Ask me anything with Sal Khan: March 30 | Homeroom with Sal

Welcome everyone to the daily homeroom! I hope you all had a good weekend. I know, or as good a weekend as you could have, given the circumstances. For those of you all who are new to our daily homeroom, this is really a way for us to stay connected as we go through this whole crisis together, especially the secondary crisis. I guess you could say, given how many students in the US and around the world are currently out of school.

As we started to see a lot of the closures happening, all of us at Khan Academy, as a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere, realized that one of the resources that we have already been working on for many, many years could be really valuable for teachers, students, and parents as they're navigating these closures. But we also realized that it's our duty to do more, to really step up so that you feel as supported as possible.

So starting with about two or three weeks ago, we started releasing daily schedules and everything I'm talking about is all available at Khan Academy.org. If you go to the page, you'll see banners and you'll see a modal show up and you can go to the various resource pages. But we have things like daily schedules for different age groups that a lot of people have found useful, that can walk through how students can structure their day, not just in math, but also in reading and writing, the sciences, and the humanities by grade level.

How could they leverage things like Khan Academy Kids for the early learners? We are also on these resources or on our various web pages putting out webinars that parents, students, and teachers can attend. You can look at the latest on the resources if you go to Khan Academy. But just so you know, we're going to be having several webinars over the next few days; April 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. We're going to have a webinar on the first one that will be for young kids aged 2 to 7. This is really for parents to think about how to set up a daily schedule.

Then the next one will be for elementary students ages 2 to 10, and then for middle school students 11 through 13. Similarly, we're going to have teacher webinars on those days for elementary students, middle school students, and high school students. So we want to do whatever we can to support you. Part of the fun of this daily homeroom is that we want to make it as interactive as possible.

Please, over whatever you're using to stream this, whether it's YouTube or Facebook, we're also monitoring social media on Instagram and Twitter. Ask us questions! This is where we're in and try to answer them, and we're also going to try to bring in special guests over the next few days and weeks to help answer more and more of your questions. So with that, I will bring on Dan, my colleague, who will help us go through the various questions.

I'll also make one other announcement: I do this every day. I do remind everyone, Khan Academy, we are a not-for-profit organization. We are funded by philanthropic donations. We were already running at a deficit before the crisis, and through this crisis, our server usage is about 2.5 times what it normally is. Obviously, we're trying to do more programs and more services, so if you're in a position to do so, please consider donating.

I do want to give special thanks to everyone who's donated over the last several days. Actually, it just turns out that somebody posted one of our videos highlighting our need on Reddit yesterday or over the weekend, and that resulted in a lot of donations. Thank you! I want to thank various corporate partners who've stepped up in really record time: Bank of America was the first, followed closely by AT&T, Google.org, and Novartis. All of that makes a huge difference. But I also want to remind everyone, we still need more. We're still running at an accelerated deficit, and so we want to be able to support you as much as possible.

So with that, Dan, let's answer some questions and please ask us anything on these various platforms, whatever you're watching this on. So some today we're gonna try to do Instagram. We're not streaming live on Instagram, but we'll try to get it there this week from Instagram. Gregory Ian asks, "What is the main thing that drives you to continue making videos free for all students?"

Oh, well, you know, I think maybe it's somewhat obvious, but I'll answer the question anyway. To be clear, Khan Academy is much, much more than me. Now we're over 200 full-time folks, there are thousands of volunteers around the world who make Khan Academy work, and I think I'm speaking for everyone, including the many thousands, actually tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people who donated to Khan Academy. Many of you... I think the need to envision a society where anyone on the planet is able to tap into their potential is huge.

If you look at almost any other problem in society, whether you're talking about, obviously, health care is a topic these days, but if you talk about economics, if you talk about safety, if you really keep peeling the onion, one way or another, it does boil down to education. If you look at access to education and quality of education and what people's living conditions are in the world, there's definitely a strong correlation, and they obviously feed into each other.

So I personally can't imagine... I consider myself the luckiest person on the planet that I get to devote as much of my energies as possible to this problem, or to the solution of empowering folks. I think it's just a very, very powerful multiplier. You know, famously, you can give people fish, but you can also teach them to fish, and that's what education is really doing. So that's what drives me day in, day out.

There is another, I would say, layer, a selfish motivation, if you will, which is I love the creation aspect and I love... you know, all of these topics that we cover on Khan Academy are really beautiful topics, and oftentimes I think students feel like, "Oh, I got to go through this," and, you know, "What am I going to use this?" But I think there's a joy that we hope we can bring to students and teachers and parents to realize that this is inherently beautiful subject matter and it's fun to dive in deep with it.

So anyway, I'm incredibly inspired to be able to serve all of y'all, and I think everyone... I speak for everyone on our Khan Academy team, all of the thousands of volunteers, and the many people who've donated, like yourselves. So I'm sad. Another one on Instagram, this one from Mooji, asks, "How is Khan Academy planning to help AP students study for AP exams?"

Actually, we're working on getting College Board to join you in this homeroom, and some folks internally as well. Yeah, I know that's a very relevant question. For those of you who don't know, the AP, which are these Advanced Placement tests in the United States and some parts of the rest of the world, these are essentially advanced high school or intro college-level classes that are taken at the high school level. At the end of the year, you traditionally have something called an AP exam, and depending on how a student scores from one to five, they could get various levels of college credit depending on where they go to college.

This year, testing globally has become difficult because it's not clear that school will be in session during the AP test, which is typically late April or early May. Obviously, other forms of tests have also raised a lot of question marks. So the College Board has announced that they're going to do an online version of the AP, which is going to be different from previous years, and what we are doing is we are coordinating. We're close friends with the College Board; that's another not-for-profit. They're the folks who administer the SAT and the AP exams.

Khan Academy has always been the official practice partner around the SAT, but we also have a lot of AP content around calculus, statistics, biology, chemistry, physics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, American history, AP U.S. government and civics. What we're going to do is continue to try to improve the resources that we have. As we get closer to the AP exam, we're going to think about partnering with the College Board to provide other ways so people feel as prepared as possible.

What my recommendation to any student who is preparing, especially if it's a subject that we have resources for, is to try to get as close to 90 or 100 percent mastery on Khan Academy in that AP course. When I say mastery, you have as much practice as you need on Khan Academy, and you learn these master mechanics that'll keep leveling you up. You can leverage course challenges to just understand how well you know the whole course at this point. You can use unit tests to break it down by unit, and then you can keep leveling up with the various mechanics.

Then, as you get closer to the AP test, what I recommend is we do have worked example videos of the free response. The best way to consume those is to start up the video, look at the prompt, and then pause it. I usually do say pause the video, or one of our content creators says pause the video, try to enter it yourself and then let the video play so you get that practice, and I think if you do those two things, you're going to be quite prepared.

We're gonna work with the College Board to get more information out because I know this version of the AP is going to be a little bit different than what we've seen in the past. So see, other questions we have. So from Facebook, I see Shala Karimi states, "My fifth-grade son is a smart student but he doesn't challenge himself at all, he thinks he knows everything. How can I help him?"

You know, I'm not an expert here, and I hope in future live streams we can bring in some, you know, child psychologists or coaches or whatever else. My gut sense is, you know, this all is about growth mindset versus fixed mindset, and there is some research on how to help coach people towards a growth mindset. Based on your description, it sounds like your son might be falling into a fixed mindset.

Now his fixed mindset is, "I'm very capable, I know this stuff." But even if your fixed mindset is one of confidence, that might actually keep you from engaging in things that you find difficult, which it sounds like might be happening here. Because if you already have a self-perception that you're very protective of... that I'm capable, then you might be afraid to test that self-perception.

So what I would do is work with your son as much as possible to build a growth mindset. Remind your son it's not about some innate ability level; it's how much you're willing to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and your brain grows the most when you push yourself out of that comfort zone. You struggle, even fail, but you reflect on that failure and pick yourself back up.

In history and in the world, however you want to define happiness, people who are able to or successful people who have a growth mindset always pushing themselves, who don't say, "I'm smart or dumb," but say, "Hey, I just need to understand what I'm capable of by keep pushing myself." I embrace failure. They're going to be disproportionately successful regardless of what your definition of success actually is. So other questions from YouTube: Adithya asks, "What is your favorite book that changed the way you think?"

So Adithya, there are many, many books that have changed the way I think, but relative to what we've been talking about at the Khan Academy mission, I think one of them is actually the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. That's more than one book, but if I were to pick one, I would say just Foundation.

Actually, I'm going to give two books. One is the Foundation series. The Foundation series I first read in middle school, and what I found inspiring about it was, you know, it's the story that takes place thirty... I'm not giving away any of the plotline. It takes place thirty thousand years in the future. Humanity has colonized the galaxy. There's a Galactic Empire, and there's this professor named Harry Selden who sees that, and he studies a combination of a new field of mathematics, statistics, economics, history, and he's able to statistically predict large-scale historical movements.

He sees with his mathematics that there's a large probability that the Galactic Empire is about to enter into a good dark ages—the dark ages that will last 10,000 years—and so he decides to do something about it. He wants... and you know, the dark ages— the Empire will get fragmented, knowledge will be lost, you'll have war, you'll have famine—and so he statistically sees that if he's able to preserve the knowledge of humanity in the periphery of the galaxy, some place, his math shows him that he will be able to shorten that dark ages from 10,000 years to 1,000 years.

And that's what the Foundation is. It's the preservation of knowledge. When I read that when I was in middle school, there were a few takeaways I got from that. It was a bit of an AHA that if you really want to preserve the essence of what makes a civilization capable, it really is knowledge and education.

If you really want to help society the most... there's a lot of other things that matter as well, but knowledge and education are at the root of it. The other thing that I found really inspiring was this notion... obviously, it's a science fiction book, but this notion of thinking far beyond your direct life, your direct generation, or your direct benefit.

As human beings, we sometimes need to think on a larger scale and on a longer time scale, and obviously Harry Selden in the book is thinking on a thousands of years time scale. So when Khan Academy started becoming, I guess you could say, a thing, I started tutoring family members, and one thing led to another. Many of you all started using it. You know, there was a world where Khan Academy could have just become an interesting YouTube channel. There is a world where we could have just become a software company, an EdTech company.

But there's a world where we would think about it a little bit more like Harry Selden, and this was delusional for a guy operating out of a walk-in closet not too long ago, 10 years ago. But what if it could be a foundation for the world? What if it could be an institution for the world that can help billions of people tap into their potential for generations?

And so that has directly impacted my hopes, my aspirations for what Khan Academy can be and should be, and you know, this type of crisis pinpoints it because we're going through a global crisis right now. There's 1.4 billion students around the world who normally would be in school but are now not. This thing we're creating, Khan Academy, has a role to play so we're already starting to hopefully help out a bit.

Then you could imagine in 50 years, 100 years—well beyond, you know, my lifespan—I hope that in 100 years, 200 years, people would have trouble imagining what the world was like before everyone had free access to things like this, that I hope they take it for granted. That anyone, regardless of where you grew up, is going to be able to have a lifeline and tap into your potential and have access to opportunity.

So there are other questions here. So one from Instagram: someone says, "How do you earn money?" This is a Reefa Gherkin on Instagram. And so the simple answer is, and I've talked about it at different live streams, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization which means no one owns Khan Academy. I don't own it, or you own as much of it as I do; it's a public charity. But all of us who work at Khan Academy, we do get salaries, and then that salary comes from the donations.

So when folks donate to Khan Academy, some of it goes to our server costs, which are even before the crisis we were running at around 6 or 7 million a year. Our traffic is about 2.5 times that, so we could see, you know, 10 to 15 million dollars a year server costs or more. A lot of our budget is paying the salaries of the engineers, the designers, the product managers, the content creators, the folks working with classrooms and districts, the folks running the webinars to pay all of their salaries so that we can create this platform that, you know, now we're seeing, you know, tens of millions of students, tens of millions, were using it before, and now it's increasing dramatically.

So, other questions... and Dan's picking, you know, randomly from this. So actually, I like this question from Facebook: Aghra Mafia asks, "How can I help my community during these times?" You know, I was talking to my wife about it, and you know, even my mom... I’m kind of worried about her. She's by herself in New Orleans, and obviously she's of a higher-risk age, and you know, frankly just the loneliness of, you know, not just living alone but now being socially distanced.

But then she has to worry about how she’s going to get her groceries and things like that. So I think one potential idea, especially for you younger folk who have a low risk, but even then you should take extreme precaution, is find especially senior citizens in your community who might need help getting the groceries or things like that and doing it for them, you know, just as a service.

And, you know, still take all the precautions, make sure you have, you know, try to wear masks, whatever you can do to minimize your own exposure. But if your family has the means, you can buy the groceries and just leave it on their porch, or if the senior has the means, but it's just highly risky for them to go out, you know, find some way that they can provide the funds, but then you can go do the grocery.

It's a very tactical, very simple thing, but I think it's very powerful. I think there's another layer, which is making sure that the people in your community feel connected in this time of social distancing. Obviously, people are worried about the virus, but the next worry is people are feeling very lonely right now.

So I think especially with a lot of these seniors, but I would say anyone in your community, make sure everyone feels somewhat connected. So that might be getting on a video conference with them, just talking to them about life. There are ways that we can connect with each other and support each other where we don't have to be in person. Yeah, so those are two of my ideas.

There are many other opportunities to volunteer. So we have a question from the curious student from YouTube: "I believe you're the best teacher, but who do you think is or has been the best teacher to the world?" Well, thank you for that kind remark! It makes me... I think, you know, I will never make a superlative comment in almost any domain, especially something like teaching.

I think there's different types of teaching and different people are going to resonate with different folks. You know, I like to believe, and thank you for your compliment, that the things that I create or the things that our team here at Khan Academy creates resonate with as many people as possible that help motivate them, help them learn. But you know, the work that teachers do day in, day out goes far beyond that.

You know, that's the work of, you know, working with individual students, individual classrooms, making sure they're motivated, you know, diagnosing an individual student that, okay, it might be this academic gap, or there maybe there's something at home that I can help them with. The really amazing teachers I know are the ones that really form those connections.

When I think about my own childhood or education, I had many, many amazing teachers. I was very blessed that way. I grew up in Louisiana, and but, you know, many teachers—almost every year, I can name at least one—but you know, in high school, I had teachers like Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Hernandez, and they were incredible teachers of their subject area.

But what I really remember is they were very connected to all of us students in a very open way. They treated us, you know, they put constraints on us as they should have, but they also treated us like peers. I remember Ms. Kennedy was our journalism mentor, and so that modeled a lot of what I try to emulate now in Khan Academy, that Khan Academy should never feel like "we're the teacher, you're the student."

It's really that, you know, we're just two human beings trying to help each other, and maybe right now we have a little bit more knowledge and you might be the recipient of it, but it is a little bit more of an equal thing. Mr. Hernandez was my algebra 2 teacher, and then he was the mentor for several clubs that I was in. If I go back to middle school, I remember Ms. North, you know, she used to run her—and I remember Ms. Ellis in fifth grade; they both used to run their English classes like university seminars, and I remember that was really fascinating.

And it informs a lot of what we now recommend for what the best model is when folks get together. Yes, use Khan Academy if you need lectures at your own pace; use Khan Academy to get practice and feedback to get some of your foundations, and then ideally that can free up class time to run it the way that Ms. Kennedy or Ms. North or Ms. Ellis ran their classes, which is more dialogue, more simulations, more games that really push that higher-order thinking.

So anyway, there's a lot of layers to what makes a great teacher and a lot of different types of teachers, but thank you for the compliment. So there's one question that I'm actually intrigued by. No one's ever asked this before. This is from Autumn again, asking, "Khan Academy should provide resources for college essays."

So we don't have resources for college essays yet, or we don't even have plans for that yet. We do have some resources on college admissions. If you do college admissions Khan Academy, do a Google search, you'll find it. But my advice for folks writing college essays is just be authentic. Just be yourself.

I think sometimes folks get so stressed about things that they try to optimize it so it's perfect in some way, but when you try to optimize it perfect, you're not letting your true self out. You're not letting your vulnerability out, and you know, I've talked to many of our advisers, or actually heads of admissions departments at some fairly selective universities, and they tell me, you know, how many kids just kind of fit a certain pattern, and they're just trying to have this perfect essay—but the ones that really appeal to them are the ones where, when they read it, they're like, "Oh, I see the student, I see the person behind this."

This person is quirky, this person's authentic, this person's honest. And those are the folks, once again—and they have a growth mindset too. They're not trying to make their life look perfect; they're willing to admit their failures and they're owning their failures. Those are the students that they like to bring to their community, those are the students that they think are going to be able to do amazing things in the future.

So that's my best advice: just be as authentic as possible in your essays. Introspect who you are; don't try to be, you know, some ideal that you think other people want you to be. Frankly, that's life—not just for college essays, but probably for life.

So we have a question on Facebook from Scott Yang. "Yes, Sal, this is on the minds of lots of students. Our students have to restart their courses because of the school closures." So I think that is a very fluid situation. What we've seen in various districts... I would be shocked if you have to restart your courses.

Like, if you were taking high school biology this year, then all of a sudden you're gonna have to retake high school biology next year. I don't think anyone is suggesting that type of thing. I think what will happen—I know some of our local districts out here in California, they've kind of moved to a bit of a pass/fail system, so at least you get credit.

I think what we're going to have going into the end of the school year, over the summer, and the early next school year, is I think teachers, schools, districts are going to be very open, and colleges, college admissions are going to be open to alternative evidence that you mastered the subject. I don't know what these are fully going to be; I do think that if you are able to master something on Khan Academy and print it out and you know, sign a promise, you know, that it's your work on an honor code, and it should really be your work—then even that might carry weight because people are looking for alternative measures in this next year.

Everyone is trying to err on the side of doing right by everyone versus trying to be punitive, but I think that's a two-way street. Everyone, you know, if you're the student, it's on you to be, you know, authentic and honest about your true state and not try to game whatever system that gets put in place over the next few months.

But I wouldn’t feel anxious about having to completely repeat. I think there are ways that you can show that you have that knowledge and that if you're good at marketing it, so to speak, you will be able to do fine. When I think back to my own high school experience—obviously, I didn't go through what we're all going through right now—but there is a certain power to self-advocacy.

I remember I wanted to take some advanced courses at the University of New Orleans when I was 15 or 16, and I remember walking in there, you know, 14 or 15 years old, and they're like, "Who are you?" I'm like, "I'm the high school kid, I go to Grace King High School, it's about four miles away. I'd love to take, you know, multivariable calculus." They're like, "We don't offer that to you."

But I'm like, "No, I'm ready." And they're like, "Well, how do we know you're ready?" And then I had to self-advocate and I’m like, "Give me a test." Here’s this. I obviously didn't have Khan Academy back then. If you advocate for yourself, people will appreciate that. So I think that’s another way to think about it.

So we have more questions here! So from Instagram, this is a question we've gotten several times: "What's the best way to avoid procrastination?" And I don't want to pretend that I'm immune to procrastination. I've done my fair share, and I think especially in the context we're in where the news kind of sucks you in, it's very easy to convince you.

So let me just spend five minutes looking at what's going on in the world, and then that can turn into longer than five minutes. What I try to do—actually, one thing—and I try to limit how much I look at the news these days. I want to be informed, but I don't want to be sucked into it.

I think the other thing is, and this is during this crisis or pre-crisis, just always have some structure and have a bit of a checklist. Then you can build that momentum during the day. I've talked in multiple live streams; I like to make my bed first in the morning, I like to do a meditation first thing in the morning, and I always get ready first thing in the morning, even if I have nowhere to go—even if it's a weekend!

I try to do a little bit of exercise, and those early wins help me build momentum into the day. Once I get into the office or in now the new world when I just start working from home, I try to ask, "What are some things that I can get some wins on?" The other thing—and this is the Pomodoro Technique that we've talked about—is try to give yourself some windows to work and then make sure you take breaks as well so you don’t get burned out.

And what Philippe is showing you is we've actually made some meditations to help you stop procrastinating, and these are meditations just as a kind of way to be reflective of your own thoughts. But, you know, the gist of the meditation, the procrastination one, is, you know, don't let your brain convince you because it's oftentimes the fixed mindset in your brain that is afraid to get started.

It's afraid to get started because it might discover that it’s harder than you thought or you might not finish it in time, and that somewhat self-destructively—that fear keeps you from starting and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It does become harder. The key is to ed that thought process and say, "No, I don't care what you're trying to convince me, brain."

Thoughts—I am just gonna start! I am just going to put one foot in front of the other and start and see what happens, and if you do that, then it kind of breaks that procrastination circuit in your brain. Then, as soon as you start, most times you're like, "Oh, this isn't so bad, this is kind of fun! Well, why did I procrastinate it so much?"

But there's--you know, there's other games you can play with yourself or if you have a due date on something, just, you know, tell yourself the due date's earlier. We could talk about that, but I’d love any ideas you all have as well. It's not like anyone has solved procrastination, but we have ways of dealing with it or minimizing it.

Let's see, there are a bunch of questions here. We have some from Facebook. I'm not sure. Chima says, "What do you think about new programs in the near future that could impact a few next few generations?"

Well, it's a fun question to think about. You know, in the education realm, obviously I hope Khan Academy is in a position that we can help billions of folks for generations to come, and there are things that I hope we can layer on. I hope one day Khan Academy—you know, someone’s question about credit or having to repeat classes alludes to something that I hope Khan Academy can play a role in in the future, which is helping people connect the learning on Khan Academy so that they get opportunity in the world, or they get credit.

So, you know, there are a lot of things that we could do on the Khan Academy layer. I think the other really interesting things that are going on in the world right now—obviously, we're in the midst of a healthcare crisis—but I think in healthcare you're going to have, you know, there's CRISPR technology where we're going to be able to start literally editing DNA. There are some scary aspects to that; we’re in the position to edit our genome, but there could be some very positive, powerful things from that as well.

I'm inspired by some of the things that might be happening in communications. Obviously, the fact that we can do this type of communication right now without a ton of planning, you know, in this time of crisis, is making the whole world a lot more connected. I'm inspired by some of the things that might be happening in energy. You know, we're all worried about what might happen in the climate and whatnot, but there are some silver linings.

You know, people are working on nuclear power plants that might not have any nuclear waste to them or radioactive waste to them. Solutions like that I think are pretty inspiring. I'm also inspired by, you know, new models of transportation. People are talking about ways to, you know, flying cars and whatever else—and they actually seem more real than not.

Obviously, space travel, reusable rockets, satellite networks that can give everyone broadband and connectivity, like we have around the globe, I think all of these are going to be incredibly transformational, and they all, in fact, affect each other. They actually all would have an impact on what Khan Academy is as well.

So, let's see, there are other questions here. So, some from YouTube: Susanna Dominguez asks, "What is your favorite part of Khan Academy?" Well, you know, that's like asking who’s my favorite child! A favorite? I will say what I think is the most powerful part of Khan Academy. You know, a lot of people associate Khan Academy with videos, and we are proud of our videos, and videos are an important part of what we do.

But I would say the most powerful part of Khan Academy is the practice and assessment exercise platform that we have, where students can get functionally unlimited practice, immediate feedback. There's mechanics for them to progress at their own pace, and all of that ideally works when teachers are able to look at their teacher dashboards or parents are able to look at either the parent or the teacher dashboard to help unstick students and then to open up what can happen in class time to be a more higher order.

So, I think that’s what I think is a real power of Khan Academy. The, the... it's nice to get these micro-explanations if you're stuck, but the real learning happens when you try exercises, you get feedback, especially when you get it wrong, and then you reflect, you look at the step-by-step solution and the hints and you're like, "Oh!" And then you keep trying, and then you see it in a context switching mode on a unit test or something like that.

So we are at time, y'all asked... you got me on my soapbox on some of my favorite questions of like work at this baby and thousands of years, but thank you everyone for joining. I know this is an incredibly hard time for the world. I would say just as one human being to another human being, the silver lining of that is that we're all in this together. This is a shared experience.

I remind myself that, and whenever I'm feeling a little isolated and socially distanced, I remind myself that I'm in a much more fortunate situation than many, many folks in the world are finding themselves. So we're all in this together, and I think we're going to get through this together. Take care of yourself, stay healthy, stay safe, and all of us here at Khan Academy are going to do whatever we can to support you. Please, on future live streams, come on, give us tips, feedback, ideas for how we can do that better.

Thank you!