Ask Sal Anything - Homeroom with Sal - Friday, May 29

Well, we can continue with that graduation theme because, frankly, that was a fun one. And you know, the YouTube and Facebook live streams are going to start shortly as well. I'm going to repeat what I just said, but I will also apologize. I just had a tooth removed. I had a cracked tooth just last week, and they had to take it out. My mom was just calling, so I just had to — I'll call her back in a little bit. But I just had a cracked tooth, and they took it out, and then they screwed in, I guess, the thing that they're going to eventually have to put the implant. So much this entire half of my face is numb.

And so at least today I have an excuse to sound funny. Oh hey everyone, now I'm on! If you see me looking away, I'm now on Facebook and YouTube. So hi everyone on Facebook and YouTube! Sal here for our daily homeroom livestream. For those of you all who are wondering what this is, this is really just something we started when we started seeing school closures and social distancing. We said, "Hey, this could be a cool way for all of us to stay in touch." And sometimes I have guests, and sometimes we just do "ask me anything." Today, the guest is me, so we'll just do "ask me anything."

I was just telling the Instagram crowd, who is, you know, a little bit lower here — if you ever see me not making eye contact, they're there right over here. I guess is that me on Instagram? I don't know, this is bizarre, a little bit trippy. But I was just telling them that I had a cracked tooth as of last Friday. I was eating a peach, which is not normally considered to be a hard tooth-shattering thing, but it did somehow crack my bottom left molar. And so it's been incredibly painful. But considering all that's happening in the world, it's, as I say, it's on the edge of the type of problems you want to have because obviously, there's a lot of folks going through a lot more right now.

So I just got kind of an emergency dental thing, and my — this entire half of my face is numb. Let me see, my mom just called, so love me — she keeps calling. Maybe one of these days I'll just answer the phone with my mom; that could be entertaining. But yes, this entire half of my face is right now numb, so I have an excuse today to sound funny. Better excuse than I normally do.

So before I start, I do want to make my standard announcement: remind everyone that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit that exists only because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about making a donation. I want to give a special shout-out to several corporations that have stepped up to support Khan Academy over the last few weeks: Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Novartis, and Fastly. Thank you for that support.

So with that, let's get into the heart of it, and you know I might cut it short because all sorts of weird things are happening in my mouth right now, and I apologize if I have to wipe my mouth, but that might not be the most pleasant viewing. But yes, half of my mouth is right now numb, but I'm a big ham with a habit of consistency and habit, so that's why I'm wanting to do this regardless. So please, ask me anything!

Alright, from Twitter, Greg Ferran Steen asks, "Oh, I know Greg! I have so many questions. Does your beard have a nickname? Will you read me a bedtime calculus problem? Can we be friends?" Well, if this is the same Greg Ferran Steen that I know, then I dunno, we're already friends. Maybe this is a different Greg Bernstein. My beard does not have a nickname; that I think would be — you know, I have some eccentricities, but they have not quite gotten there yet.

"Will you read me a bedtime calculus problem?" Maybe think about that, think about how we can do the logistics. I'll wait for my tooth to heal before I think about bedtime calculus problems. Okay, from Facebook — and you know I said this is asking me anything, and it can be literally about anything. But I thought last week when we did the graduation theme that was also fun because then I got to be kind of Uncle Sal and give life advice and wisdom, and you could take it for what it's worth.

So from Facebook, Laurie and Stiles Neer asks, "I would love to see school districts convert to using Khan Academy regularly. I think the Khan — the classroom flip. Students watch videos from teachers or Khan Academy at night and work through their assignments in the classroom with aide teachers. Why is this approach not implemented yet?" So, those of you who don't know what Laurie is referring to — is something that we've sometimes been associated with, but it's not something that we came up with. This notion of a flipped classroom predates Khan Academy. Arguably, this is what, you know, Socrates did where students would do reading ahead of time, and then when they get to class, they would engage in, I guess, a Socratic dialogue with Socrates.

But the idea is that the learning, the information retrieval or coverage happens at your own time and pace. And that's especially doable now in time on-demand video. That way, when you get to a classroom, you're able to dive deeper, do problem-solving, have conversations, actually have human-to-human interaction. And so that's why people call it a flip.

Once you do that, you can actually go even further because one of the reasons why a classroom all has to move at the same pace is because in a traditional classroom, you have a lecturer, and a lecturer by definition is at a fixed pace. But all of a sudden, if students are able to watch content or even practice at their own time and pace on their own, then when they get to the class, they can have more supports. In theory, every student could go at a different pace.

And you know, I don't think it has to be strict videos at home or lectures at home and then problem-solving in the classroom. I actually think it could be whether you're in the classroom or at home; you should do whatever makes sense for you. So work at your own time and pace on exercises and videos, and then when you're in the classroom, you have extra supports of your peers, your teacher — the teacher can look at the data and see, "Hey, so-and-so is having a problem," or "Maybe three students are having trouble." I can have a small group session with them while the other students continue to work at their own time and pace.

We've seen this in many classrooms, and students love it because it's much more interactive. They get much more support, and teachers really like it because they get to form these deeper connections and are really able to do differentiated instruction. To your question of why we're not seeing more of it, I think it's just a different way of thinking about classrooms.

And you know, for the most part, it just sometimes takes time for people to realize there's a shift. You know, I've given talks to groups of educators, and they all intellectually really agree with this idea. But it is sometimes harder to move past maybe what you're used to in a traditional model.

The one, you know, one silver lining perhaps of the scope of the crisis is that we are seeing many more teachers move to this type of a model because, obviously, with people staying at home now, you're not getting as much — I guess you could say — seat time in the classroom. And so a lot more of the information delivery or the lectures or whatever you want to call them and the problem-solving has to happen on a student's own time and pace.

That way, when students and teachers get on Zoom or Google Hangout or whatever, they have a lot more interaction because, obviously, it makes no sense to just give a lecture on Zoom. That might as well just be a video, and honestly, it's not just about Zoom; that could be true of the real world too. If you just — if you know in some universities, if the lecture is with 300 students, that could and should be a video. And ideally, the students and the teachers could interact with each other instead, which would be far more human.

And if you see me keep shifting my eyes from a little part of my screen to another, it's because I'm trying to make eye contact with both Instagram and the Facebook YouTube live streams and read the questions. So my apologies.

Alright, from Facebook, Khushi Wostock says, "I hope you don't mind, but I tell people that you're my cousin." Sounds fine to me! For all we know, we are cousins, cousin Orsa. Alright, there on YouTube, Easton asks, "If you taught in a public school, what would you teach?"

You know, one of the things that I — when I was in college, I used to say if there was such a thing as a PhD in everything, that's what I would want to do because I actually can get very excited about teaching almost anything or learning about almost anything. So, you know, math is interesting, physics, chemistry, biology — I would love to do literature. I would love a philosophy course. I think that's what keeps things interesting is where you want to teach things where you have some grounding and familiarity, but it's also fun to be on that learning journey.

Oftentimes, with the students, and oftentimes that makes the teaching that much more authentic because you're that much closer to empathizing with the experience that the students are having at that moment. But, you know, in in-person classrooms, I really like as much interactivity as possible. You know, we started a little lab school; it's in our offices called Khan Lab School.

And, you know, roughly once a week or once a month, I do a seminar with the middle and upper school students, and we just kind of, you know, I start with a question. I just say, "What is the meaning of life?" A small question. And then I really facilitate a Socratic dialogue. So I like doing things like that or like doing simulations and games with students. And I like it when you get into the room, the more cross-disciplinary it could be.

Oftentimes, in that hour, we will go into philosophy, politics, economics, physics, math. And I think that's what really forms the connections for students. And frankly, I learn something interesting every time I do it. I think some of the fun is when it's not predictable; when, you know, it's not just from the teacher to the student, but it's also from the students to each other and to the teacher as well.

Let's see, from Facebook, Ganesh Gallup Ali asks, "Do you have any plans to translate content in English into Indian languages?" Simple answers — yes. We have a whole effort going on in India. We have a team in Delhi and in Bangalore that is redoing and translating content into the largest Indian languages. We also have a project in English for those of you who are not familiar, that is a hybrid of Hindi and English, which is apparently a fairly standard method of learning a lot of topics or the language of education in a lot of North India. So, yeah, we are doing that. Simple answer. So look that up, look up, you know, Khan Academy India, and I think you should be able to find that.

Okay, from Facebook, Kesava Rahman asks, "How long did you study and how long do you recommend studying? How were you motivated to study when you were young?" So I guess that question, you know, means how many years did I go to school? Or when I studied in school, how long did I study? I guess I'll answer both. In terms of — I guess the first one's easier to answer. I, you know, for my undergrad, I did a master's degree; but all of that stuff happened in about four years, and that was in CS and math, and a master's in computer science and electrical engineering.

And then I went to business school for two years, you can, you know, you can add up, and then I was working for two and a half years between undergraduate and business schools. So that's how long I went to school — formal school, I guess you could say. In terms of how long did I study, it really depended on the context, depending on what I was doing at the time. What I found in courses like math, physics, chemistry, and biology — essentially STEM courses, or even, you know, programming courses — I found that if you do the problem sets and you're always just thinking about it, then you actually don't need to do a lot of studying or a lot of cramming.

If you know the professor is about to do a problem, try to do it ahead of time, or try to do it at the same time that the professor's doing it. If you're doing all of the problem sets, you're doing all the projects, I found that the tests are actually quite intuitive. You know, I have peers, and I don't think it's anything about intelligence who sometimes would, you know, they're kind of mindlessly note-taking in a class and maybe not actively learning, and then they find that when they go right before the final exam, they have to do a lot of cramming.

I'm a much bigger fan of active learning. You know, I — in enrollment at Old Schoolhouse, I was a little bit infamous in college that, you know, certain lectures I found a lot of value in, and I found that I could do that active learning, and then others I did not, and so I didn't go to them. Instead, I would go, and I would get out the textbook, and I would do problems on my own. I found if I did that all term, that when I got to the class, that I would, you know, when I got to the exam, I had to do a lot less real studying.

But other subjects that might have had, you know, more content to them or more terminology, you know, I wish I could say that I wasn't, you know, a super procrastinator. But there were times in college that I pulled all-nighters, and in hindsight, I wish that I had done it more regularly. You know, the more mature kind of, you know, fully developed frontal lobe Sal would have said, "Yeah, you know, if I just worked on it a couple hours every day," then I would have not had to pull those all-nighters.

But, you know, in college, you might find yourself, you know, three, four, five, six hours the night before a test if you haven't been doing what you're supposed to up until then; you might have to do that type of thing. But I don't condone it. But yeah, you know, you're going to have to be the judge yourself of how much to study, but I think the most important thing in everything in life — you know, I say this about Khan Academy — don't — it's okay to binge do it every now and then, but the better is to form a regular habit.

20, 30, 40 minutes a day in anything is going to actually build those muscles, and frankly, not only will you not have to cram for the test, but you're likely to have better retention because oftentimes you just cram for the test, you take the test, you go sleep for 16 hours, and you wake up. You're like, "What just happened?" You might not remember a lot of what just happened.

Alright, from — so, from Facebook, oh, this duo, this duo Khan Academy duo, tell us, tell us, tell us why you love some of your favorite science fiction authors, please. And then Dan from Khan Academy is asking, "Do you prefer the Noir Foundation? Which one do you prefer and why?" So to answer duo, you know, some of my — well, the second question from Dan kind of answers — you know, I'm a big Arthur C. Clarke fan. Obviously, kind of the whole 2001 series, the whole notion of — I also like Childhood’s End. There's a bunch of good Arthur C. Clarke stuff that are very enjoyable.

Isaac Asimov, I've talked a lot about. George Herbert Dune, I mean you can see behind me a lot of these books are there. Where's the Dune? But, you know, I'm not a big believer in stack ranking everything in your life. You know, it's like stack ranking your children; you love them all, and they all add dimensions to your life. But I'll tell you why I loved many of these things. You know, Foundation, I've talked about it many times. The Foundation series, I'm not giving the plot away. It's a — a lot of — it's a good read, and I envy any of y'all who haven't read it because you get to enjoy it for the first time.

But it takes place thirty thousand years in the future. Humanity has colonized the galaxy, and there is kind of this mathematician, historian, you know, psychologist-type academic named Harry Selden, who develops this science of psychohistory. Through his math, he shows that there's a very high probability that the Galactic Empire is about to enter into a ten-thousand-year dark ages. And he decides to do something about it.

His math shows him, his science shows him that if he's able to collect the galaxy's civilizations' knowledge and put it in the periphery of the galaxy as a foundation, that will shorten the dark ages from ten thousand years to one thousand years. And you know when I read that, as a kid, I think I first read it in middle school, I was like, "This is epic." You know, first of all, it was the first time that I really appreciated that, you know, what Harry Selden is right. The single most important nugget for civilization or for people is, at the end of the day, how much they're able to leverage their human potential.

And that all boils down to really knowledge. And so that's number one. And that probably put a seed in my mind later on when I was working on Khan Academy that, like, this could matter a lot. Maybe Khan Academy could be this foundation for the world that can maybe prevent us from getting into a dark age or maybe elevate humanity to a whole other level, whatever else.

And the other thing that I was inspired by, by Harry Selden, was that he thought on that timeframe. You know, most of us do not think, "Oh, what's going to happen in a thousand years?" "What can I help to keep, you know, that 10,000 years of pain and war and famine instead being 1,000 years?" Because most of us said, "Well, you know, I probably got another 100, 60 years on this planet at best." I mean, many of you young people watching hopefully will have many, many more years.

And you know, we can talk about, you know, this whole notion of the singularity, and if medical science can extend lifespans, who knows? There might be some generation that lives much, much longer. I actually think we're going to bring David Sinclair, who's done research on that, onto our livestream at some point. But you know, I was inspired that, well, maybe we should be thinking on that type of a timeframe because that's probably what's going to help humanity.

And it doesn't have to be ten thousand years or a thousand years, but even think on a hundred-year timeframe or a fifty-year timeframe, which I found incredibly inspiring. And that I've told many of y'all that was one of the reasons why I set up Khan Academy as a not-for-profit. It was delusional ten years ago when I was operating in this very same walk-in closet that I'm in right now.

But I said, you know, maybe Khan Academy could be like the foundation; it could serve one day billions of kids for hundreds of years and be one of the great institutions of the world. And it was frankly outright delusional back then, but it's feeling a lot less delusional now. You know, we have a hundred million registered users. There's no reason that can't get — we've grown a hundredfold over the last ten years. Why couldn't we grow another tenfold and get to a billion and really build out the content and the software and the tools and all the stuff so that we really, you know, that no matter where you are born, if you at least have access to a low-cost device — and the devices are getting cheaper every day — and an internet access, that you have a lifeline.

It could be in some village that, you know, has no school; you still have a lifeline. Or it could be a place that does have a school, and then you're able to use this thing to empower the school, to empower the teachers so that you get more personalization and more access to more content. And you know, there's ideas of, you know, ways to pair people so that one student could tutor another student, even if they're in completely different places or different countries.

So anyway, that Foundation is really, you know — Dune is epic, because it also takes place, I think, several thousand years in the future. And you know, it's obviously — it's a — it's kind of an allegory for the whole, you know, energy and whether, you know, people — what many would argue that, you know, because of oil in the Middle East, that has become — made the Middle East a very tough, you know — there's, especially coming out of World War I when people realize that oil was very valuable, and the Ottoman Empire was broken up.

You know, many people, that's why you've had that instability because there's been so much interest in oil, which is, you know, obviously it could be an issue of national security and definitely an issue of economic security. And so Dune takes place, I think, 3000 years in the future. But it's the same thing; there's this planet Arrakis that you can mine spice, and spice is used by the navigators to be able to do interstellar travel.

And so it's analogous to oil, but that makes Arrakis, which has a lot of parallels to the Middle East, it's kind of a desert planet. And it has some of these, you know — there's some nomadic people who live there, but it makes them kind of a tension point. And so just kind of a power grab there. So it's a good metaphor for geopolitics and politics. But then there's also a bit of a metaphysical layer on it where the main character is kind of perceived as the kind of the savior.

And on a religious level, you know, there's this concept in Islam known as the Mahdi, which is kind of the savior; the person who comes at, you know, at some future point. And so the people who live on Arrakis are kind of this neo-Islamic, you know, you can imagine how religions might evolve over thousands of years. And so they still have retained, and they think this main character is that. And he does seem to have certain powers or data points to back that up.

So anyway, as you can imagine, anything that is truly epic and expands your mind and makes you kind of think beyond the "Oh, I have to go to a dentist appointment to remove my tooth," or "You know, I better go buy some baking soda tonight." Instead, makes you think about, like, "Wow, what are we, and where are we in the whole scope of time and space, and what could we become as a civilization?" I think is always really interesting.

You know, I think we sometimes forget that we are — we are an intermediary on some form of pathway of some form of, you know, humanity. A thousand years from now might be very, very different than humanity today. But we, you know, us, the collective we, are the people who are going to kind of define what that trajectory is, so it's just really interesting things to think about.

So, let's see — Virender Budge Wani asks, "What are the top challenges for Khan Academy to scale their product from just an add-on education to become an official part of the school curriculum, specifically in developing countries like Pakistan and India, where government school systems can benefit a lot from Khan Academy?"

Well, there's a lot of things. You know, at the beginning of this, I made my standard plug for resources. You know, we're the budget of a large high school; it is a substantial budget, but we're the budget of a large high school, but we reach over a hundred million students in a year. So I'd like to make the argument it's a very strong social return on investment, and that could one day be billions.

We need to add more content. You know, we're starting to add English and which artist — I would — I looked at, and middle school science. We already have really math from pre-K with Khan Academy kids, all the way through high school and early college level math. The sciences — biology, chemistry, and physics — are either added or being improved upon as we speak. And then, so I think that lays a very strong scaffold.

We want to constantly improve the software, the exercises on Khan Academy, so you get as much practice and feedback as you need. We're constantly looking at the data so that we can improve those items. You know, I'm intrigued by things in the future: How can you use Khan Academy as evidence for what you know to the broader world so it can plug you into higher education, or you can even get a job or whatever else from Khan Academy?

And then I think there is a very real issue of device access and training and support, and we are starting to do that type of work. We're working with school districts mainly in the U.S., but we do have efforts in places like India and Brazil as well to start integrating with their technology and their rostering systems, and do training with their teachers and their administrators.

And then, you know, you can imagine device access, especially in places like India or Pakistan, are not where they need to be in order to fully leverage Khan Academy to empower teachers and students in schools. But you know, my hope is over the next ten years, a lot of that stuff is going to happen. And frankly, the COVID crisis is accelerating a lot of that.

So, let's see — from Instagram, w0 7 says, "Do you play an instrument?" I do kind of — I play guitar. I'm, you know, I'm a mediocre guitarist. I usually — it's more of a means to an end just to sing, and I'm mediocre at that as well. I've picked up a little bit of piano; my oldest son is actually quite good at piano, and I've kind of observed what he's been up to. And so, but even there, you know, my piano is really just an excuse to belt out a tune every now and then.

So let's see, we have — oh, we only have a little bit more time, so let's see — there are — is there any other questions? So a couple of people are asking about the Jr. Breakthrough Challenge. Katie A. and Natalie O., advice for the Breakthrough Junior Challenge. Excited about the Jr. Breakthrough Challenge!

First of all, I am excited about it. For those of you who do not know what it is, the Jr. Breakthrough Challenge is — there's a Breakthrough Prize, but you can kind of think of it as new Nobel Prizes where several folks out here in Silicon Valley, led by Yuri Milner, but also Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, they funded this prize. It's like a Nobel Prize. So you know, these top mathematicians, scientists, and doctors in the world, they give a three million dollar prize for really, you know, disruptions, you know, breakthrough-type discoveries.

And they reached out to Khan Academy about five, six years ago and said, "Well, we want to do something for high school students." And what we came up with is, "What if high school students created short videos that explain the phenomenon in math, medicine, or science in just a novel way?" And if you win the Breakthrough Prize, it is a lot; you get, I think, it's a $250,000 scholarship, your teacher gets $50,000, there's a $100,000 lab for your school, so it's like approaching half a million dollars for a three-minute video. So it's a good ROI, I think.

And I am one of the judges, and you know, the ones that I've always found appealing are — it's always great to have a sense of humor. I would say almost every winner, not every winner, but especially some, you know, if you can make someone chuckle while they're getting their mind blown, you're doing great. That's — so humor is great.

But I think the interest, the really good ones are good ones are — even for someone who's an expert or thought they know about that field, like, "Oh, I never thought about it exactly that way." And I think if you can give that aha! And you know, many of the judges beyond me are some of these Nobel Prize winners, Breakthrough Challenge winners, things like that.

So if you can make even a Nobel Prize winner say, "Hmm, I'm obviously an expert at that topic, but I never thought about it exactly in that way." And by the way, that was kind of funny. I think you have a good chance of winning. That's — and I would say it's not just about the prize, just the activity of doing it. I think is really, really powerful. And I think creating portfolios of things like this regardless of whether you win or you're a finalist, you show it to colleges, you show it to employers, you show it to people you're interested in dating — and I think they'll be impressed.

So let's see, maybe one question — okay, I'll take this one from Instagram. Opium Yum says, "How can I become smarter? I just feel like no matter how hard I try, I can't learn anything." Well, um, Opium Yum, hopefully, your username doesn't correlate too much with things going on in your life because that might be part of the explanation. But in all seriousness, I think you just have to have a growth mindset about it. You know, this notion that somehow intelligence is fixed is a flawed way of thinking about it and in some ways becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So I think the best way to quote "get smarter" is to engage on things that you can engage on but are challenging to you and are a little bit frustrating to you. But what you do is when you find, is if you keep engaging on it for 20-30 minutes a day, 40 minutes a day, you're going to notice in 2-3-4 months that all of a sudden that thing that you thought was difficult, you're able to do quite well.

It's just like anything; it's like going to the gym or running. If you run every day for 20 minutes, you're going to shave minutes off of your mile before you know it. So I would recommend — Khan Academy is a great place to do it; it's all free, it's not all — non-commercial. Start at the beginning of math; if you want to start in math and do one plus one equals two, you can use the course challenges in the unit tests to accelerate you through it.

And if, Opium Yum, you do 20-30 minutes of that a day, come back in six months and tell me if you do not genuinely feel a lot smarter because I think in about six months you will have gotten to a grade level — you'll have gotten beyond your grade level. If you're an adult, you would have found that all of those things that you found intimidating when you were in, you know, algebra class, whatever, you're like, "Wait, that's not so bad now that I have a good foundation, now that I'm really building a habit of learning."

So I think it's all about having a growth mindset, realizing that you grow — you learn the most when you step out of your comfort zone. You don't really know how intelligent you are until you push yourself. Failing — you know, I like the term fail forward. Failing is actually an opportunity for growth; it's actually your best opportunity for growth. And you keep up with it and really the sky's the limit.

So I'm going to stop there. This was a lot of fun; I could keep going. But, you know, thank you for joining this livestream, and I will see everyone on Monday!