking forward to our discussion!

Ned Johnson: Hi, Dan! Welcome!

Kristen: Thank you for having me! I'm so, so thrilled to talk through this with you. And of course, like anyone in education, big fan of the great work that Khan Academy does in helping kids all over the place, so thanks for having me!

Ned Johnson: Oh, thank you!

Kristen: Absolutely! I'd like to start discussions by asking people what their journey is. How did you come to work in this field of test preparation and education?

Ned Johnson: Well, honestly, I graduated college without a really clear plan of what I was going to do. I followed a friend to the DC area and I took a job with a local test prep company who said they were looking for folks who are good at standardized tests and like working with high school students. I'd always been pretty good at standardized tests and at that point was pretty nearly a high school student. I thought, well, gosh, I can give this a try. I really fell in love with talking with teenagers.

It's such—Paul Tough, in his wonderful book, "The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us," talks about the first year of college, but I think it also applies to the last year of high school. Sort of the uncertainty, what he describes as “the belonging uncertainty.” During those transitions, kids are vulnerable. They're vulnerable to stress, but they're also vulnerable to new ideas about themselves.

There's just something really cool, at least for me, about working one-on-one with kids. I'm not mom and dad; I'm not asking them to clean their room; I'm not a teacher giving grades. I'm just all about trying to help them in all the ways that are meaningful to them. I've been something like 50,000 hours one-on-one talking with kids since the early 90s, and it just never gets old. It’s really cool.

Kristen: That is fantastic! So you write and talk a lot about stress. Is all stress bad? Should we think about stress in different ways at different times?

Ned Johnson: So, yeah! First of all, all stress is not bad. I mean, classically when we talk about stress, there’s something called the Yerkes-Dodson curve, which some of your educators may know about. It’s a bell curve; it’s a performance curve, and it’s really measured in physiological arousal. So kind of what are those stress hormones? What are the neurotransmitters that are running through your bodies and brains? If we have no stress, typically there’s not much by way of performance. If you play against a team that’s just terrible, you’re going to win, but you’re not going to play your best.

At some point, you start to feel butterflies right before a big math test or you're trying to talk to someone you think is really cute. You should feel that because it means that you're paying attention. It means that you’re primed for action. It means that you're ready. The challenge is that more isn’t necessarily better. At some point, the performance starts to fall apart. What we’re trying to talk about is what helps any of us, but especially kids, feel like they're in their place of what's known as "optimal arousal." You're amped up enough to be excited, but not so much that you kind of lose your mind.

Kristen: That makes sense! I've also read some about the impact of stress hormones on memory and that a low, some level of stress hormones can actually help you remember more, but then it gets too high.

Ned Johnson: Well, yeah! Especially, you know, one of the things—so my co-author, William Stixrud, who is a clinical neuropsychologist, often works with kids where things aren’t going well. Learning isn’t easy, attention isn’t easy, maybe emotion regulation isn’t easy. Both for him as a neuropsychologist and as a test prep geek, we would submit that the most important outcome of high school is not where you go to college. I don’t know, my clients are like, “What?!”

But seriously, it’s developing the brain that kids are going to carry into college and then into adulthood. Cortisol, the dominant stress hormone, again, we need enough of it to kind of get us out of bed in the morning, but too much it erodes the hippocampus, the major memory center of the brain. It weakens the connection between the prefrontal cortex, you know, the kind of thinking part of our brain, and the amygdala.

If you're too tired and too stressed for too long, very bad things happen to developing brains. We just don’t want to see young people, particularly teenagers who are really sculpting the brains that they’ll carry into adulthood, we just don’t want to see them be stressed all the time. It’s fine to have intensity—work hard, relax hard, work hard, relax hard—that’s how you get stronger. We want kids to have that experience. But if they're constantly like this all the time, that’s just not good for developing brains or for test performance, for that matter.

Kristen: Right! So, what are signs that someone is too stressed and that those stress levels are too high?

Ned Johnson: Oh gosh, I mean, there are all sorts of symptoms when you talk about diagnosed anxiety. I mean, it’s the constant fretfulness, it’s perfectionism run amok, it’s difficulty sleeping, it’s difficulty with appetite. You know, with depression—I mean, I’m not a clinical psychologist—but you know, if you really have a kid who you’re worried about mental health, just go to some of the websites that will talk about these things.

But classically, assuming that's just garden variety anxiety—which we all experience to a degree—I’ve really become interested in, you know, for years, kind of what I think of as underperformance. When I first started doing test prep, I was always pretty good at these tests. I was trained really well on how to talk about these tests, but I kept having the experience of really bright kids from great families, their great schools, they did all the hard work, and they would go and take the test and go “bish!”

Typically, I’d get an irate phone call from the parent: “I don’t understand; we did all the prep!” I didn’t know anything when I was 23, 24 doing this, but I was fortunate enough that parents would send their kids back, and we’d have another conversation. I’d ask them, “Did the proctor use you at the time? Was the kid next to you distracting you?” You know, what it looked like. Almost always, the conversation would end with something like, “I don’t know. It was just so much harder than what we did for practice.”

Oh okay, that makes sense! For all the reasons that people may not like the SAT or may not like the ACT, you know, I just don’t like standardized tests generally. You have to give them credit: they’re standardized. So the idea, right, that this test that they took was so fundamentally different than what they’d done for the, you know, months of practice tests just didn’t make a lot of sense. So, I went to go and take the SAT at a local public high school, and I was probably five years into being a tutor—late 20s—sitting there with all these teenagers and kind of eavesdropping.

I’m like, “What’s going through their heads? Are they nervous or anxious?” And for no particular reason, I checked my own pulse; it’s 140 beats a minute, 140! Which is like running down the stairs 15 times! I thought, this is curious because I didn’t think that I was nervous. I have very few identifiable skills, but one of them is that I’ve always been good at standardized tests.

I didn’t need it because I wasn’t going back to college; like, what was going on? A lot of times kids will be super well-prepared for the math test or the SAT or whatever it happens to be, and we look around and assume, “Well, you didn’t study hard enough.” Or maybe you’re just not that good; you’re not as smart as you thought you were. That’s a thought that helps nobody.

Right? The tutor’s no good, the program is no good, and those are all things that we might want to consider. But in some ways, if we take seriously the fact that test anxiety is rooted in neurochemistry, it doesn’t matter how hard they worked. If they work hard to put into kids' brains that if they’re under too much pressure, perceived stress, they lose their minds, then it all goes for nothing.

So I would say when things are unexpected is the way that I would look for anxiety. If a kid is really taking this seriously—we have a sense that they’ve demonstrated their abilities in other ways, class discussions or essays or whatever—how do they perform when there isn’t pressure versus how they perform when there is pressure? If there’s a big disconnect there, then we start thinking about how do we get more comfortable with that perceived pressure or find ways to kind of ratchet down the perceived pressure of that activity.

Kristen: That makes sense—thinking about that unexpected performance that doesn’t align with what you see in other kinds of settings and other kinds of ways they’ve demonstrated what they know.

Alright, so how do we help them ratchet that down? What does that look like?

Ned Johnson: Well, there’s one place to start. There’s wonderful research by a woman named Sanya Lupini who’s at the Center for Studies of Human Stress, I think I got that right, in Montreal, Canada. She has a beautiful acronym for what makes people nuts, okay? So “NUTS” and “U-T-I-L-S.” So “N” is novelty—so new situations. So, hey, it’s not just the Coronavirus; it’s the novel Coronavirus. If you’re taking a test, you’re like, “I’ve never seen that before.” It’s never a happy thing.

Like if you’re shopping, “U” is unpredictability. So for the work that I do in standardized tests, you know, “Am I going to have enough time or not?” If you know that you won’t have time to do three questions no matter what you do, well that’s great to know. Then we figure out which three questions do we just not do; we just fill in those answers. “T” is perceived threat, and so pre-COVID, but for most kids, for most of us, and particularly for kids in school, that’s threat to ego. “Am I going to look stupid? Are people going to think I’m an idiot? Are my parents going to think I’m an idiot? Are my teachers going to think I’m an idiot?”

And then “S” is a low sense of control. It turns out this is what the book that Bill and I wrote and “The Self-Driven Child” is about. A low sense of control is the most stressful thing that people can experience. So novelty and unpredictability, you know, this is one of the great things about Khan Academy. You can have a great teacher, awesome, and never need to spend your time with Khan, or you can have a teacher—you’ve had three teachers in chemistry this year because, well, COVID, right? Do you feel like you’re responsible for doing well?

But I have no way to learn this; oh, oh, that’s really stressful. If you know that there’s a tool, it’s not you. Gosh, you’d rather learn this at ten o’clock in the morning with a wonderful teacher, but that’s not where we are right now. So if we think about, in a given situation, how much of it is novelty, how much of it is that you feel threatened, how much of you feel that low sense of control?

And we tackle those things in turn. I can talk very credibly about the values that you can find in standardized tests, but I can also talk until I’m blue in the face about all the ways that the SAT is a terrible test and a bunch of ragged muffins. I do that with kids to decrease the stress they feel about it.

I say, “Look, you may need to take this test for the college that you’re applying to, but let’s disabuse ourselves of the idea that this is measuring something innate like your intelligence.” Because, golly, for most kids, that makes them super, super anxious. So that’s kind of the first thing; we want to try to diagnose what’s going on. A lot of kids I work with, they have an older sibling.

We talk about—sorry, your sister is an incredible person, but she did you no favors by getting into Princeton, right? And so this is something that parents can do, that teachers can do, to try and figure out where—Tina Payne Bryson, if you know, you know, the co-author of “The Whole-Brain Child” and a lot of other great books—talks about stress as what we perceive when there’s a gap between what’s being required of us and what we think we’re able to do.

So, we may want to decrease the demands on a person or increase the support. Now there's some really fun research, and it's just hard for parents. When they ask parents kind of what their expectations are of their kids, and then they also ask them how much do you think they can actually meet those expectations, the wider the gap, the worse things get.

I just spend a lot of time with parents trying to talk them down from these expectations that you have to go to Princeton. I love orange, but really four years affords—that's not the only place in the world to go.

I mean, it’s complicated! Kids are complicated; parenting is complicated! But that would be the first place that I would start. I mean, we talk about a lot—I spent the amount of money that I’ve been paid to talk with kids about sleep that I have not been paid to talk about sleep deprivation. I’ve been paid to help them, you know, prepare for these tests. But I can talk for hours about what sleep deprivation does to developing brains, but two from a performance perspective.

Just for folks who don’t know, I mentioned a little while ago that cortisol is the dominant stress hormone. When we’re sleep-deprived, the amygdala, the stress reaction, is about 60% more reactive, and our bodies are just pumping out cortisol. We’re stressed all the time.

There’s a kid I was working with years ago—she had an older brother who went to Princeton as a baseball player. She was super academic but found tests harder partly because she was just more stressed, more easily than, you know, maybe her brother was. We were doing the ACT, and she had taken this test far too many times.

We were meeting on a Sunday; she was taking the test the following Saturday. We were doing all the last-minute review, and she’s an academic kid, great family. Finally, I say, “And remember that you know if you can be in bed by 10 or 10:30, you're going to do so much better on the test.” Well, then I’m in the middle of this, and her face falls, and I'm like, “What? You should say…”

Well, my friends—and her friends are great, and they’re super important; she’s a 17-year-old girl; I get that! I said, “I understand! I understand! But for one week, could we maybe just like, you know, just hang up the phone in the kitchen to get a bit early?”

I said, “What if your mom paid you to go to bed?” She’s like, “My mom wouldn’t pay me.” I said, “What if I paid you?” She’s like, “What?” I said, “But I don’t trust you, so your mom’s in charge. You have to hand your phone to your mom at 10 o’clock, and if your bed lights up, I’ll give you 20 bucks!”

She said “For the week?” I said, “I’ll give you 20 every night.” She said, “No, you won’t.” I said, “Yes, I will.” She said, “No.” I said, “Watch me.” She shows up on Friday, and we have one last review to do, and I hand her $5 bills!

No, this is wealth redistribution, is really her parents' money, and she goes off and gets the test. I mean she had always been capable; she could have probably done this months ago if she could have been less stressed.

So sleep deprivation is a big deal. There’s a wonderful book—I’ll hold this up—called "Choke." It’s a provocative title; if you know this, this is Sian Beilock. She’s now the president of Barnard College. She is incredible—love, love, love her work! She looks at underperformance in public speaking, athletic standardized tests, and one of her models is the idea of having the mindset of a predator rather than prey.

Because the prefrontal cortex—decision-making, planning, problem-solving, emotional, mental flexibility—all executive functions of the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala, the freeze, fight, flight response—you don’t want to freeze if you can’t run away, and there’s nobody to bite right in the middle of a test. We really don’t want that part of our brain going off.

She says if you lean in with what she describes as having more swagger, you’re going to perform better. So, I actually did—I did a TikTok thing the other day. I know, old people, TikTok! But whatever. I stumbled on this great research at NIH that found of executive functions. We know that stress really messes with executive functions—being anxious, bad, bad, bad.

But you know what doesn’t? Being angry! So if you’re worried about the SAT or your math test or whatever, if you’re like, “Don’t drag!,” you’re better off angry than anxious because you’ll actually think better!

Kristen: So interesting! You have more questions? I’ll talk about it in a minute, but please jump in.

Ned Johnson: Yeah, no, that was great!

Kristen: So, you talked about lowering the threshold. When we think about teachers, we have a question that came in thinking about, from Aviv, what are actions teachers can take to help their students prepare for that stress of assessment? So, even if we're not talking SAT, we could be talking classrooms.

Ned Johnson: Yeah, that’s a great part! I mean, things that teachers can do?

Kristen: Yes!

Ned Johnson: Yeah, I mean, there are several things. First of all, there’s a wonderful study that when we, when students, I think they were taking a grade—I can’t remember—but of course this applies to all tests. When kids were reminded that some anxiety, going back to that bell curve, actually improves their performance!

Right? That you want to have some butterflies before the test; that actually helps you focus! That improved their performance because then they weren’t worried about being worried! They felt what they’re feeling physiologically, and they felt it as this preparation, you know, to go do battle. That’s super helpful!

The same Sanya Lupini of the “NUTS.” One of the things she talks about—this is incredibly useful—is probably the single best tool to lower stress is Plan B thinking. I am so happy for test-optional—I can’t even tell you because it lowers the stress. Of course, you would love to get a 1500 because who wouldn’t want to?

And apply for fantastic schools, right? Because you look great in orange, I’m sure! But goodness knows, you know, if you don’t get a 1500, we know what to do—you can still apply to Princeton! We know what happens if you don’t go to Princeton—there are like 3,500 colleges where you can also get an education!

So, we have to, in order to talk about that Plan B thinking, a teacher really needs to have a good relationship with the kid lest the kid feel like you’re saying, “I can’t do this!” Not what I’m saying at all!

I’m saying that it will help you if, right? From a stress perspective—Bill and I in “The Self-Driven Child,” we talk about the chapter in the book called “A Non-Anxious Presence.” I wish we’d made this up because it’s such a good term. We borrowed this from a guy named Edwin Freeman who was a rabbi; he was a consultant. He worked with schools and searchers and synagogues and families.

He simply made the point that things work better when the person or people in charge aren’t overly emotional or overreactive because stress is contagious. But the good news is all emotions are contagious; calm is contagious! We discover this when calm is contagious in the Navy SEALS.

If your kids come to you and they’re super spun up, if you can say, “You know, Eli Leibowitz, the guy, professor about anxiety, what’s called the SPACE program at Yale talks about making supportive statements.” Supportive statements are simply saying, “Yeah, I get that this is really hard for you. I can see you’re pretty stressed out about this. I have every confidence that you can deal with this. I’m confident you can handle this, and I’ll help you in any way that I can.”

Because so often we try to, “Oh my gosh, it’s not such a big deal, Christian! It’s just the SAT! Three years from now, who’ll even care?” Well, I’m trying to help you, but I’m really invalidating what you’re feeling. You’re feeling what you’re feeling for whatever reason, but we also say, “I have every confidence that this is going to work out, and if it doesn’t work out just the way you want, we can do this! I bet you can figure out a way to make this work even if it’s a Plan B!”

So, you know, in our new book, “What Do You Say?” we use a lot of scripts—there's a lot of language because it’s hard as a teacher when kids come at you with things, and they’re super spun up, and your heads are thinking, “Oh my goodness, we could be seeing this differently.”

But what we’re really trying to do is get buy-in in order to have kids be open to our messages. We really just start with empathy and validation. It makes sense to me that you’re pretty stressed out about this SAT! It feels like a big deal. I can get that you feel pretty intense about this test coming right now because there is some hard stuff on that! But I’m confident that you can handle this!

Kristen: Thank you!

Ned Johnson: You know, I don’t want to put one more thing on the backs of teachers who feel like they’re shouldering the weight of the world right now.

But I will say that if there’s any single thing that is valuable to young people right now, it’s having a close connection to one or more adults. If there’s a silver bullet against the effects of stress on developing brains, it’s feeling close connection to an adult, ideally, that’s parents.

When we were writing this book, we asked—we were meeting with all these kids, and we asked them, “Who do you feel closest to in the world?” Sometimes mom, sometimes dad, sometimes a grandma, an aunt, an uncle, sometimes a teacher. I’m sitting in right now in Washington, D.C. and right across the street from us is Wilson High School. It’s kind of the big public high school in northwest, terrific school, great learners.

We’re working with—we were talking a bunch of these kids, and this one—and so in the follow-up question, we said, “What about those people makes you feel close to them?” And there are two things: one, they listen to me without judging, and two, they don’t tell me what to do all the time!

This boy went on to talk about this biology teacher who was just like this fountain of wisdom and calm. She wasn’t his teacher; she never had him as a teacher. He’s never had her as a teacher, excuse me! But she was just known as “the person.” All these kids would just come in there, and they would just have lunch with her. She would just ask about their stuff.

I’m sure they told her some crazy stuff! And she was just being a person where you can go, “Oh, that’s interesting! Tell me more about that!” Because it’s incredibly valuable for lowering stress and for developing motivation.

We can talk about motivation if you want, but I’m an enormous fan of what’s called self-determination theory, and it’s a model for intrinsic motivation. You probably know all about that?

Kristen: Yes, go ahead and explain it!

Ned Johnson: I’m a big fan too! But the idea that, you know, so often we think, “Parents, teachers, school systems, politicians—we’ve got to get kids to work hard!” Well, from my perspective, I have zero interest in kids working hard. I have interest in their wanting to work hard!

Because extrinsic motivation of fear or bribes, they work for a while, but it’s a terrible way to grow up with a brain simply trying to meet other people’s expectations of you! What we really want is kids to do the work right.

Jess Leahy— you know, “The Gift of Failure”—people I know love her work. I saw her talking with a bunch of teachers and asked them, and this one teacher said, “You know what the three R’s of teaching are? Relationships! Relationships! Relationships!” And so good teachers are worth their weight in gold because they don’t get kids to work hard; they get kids to want to work hard!

Whenever I meet with kids, the first day is trying to understand them as a learner: “What’s your favorite class? What’s your least favorite class?” Oh, you love math? Is that the class, or is that the teacher?

As you can imagine, more than half the time it’s, “Oh, you know, it’s pretty good! Oh, Miss Rodriguez, she’s just—I don’t know, she makes it so interesting!” And part of that is that she makes math interesting, but that she’s interested in them, right? So, again, I wish teachers had more autonomy; I wish they had less on their plates so that it was easier for them to put as much time and energy as they wanted to in the relationships.

For anyone who’s an old part like me, when you think back about the class that you loved most, you can remember so little of what we learned! But I can remember Mr. Broberman and just how much I loved this guy as a history teacher. I took zero history in college, but I loved him as a teacher, right? And that’s what great teachers do!

Kristen: Absolutely! Let’s take one more question from YouTube. The handle Math with TGA says, “How do I clear my mind after a big failure so you can imagine you’ve failed at something or that causes a lot of stress? How do you get over that and go for the next steps?”

Ned Johnson: Well, gosh! One thing—I love all these people! Lisa DeMoor, she’s previous and talks guest, oh I just love her! You know, she makes the point that mental health is the right feeling for the right situation. So if you really worked hard at a test and you feel like you bombed it, you’re allowed to be upset!

Right? You shouldn’t be saying, “I shouldn’t be upset!” Look, you’re going to be busy like, “Gosh darn it, I really worked hard in that.” But then we have to move on! The real challenge is when people get locked in rumination—they beat themselves and beat themselves up and beat themselves up and beat themselves up.

What we want to try to do is, if you go back to that Plan B thinking, what else can I do now? The reality is, I love the site. This is a success coach I follow from the 80s who made the point that unexpected successes and unexpected failures provide the source material for great insights on your own life.

So it’s worth trying: What happened there, right? Talk to your math teacher, talk to your friends, compare notes, reflect: Was I really well prepared? Was I well-rested? What was going on? What was my subjective state? What did it feel like going in there?

I feel that the kids every year in school, I don’t know what grade the student is in, we should have to work harder! We shouldn’t re-engineer ourselves as learners because if you’re not having to do things more or differently in 11th grade than you did in 7th grade, boy, a lot of people’s time is being wasted here!

There’s a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book called "Make It Stick." It’s Henry Roediger III and a bunch of people. If there’s a—if you send out notes afterward, they have fantastic pieces, basically the six takeaways from "Make It Stick." And it’s all about the stuff: it’s spaced learning, it’s sleep, it’s testing effect, right? So retrieval practice—so we don’t just look at our notes, we actually kind of test ourselves.

There’s a lot of great stuff there. When I think about underperformance on tests, you know, math tests, SAT and that kind of thing, I try to think about was it the input or was it the output? Meaning did I test myself in ways that I know that I really learned it?

Because if I just think I knew it, it might have been a little trick my brain was playing on me! In which case, I want to examine how it is that I’m learning. Was I just cramming? But if I really knew the stuff and I underperformed, well then it’s a performance piece!

Right? So we’re back to what blows up cortisol, what helps you get your, you know, swagger on, right? You know, what gets you like Hulk smash mode when you take the test, right? Listening to music! I’m a huge—the number of students to whom I have prescribed the 7-minute workout, you know?

Sonia—they may not know this. It’s in the—I forget the author’s name. It’s a 30-second exercise you can do anywhere; you need no exercise equipment at all; you need a chair! Because, oh, if we go back to Sonia Lupini—I love her; she’s just a genius.

She says the four methods of emergency stress relief are these: laughing, singing, deep breathing, and vigorous exercise! Right? Well, laughing and singing probably aren’t too available during the test, you know, maybe beforehand. Vigorous exercise, for sure!

You can do this—in Paul Tough’s book, there’s a chapter about me. I won’t go into the long story, but basically showing up in this girl’s going to her house and doing SoulCycle with that. It’s a wackadoodle story at like 6:30 in the morning before the ACT.

It’s bonkers. She’s an academic, super tightly wound—couldn’t get her to sleep more—and just she sort of gasped herself for 20 minutes, took a shower, and got the score! Because too much cortisol—she was just on the wrong side of that bell curve.

The deep breathing is a big thing! People probably know the box breathing that the Navy SEALS created. I mean, these are people who have probably high-intensity performance anxiety, right? Deep breathing purges cortisol out of our nervous system and brings it back to normal.

I mean, I pre-COVID, I was still taking the SAT shoulder to shoulder with teenagers, you know, just to know what it feels like! I can sit down, feel my pulse is still going like crazy because I’m an old guy in a room full of teenagers!

Like, that’s weird, right? But I want to know what it feels like, and I sit there when I'm filling in my answers, and I do deep breathing, and it brings me back down. I’m not altering kilo but I’m in this place where I’m amped up, but not crazy!

So again, I think of the input in testing to really know the stuff. Look up "Make It Stick;" it’s wonderful! But then if you really know that you learned it, well then we start thinking about these aspects of performance. It may be a little bit A and a little bit B.

Kristen: Great. We are just about out of time. I do want to, as you say in your new book, you provide lots of scripts and things to ask. Let me ask you this question that comes up a lot when talking to parents.

How do I ask something to get to my kids to say, give me an answer other than fine? When I say, “How are you doing?” Fine. “How was school today?” Fine. How can we encourage kids to express their emotions?

Ned Johnson: Yeah, I mean, how—golly! First of all, it probably helps for us to remind ourselves that teenagers, especially, part of their work to become adults is to individually, indeed, individuate from mom and dad, right? So they’re supposed to push away from us a little bit, right?

They run away, and then they come back and run away, and they come back. I mean, a few thoughts. The first is, for the love of Pete, please ask them about things other than school, because so many kids feel like—there’s an article I’m still wanting to get in some paper that we have.

Basically, Adam’s—let’s think about how was school? How are your grades? Where are you applying to college? Do you have a boyfriend or girlfriend? As though that’s the sum total of their experience, right? So if you’re getting the fine, stop asking! Stop asking about school, okay? But I have a specific thing to that; I’ll come back then in a moment.

You know, ask about kind of everything else, particularly asking about their hobbies. What are they interested in? You know, politics, everything else in the world! Also, if you have a kid where there’s, you know, there’s a problem.

You know, they don’t have friends at school, right? They’re having a hard time—that’s a hard thing when we keep asking about the thing that’s a problem— we’re kind of interviewing for pain. We’re looking, “Well, you know, and because in many ways what parents I think are trying to do is they really just want to be told that it’s okay so they don’t have to worry about this.”

But in this situation, you’re being the opposite of non-anxious presence. You’re feeling like, “I have to check over and over and over and make sure that you’re okay! Just like, did you do homework? Did you do your homework? Did you do it right?”

It’s putting all the energy into that! Right? Where what was for lunch today? What was the weirdest thing that happened? What’s going on? I mean, you know, particularly with the last two years of COVID, you know, taking an interest in what your kids are watching on TikTok!

If you want your kids to be open with you, try to ask them about things other than school so they give you information, and then they feel like they’re going to be in trouble or they can be criticized for it.

If it is about school, you know, so, you know, so I don’t know. You know, what was the hardest thing that popped up in chemistry? What was the dopiest thing you saw? Try to make those questions a lot more specific because, yeah, if you ask, “How was school?” of course, they’re going to say fine!

Because if they say, “Well, it was really hard,” they feel like they’re going to be interviewed or grilled about the thing. “Well, wait a second! What do you mean you didn’t do all this?” They don’t want to hear about this because this is really interesting to me.

In writing this book, we realized that a lot of kids don’t want to share the hard parts of school, life, friendships with their parents because they don’t want to burden their parents! They don’t want to get their parents upset, and it’s too much for them to deal with their parents’ intense feelings on top of their hard feelings!

So, this is where kids say “fine” even though we know it’s not fine. So I will share this particular piece of advice: If you have a kid where you know things are not fine, but you can’t get them to talk to you? I think my daughter is a senior in high school, and she is a complicated bird.

She is brilliant—40 IQ points, my dad has had her share of dark things. The last couple years have not been easy for her and when she’s unhappy, she just closes down. You know, she’s the kid in the cave, and she and so the conversation will often look like, “Hey, kid! Are you okay?” That’s what she does; she shrugs her shoulders. “Any—anything I can help with?”

I’ll ask two or three questions like that, and she’s not giving it up. In many ways, these are her feelings, and these are hers to feel. It’s not my responsibility. I know that sounds like a tough thing to do, but honestly, it’s an important thing for young people to learn to be able to talk themselves out of hard feelings.

If she can only get back to baseline because of me, I’m not doing my job as a dad. So, what I’ve done with her is validate and then offer support, right? Then step away and say, “Well, so boy, sweetheart, it sure looks like you had a day of it because I don’t know what’s going on, but you look really upset.

If there’s any way I can help, please know that, if you want to listen—if you want to…yeah, I’ll do whatever I can. Is that okay?” Shoulder shrug. Here’s the question I said to ask: “Is it alright if I circle back in about half an hour just to check in and make sure you’re doing okay?”

Get the head nod. I swear, every time I’ve done this, if I say, “I’ll be back in half an hour,” in 20 minutes, she’s bounced downstairs. If I say, “I’ll come back in an hour,” she comes down in 40 minutes! Every single time!

And she’s just in whatever cloud it is that’s been in her mind has just passed, and not once have I found out what she was upset about. I knew she was upset; she knew she was upset, but she just didn’t want to share.

And so, this is the way we as parents can—we offer support, we offer help for our kids. A lot of times for kids to know that we’re there to help, even if they don’t take us up on the help is helpful.

Kristen: Thank you! I’m going to close on that! That seems like that’s an excellent note for us to leave on. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciated all the information you shared, and I look forward to diving into the new book!

Ned Johnson: I hope you enjoyed! I really appreciate, again, that the Khan Academy is taking all of the technical stuff you teach everything and really trying to broaden it with some of the folks. I’m grateful to be among those, so thank you!

Kristen: Absolutely! Thanks, all for watching today. We’ll see you next time!