Ask me anything with Sal Khan: March 27 | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone! Welcome to our daily live stream. This is why we've almost, we've been doing this for a little bit over two weeks. For those of you all who are new to this, the whole point of this is Khan Academy is a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Over the last many years, we've been building resources that start in pre-K with Khan Academy Kids through elementary, middle, high school, and the core of college. Not just math, not just videos, but deep interactive exercises, dashboards for teachers, English and language arts, history, sciences, SAT preparation.

That has made us very well-suited to help, to really step up for the country and the world as we go through these school closures. But we realized we need to do as much as possible on top of that. So the whole point of this livestream is for all of y'all who are using Khan Academy or thinking about using Khan Academy or just trying to navigate the school closures generally. We wanted a place for folks to connect and feel connected, especially in this time of social distancing.

Every day, it's very informal. Myself, and I want to bring some team members on. We sometimes have special guests. We try to answer your questions and make any announcements that are relevant. I do want to start off with reminding everyone we are not-for-profit. We are funded by philanthropic support from folks like yourself. We were running at a deficit even before this crisis, and with this crisis, our server load is up, roughly 250 percent of what it normally is. Our registrations are 6x from teachers and parents of what it normally is. Parent registrations are 20x. So if any of you find yourself in a position that you can donate, please think about doing so.

I want to give a special shoutout to several corporations who've stepped up in the last few weeks with very short notice to help us, although we need more help. Bank of America was the first, followed by AT&T, Google.org, and Novartis. But we need more help from individuals and corporations, where we are literally going to go million a few weeks and months. With that said, I would love to bring my colleague Dan on, who helps me answer all of the questions that we get on the livestream. I encourage all of y'all to start asking questions on whatever you're using, YouTube, Facebook, whatever channel.

And let's see, there seems like there's already a couple questions. But Dan, you can always jump in. This question from YouTube, this is CrazyCookie3908. It's pretty impressive that there were probably 3907 cream cookies before you. So it says, "Hey Sal, will there be summer classes? Will this be year-round?" That's actually a super powerful question, CrazyCookie3908.

You know, I think about two weeks ago, the school closures were announced in this country and really throughout the world. There's 15 million students out of school in just the U.S. Pretty much close to a billion globally. It happened so fast because of just the health emergency. I don't think a lot have thought that was, was no one had time to think about what the implications but now is becoming clear that in most of the world, the school closures actually might happen through the summer.

So the way we've been thinking about it is we want to be able to support teachers, parents, and students over the next two months so that we can keep the learning happening. Keep everyone learning. But we also see summer as a really powerful opportunity to keep going. There's no reason that once you've built the practices and the habits to keep learning over what would be the traditional school year that whether you're a student, parent, or teacher that you can't go over those three months as well.

That might be the silver lining. Historically, summer has been, you know, there's the term "summer slide." It's been a time for lost learning. Now we have an opportunity to make it valuable for learning purposes. So, yes, simple answer: what we're trying to do in response to the school closures in COVID, we expect to be able to do through the summer.

I think next school year is going to be interesting. We all hope that the social distancing, the school closures are not in place as of back to school. Hopefully, the summer temperatures will help kill some of that virus and reduce the spread. But there is a possibility that in October, November, December, what's traditionally flu season could actually make COVID go up again. So we also want to think about if that happens, how we can continue to support folks.

But the big takeaway is summer is an opportunity that we all have to keep everyone learning. Excellent question! Alright, so there's another question. This is from Facebook. Deena Evert Niveau says, "Hi, I'm a parent. Nuta Khan, I saw the sample daily agendas. How do I link the daily schedule to my children's accounts?"

Thanks! Well, Deena, the schedules are very simple documents. You can actually adapt them. You can copy and paste them into your own docs and adapt them as necessary. Those just have links to the relevant part of Khan Academy. If your child clicks on the link, it will go to their Khan Academy. If they're logged in, they will show up as logged-in users. So if they click from their computers or whatever they're using, if they click on that, you know, let's call it 5th grade English and language arts, on that document, they'll go to Khan Academy and see 5th-grade language arts.

If they're not logged in, they can log in, and they'll be logged into 5th-grade language arts. If they're already logged in on that computer, they will be on their accounts. So I think that's what you might be asking. That brings up another interesting thing. We've made those schedules. We made four different versions of them. One for kind of the pre-K, kindergarten, first-grade crowd, one for the elementary crowd, and then one for the middle school and one for the late high school crowd.

What you could do is then make them even more fine-tuned for your children's needs. For example, for the late elementary crowd, we said, "Okay, you might want to use third grade or fourth grade or fifth grade or sixth grade or seventh grade math on Khan Academy." Depending on the strength of the student, you might want to remediate it or not. But you know your children better than anyone. They know themselves, hopefully. You can narrow that down: work on sixth grade, or if you had some weak foundations, work on fourth and fifth grade while you work on sixth grade as well. So I completely encourage you to fine-tune those schedules for your children's needs.

So Sal, I would add, next week we are hosting some parent webinars for different age groups specifically. We’ll be going through both your schedule that you created and kind of helping parents find the right content for their kids and diving a little bit deeper on how to use Khan Academy specifically matching to those schedules. Awesome!

So we have a question, yeah. We have a great question on YouTube from our Roth Jane, who says, "I’m in fourth grade. I want to learn more about sciences. Can you post something on Khan Academy about that?" So, our Roth, we want to help you! We currently do not have what you could call fourth-grade science on Khan Academy. But we... and I hope over time we are able to add that.

I'll remind everyone we're not-for-profit. The more support we get, the more we can think about adding more subjects. But if you are genuinely interested in science, I think there are places you can start. I actually think that you could... we have several, for example, even our high school biology, and I know you're only, I'm guessing, nine years old, and high school biology could seem daunting. But I actually think some of the intro levels of high school biology you could start to engage in.

My oldest son is about... is actually a little bit... or the new, my daughter's about your age, and actually, I've been doing stuff even in some of the early chemistry high school chemistry units on what's an element, what's an atom with an atomic number. I think these are types of things you could completely understand and it'll be really interesting, especially some of the stuff in biology, to understand.

You know, I was talking to my daughter, who's about your age, this morning about what's a virus... how's the virus different than bacteria? Are viruses living? You know, what's the definition of life? What's RNA and DNA? How do viruses replicate? So this is obviously very important things to think about that are very relevant to the world right now. I encourage you to, depending on your interest, to start digging in and see what works for you.

See other questions. So this is from Facebook. Scott Yang asks, "I enjoyed the daily live streams. Will you do it again next week?" Yeah, we are set to keep doing this until no one wants us to do. No, we think this is super important. I say at the end of every live stream, I, myself, in this time of social distancing feel more connected by being able to do this, and I know a lot of our team here at Khan Academy does.

So we want to do it for sure. Keep that connection going and make sure that all of you feel supported. So from YouTube, Stephen Almonds asks, "When was Khan Academy founded?" And Stephen, if you do a web search, you'll find a lot of talks on YouTube and other places for me talking about that. So if you want to, I recommend you do that.

But long story short, about 1450... actually, 16 years ago, I'm getting old... my cousin Nadia, who was 12 at the time, needed help with math, and I started tutoring her remotely. Word got around my family that free tutoring was going on, so I started making resources to scale it up. At first, I had nothing to do with videos. I was creating the software part, the early version of what you can now... the practice software in Khan Academy.

Then a friend suggested that I make videos to supplement it, and that kind of took on a life of its own. In 2009 or 2008, I set up as a not-for-profit, which just means no one owns Khan Academy. I don't own Khan Academy. I'm an employee of Khan Academy. I own as much as you own of Khan Academy. Then 2009 was when I quit my day job to try to work on this full-time. It was a tough year. I was living off the savings. But then in 2010, we got some of our first support from some foundations and corporations, and so we've been able to grow all the way till today where we're over 200 folks.

We have thousands of volunteers. There's 40 translation efforts around the world of Khan Academy. We're trying to add subjects and grades, and we were already reaching 17, 18, 19 million students a month before the crisis. It looks like our daily users are up roughly 50% now and our actual total traffic is up 2.5. So it's been a bit of a wild ride, but we feel privileged to be able to support you and so many other folks.

Then you got more questions? Yeah, so I just wanted to share, here's our 10-year t-shirt from last year. So showing off his clothing. I'm so sad. We have a question on YouTube from Carmen. Carmen Ha Paste asks, "I'll have a question. Will the schedule you made for all of us... will you switch it up or will it stay the same?" That is a great question, Carmenita.

So, the schedules you see were the first pass that we put out a little over a week ago, and I hope that as we kind of get our legs under us, we can provide more and more supports for y'all. One thing we are very seriously talking about are... Yes, can we extend that schedule to maybe think about what goals could be week by week as we go through this crisis? Not just over the course of the next couple of months during the traditional school year but to a previous question asker, go through the summer. So that, you know, given your grade level, given what you're trying to achieve, what are reasonable goals for you to achieve?

It would be cool to even switch it up like, "Hey, here's the PE of the day." We're trying to do it. We have a small but mighty team, and we're going to try to put as much together as possible, but that's a really cool idea to think about how could we switch it up day by day a bit. Maybe we give a weekly schedule or something like that. So we're going to work on that.

Let's see, there's other questions. From Facebook, Tamra Adams says, "Is this noon or is this a new normal of distance learning? How do you believe is the best platform for assessments?" So Tamra, you know, what you're asking is a really intriguing question. I've been writing... actually, just there was an op-ed that came out today that I wrote about, you know, a lot of people are asking me, "What's the new normal? What's structurally how is this crisis going to fundamentally alter what we do going forward in schooling?"

Obviously, in a bunch of other ways, the way I've been thinking about it is, given that we're likely to go through the end of the school year and then summer and then as we go into next school year, hopefully schools are open. But then they might have to close with fairly short notice if the virus picks up again in November or December. I think this is where the hybrid of in-person learning and having great online tools that are accessible and free is starting to become even more important.

Even before the crisis, we’ve talked a lot about that. Everyone learns at different paces. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge. If they're pushed together at a fixed pace, teachers have always known this. They have students who come into a class on day one. There are some kids who are ready to move ahead. There are some kids who have gaps from two, three grade levels behind. Teachers try to kind of teach to the middle, but that leaves some kids a little bored and some kids a little lost.

There was no way for them... you know, they're taught in ed schools to try to differentiate, but it's really hard if you're one teacher in a classroom of 25, 30, or in some cases, 35 or 40 students. Even before the crisis, all of us at Khan Academy have been working with teachers and districts to say, "Okay, how can we support teachers in that way so they have the tools? How can we be the teaching assistant for that teacher so they have the tools to give that personalization for every student, so they can fill their gaps and if necessary learn along the class, if necessary, and even accelerate as necessary?"

Then how do we do it with districts so that districts can have a read on where their kids need help or not? Now all of a sudden when you have these school closures, the districts that have adopted those types of models, where they were using tools like Khan Academy for even 20% of their class time, really is a strategic supplement. It's been much easier for them to transition to the school closure world because they can now... they've already rostered their kids and set them up. The students are used to using these tools. The teachers are used to reading the dashboards, and so they've been able to lean quite heavily on these.

You see the teacher or the district version of Khan Academy and have a seamless transition. I think one of the new normals is the emphasis on being able to blend is going to be really important. Blend so that you can accelerate outcomes during a normal school year, but also blend so that if whatever reason there's a school stoppage, that the kids can keep learning and then the district and the teachers can keep monitoring.

I think there's a whole other layer that's going to be really interesting. I've been talking to some school districts lately; they're doing all sorts of training to help teachers start teaching on Google Meet or on Zoom. I think that's going to be a new muscle that even when schools in session, I think might actually be an added muscle that'll be really powerful for a lot of types of schooling.

So we will see, but a lot of things are going on. I think one of the biggest questions that everyone's thinking about is access. Obviously, if you're watching this, you have internet access at home. But there's still a large fraction of kids in the U.S., and even a larger fraction globally, who don't. I think this crisis shows us that at-home internet access is not just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have. Not just to access things like Khan Academy and keep learning, but also to just be socially connected and for your mental health when all of us are having to be socially distanced.

Great question though, and something we're thinking about quite a lot. So Sal, we have a question on Facebook from Elizabeth Warner, and this is relevant for a lot of folks. So, "Where can a parent find out more about the upcoming parent webinars next week? Where is the best place to find these opportunities to send parents to? And really what's the best place to find all of our resources that we're developing right now?"

I could answer if I want to steal Dan's thunder because he's actually the guy. Yeah, sure! So if you just go to Khan Academy.org right now, we have a blue ribbon at the top, and it contains links to all of our resources, our parent webinars. The ones that are upcoming are listed there as well as webinars that we've already performed. We create links there, and it's available for you to view. So in case you can't make any of them live, they're available to you after the fact as well.

Yeah, exactly! You just go to our homepage or actually any page on Khan Academy. That banner at the top—there's three or four links. One of them is kind of, you know, we've been posting stuff on the daily schedules because a lot of people have been looking at those and also that remote learning resources link that you can see right now. We are... and Dan is one of the many people who is constantly updating that to keep you informed.

Also stay tuned on social media, our Facebook page, our Twitter, etc. That's also where we're going to be making announcements on new resources that we are adding. Alright, so there's other questions.

From Facebook, Mary Miller's asking, "Any thoughts on adding more arts courses to the curriculum?" So we don't have any major plans to add significantly new ones. And Dan, don’t... if there’s a little hum from yours or maybe lower the microphone there, I’m getting a hum. It’s not, it’s not horrible. Oh yes, much almost so peaceful now! But on the art courses, we aren’t going to add any new significant ones.

We have a partnership with Beth and Steven who do Smart History, who've been adding art history content on Khan Academy for many, many years now. So, if you haven't seen it already, I do encourage you to explore art history on Khan Academy. It's really, really interesting stuff where they're having these cool conversations about some of the most important pieces of art in the world—or actually almost all the important pieces of art in the world. So I encourage you to check that out.

Alright, so there are other questions here from Facebook. Kara... actually, let's see, there are other questions below. So from YouTube, Kimberly Klein asks, "What advice do you have for GED students using the website?" So Kimberly, my recommendation to you as a GED student—I think there's two things you could do.

Actually, even though it's not built for a GED, I think our SAT practice could be great for the GED. It covers roughly the same, you know, math, reading, and writing. So if you get good at that, I'm confident that you will do just fine on the GED. If you feel like you have some more foundational gaps, especially in math or reading, then I encourage you to try to find your learning edge on Khan Academy math and the Khan Academy English and language arts.

You could do that by just sampling and say, "Okay, the algebra stuff seems a little hard. Okay, the seventh-grade stuff feels a little bit easy. Eighth grade feels right for me." Then you could take the course challenge and use that to assess what you know and don't know and then focus on the unit where you might have larger gaps.

There’s another way where you could actually start at the earliest possible stage—at second grade in English and language arts and second grade in math or even earlier in math you could start—and just go from there. If you feel like it’s ridiculously easy, you can skip to the next grade. But that actually might be... and you can take the course challenges in math. That might be one of the most robust ways of making sure that you don't have any debilitating gaps.

What we've seen, even strong students—A-B students or in middle school, high school, even in third or fourth grade—they might have mastery of 99% of it, but there's always that one, like, "Oh, that's why the distributive property works this way," or things like that. Things that they've just, you know, taken for granted, but even that helps fill in a gap, so I think that's something that you can do.

So from Facebook, Mehran asks, "How can we make sure that we maintain good mental health during these uncertain times? You are my hero!" Well, thank you, Mehran! You're being very generous. On the mental health side of things, you know, and this is something I think a lot about because even before this crisis, you know, sometimes life can get stressful, jobs can get stressful, school can get stressful.

What I have found invaluable—and y'all have seen me talk about this before—has been meditation. Meditation isn’t some fancy new age thing. I mean, it is a fancy new age thing as well, but it doesn't have to be a fancy new age thing. You know, meditation literally can be, you know, you can start five minutes in the morning. And I've personally found the morning or right before I go to bed, but especially the morning is about... is the best when the house is quiet is the best time to meditate.

It’s literally just finding a quiet space, sitting... you know, posture matters a lot. Sit upright, close your eyes, be attentive, and just try to observe your thoughts. You'll realize that you are not your thoughts. There’s all this stuff that’s going on in your thoughts: "Oh, I got to get that thing done," "Why did that person say that?" "How am I going to do this?" "What’s going on on that TV show that I'm watching?" "What's gonna happen with COVID?" You know, all these thoughts are going in our head right now.

What you need to do is just learn to observe those thoughts and separate yourself from those thoughts. A metaphor, and we've done some guided meditations on Khan Academy, there you have it, Philippe—it’s a... put the screen so you can go use these guided meditations if you want a little bit of help.

Over time, you'll be able to do it on your own, and you're gonna realize that as you rise above the thoughts—if you view the thoughts as cars on a highway, you just kind of get out of the highway and just watch the cars go by—that the car starts slowing down and you're gonna have these moments where you're like, "Whoa!" You're not even thinking about it; you're just not thinking.

When you have even five minutes of that a day—and your mind will wander, and don't beat up for yourself—just say, "Okay, mind, yeah, that's funny you wandered, come on back in!" You're kind of like a sheep herding dog for your mind, and your mind is the sheep. So you just kind of, there’s a little sheep that's going astray, and you gotta bring it back.

But I found if even five minutes a day—but over time, you're going to like it. You're gonna want to do 10 minutes, 15 minutes. I do half an hour every morning. You're gonna have moments in that half an hour where your mind is wandering, but moments in that half hour where you're just completely still, and you’ll all feel really happy and really, really calm.

I found that it's not just for that 30 minutes or that 10 minutes that you're meditating—it just makes you more mentally resilient through the day. It’s harder for people to trigger you, so to speak. You get less worked up about things, and you get less stressed about things. So, that’s my best advice.

You know, just don't beat up on yourself. Take everything one day at a time. You know, to quote Frozen 1 and Frozen 2: Frozen 1, you know, "Let it go!" And Frozen 2, "Do the next right thing!" Which is awfully deep philosophy, which is actually consistent with most of the mystical traditions of most religions.

So, unfortunately, with the crisis affecting everyone around the world, this question is particularly important. So from YouTube, Online Education Nepal says, "Hello Sal, I'm Pushpa from Nepal. How can you move this into different languages?" Great question, Pushpa! So there are 40 translation projects of Khan Academy around the world, and there are different degrees of fidelity.

We have the richest versions in Spanish-speaking Latin America, Brazilian Portuguese, and we have actually a team in India that is trying to work on the various languages in India and align to the standards in all of these places. Then of course you have this other 30-something projects going on. So that's what's going on right now. I'm actually not an expert on the state of Nepalese, if that's a particular interest, but if we don't already have a translation project there, obviously, we would love people to start one.

That's one layer that we think we can help with, and then the other layer is in many parts of the world things like internet access, etc. You know, we are trying—we do try to work with philanthropists, corporations, telecom carriers to make it more accessible. But that's our best answer right now.

Alright, YouTube! Tom Yum Hyundai is asking a really simple question: "What do you think is the purpose of life?" That’s a good question! Yeah, I mean, you know, I think... not to get too metaphysical or too deep. We find ourselves in this big mystery, and I think, you know, current world events, you know, which feel almost surreal, dystopian, whatever you want to call it, I think really emphasize because it that we're finding ourselves in this big mystery.

One of the purposes is to reflect on the mystery and to experience this mystery that we call life in the universe and everything in them. I would see... I'm making a few references to Douglas Adams. But, but yeah, I, you know... I can’t claim that I know the purpose of life. I will say that sometimes in your moments when you can actually steal your thoughts and bring your mind away from, I guess you could call it, material reality and all of the distractions in material reality... sometimes you can feel a deep peace and connectedness to the universe, whatever you might want to call that.

I think that actually can sometimes make you feel very grounded and very, very happy. And so, you know, I can’t necessarily describe that as a purpose of life, but it can give you maybe a lens on life. But it's a really, really good question! One meta framework, you know, who knows if this is true? This is something of a learning experience.

Obviously, we talk about learning at the academic level, but life itself is a mega learning experience. There’s frameworks of imagining that every person on the planet is another version of yourself. So you are, you know, we're all connected in some way. Who knows? I don’t want to get too metaphysical because I don't know the answers, but it’s a deep question that I’m sure we will keep struggling with.

Okay, so YouTube's Gurpreet is asking, "How to deal with demotivation and how to approach a new topic?" I think the number thing—another one thing with demotivation or procrastination—is to just get started. I've talked about it in other sessions. There’s something called the Pomodoro Technique where you can kind of set a timer, say, "I'm gonna do 20 minutes," and I'm gonna focus and I'm gonna get something done, and then give yourself a break after that.

Force a break after that, and then jump back in. One thing that I've always reminded myself is to just keep on moving. I actually am a big believer in starting the day with making your bed. I have a little bit of a ritual which includes meditation. I go do some pull-ups in my garage, I do some push-ups. The reason why I do those things is not so much even for my health or to make my bed look nice; it gives me some wins early in the day, and I find that on days when I'm able to have some accomplishments within twenty, thirty minutes of waking up, that my brain just loves that feeling and wants to then have more accomplishments and check more things off.

So that's my best advice. And when I approach a new topic, I view it as an adventure. You know, some can just... you could approach life in this... It's like a mystery, it's like a game, and it's a puzzle. Even if something looks dry or you're not sure how it applies to your life at first, if you look at it with that lens, and if you look at it through the lens that you're able to look at human knowledge that has been accrued over thousands of years and you are the beneficiary of being able to consume that.

You know, Isaac Newton would have done anything to have access to the textbooks, the resources that we have today. Pythagoras would have done anything. Marie Curie would have done anything to have access to a modern chemistry or biology book. We get that! And we get the lifetimes' work of so many people who dedicate their lives to it. So that way, it's quite exciting, I think, to learn, and it’s fun to meditate in a different way or it’s fun to sit and think about the learning in a way that it forms those neural connections in your brain and it becomes intuitive.

When you do that in one subject, all of a sudden a lot of other things start to make a lot of sense. So it looks like we’re all out of time. You guys got me talking about topics that have limited knowledge about, but I enjoy pondering. But I just want to remind everyone, or I tell everyone, thank you for joining. We do this every weekday at noon Pacific, 3:00 p.m. Eastern.

It’s a fun way for all of us to connect at this time of social distancing. We want to do everything in our power to keep students, teachers, parents learning, keep them supported. And I’ll also put another plug in: we are not-for-profit, please donate if you are in the position to do so! Thank you so much!