Homeroom with Sal & Rehema Ellis - Tuesday, December 15

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our homeroom live stream! We have a very exciting guest, Rohima Ellis, who is the education correspondent for the NBC Nightly News. But before we get into that, what promises to be a very exciting conversation, I'll give my standard announcements.

One, a reminder that we are a not-for-profit and we can only exist through philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate. I also want to make a shout out to several organizations that have stepped up to help Khan Academy, especially during the COVID school closure, what can only be described as a crisis where Khan Academy's traffic has gone up dramatically and our costs have gone up. So, special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and the artists who have helped close that gap. But we also need more, especially as we go into 2021.

Last reminder: there is a version of this live stream in podcast form, Homeroom with Sal, the podcast. Get that wherever you get your podcasts.

So with that, I'm excited to welcome Rehema Ellis to our conversation today. Rehema, good to see you!

Nice to see you! So there's so much I want to talk to you about, but the two things I think will be really interesting—and I encourage everyone listening or seeing this on YouTube and Facebook to ask questions, especially in these two dimensions, but really on anything. You're the education correspondent, so you're really seeing on the ground what's happening in schools. So I encourage people to ask questions about that, but also just your life journey as a very successful journalist. Any questions people have on that as well?

But maybe a good place to start is just where we are. You know, what are you seeing? I know NBC Nightly News is going to be doing a whole series on understanding how teachers are adapting to COVID. What have been some of your biggest takeaways so far?

One of the things that is my big takeaway is I hope that people will gain a greater appreciation, respect, and recognition, if you will, of teachers. As all parents—and I'm a parent myself—find ourselves at home with our children, we love them dearly and care for them dearly, but some of us are not the best teachers for the ones that we love. We're seeing a tremendous amount of appreciation for what teachers do.

We care for our children because we love them, but we entrust them to a stranger to care for some 25, sometimes 30 children in a classroom. And for those who do it with such magnificence and such passion and concern, they are really superstars in terms of our children's lives and ultimately in terms of the life of our society. Because a society to prosper requires, demands really, an educated population. So that's one of the things that I'm seeing. I'm hearing a lot of people talking about, “Geez, I had no idea how hard it is to be an educator.”

Absolutely! It's funny when you were saying—when you kind of reminded yourself—I love my children dearly. I think you expressed what a lot of parents expressed, especially during COVID, where we remind ourselves that we love our children dearly, but maybe my children were a little bit harder to deal with on a full-day basis than originally expected. For an untrained parent, who is not trained as an educator, you start to see this is really challenging.

And so this appreciation, I think, is wonderful, and I'm so happy to be a part of what NBC Nightly News is doing, and that is devoting a whole week to what we call teacher appreciation—to really highlighting some of these superstars in the field of education. And there are a lot of them.

And it might be obvious, but you know, and this is NBC’s credit, NBC has always kind of put a real emphasis on education. What was the catalyst for doing this focus—a whole week on not just teacher appreciation, but how teachers are navigating the crisis?

Well, one of the things is the crisis that we are in. It's not just something that's outside of the classrooms. Even our children are not in the classrooms. It's not just something that's not happening to children. It is happening to children. Even though children are not among those whose numbers are seen as the fatalities of this dreaded virus, but children are being severely impacted by it—not being in school—a place that's a social environment, a learning environment.

It's an opportunity to learn how to not just learn your ABCs, but how to communicate in a community. When we don't have that, that's really damaging; it's really impactful on children. NBC recognizes that and said, "Let's take a minute to see what teachers are doing to try and fill that very important and large gap that's occurring for so many of our children as they're learning remotely."

And you know, I want to get into some of what you all will cover, but there's a question from YouTube. Mr. Spector asks, "Ms. Ellis, is it hard finding stories?" And that's actually interesting because this is kind of the intersection of the two things I want to talk about. When you all decide that you want to do, let's say, a week of reporting on teaching, especially during the crisis, what's the process for you all? How do you find out the interesting stories and how do you kind of surface the real human element of it?

It is varied. It's sometimes complicated, and sometimes it's easy. Sometimes we'll see what our colleagues have done on other platforms—be it newspaper or television programs, etc.—and we'll say, “Oh my gosh, that's a great story.”

If we're looking from local television programs, we'll have a producer, a camera person, and a correspondent like myself in a particular city and say, “I saw this story on local television; this would be the kind of story that we should tell our viewers all around the country and indeed all around the world.” And then we sometimes just call up schools, call up school departments, call up local community agencies and ask them, "What's going on in your community that might be of interest to our viewers from coast to coast?"

So again, it's a complicated process, and the process varies in terms of how we zero in on stories.

And what are some of the stories? You know, not to give away your whole week of reporting, but I'm assuming you've already started to record some of them. Are there any that have really stood out to you?

Well, of course mine stands out to me, but they all stand out to me. We had one on the air just last night about a teacher in Wisconsin who was so concerned about the fact that she wasn't able to be with her children because everything was shut down, and was being done remotely.

So she decided that she was going to infuse some of the sense of architectural skills that she didn't have—at least she didn't know she had—but she found out that she did. And on her classroom, on her school grounds, she built a tent with the tarp, the seats, the desks, the chairs, the chalkboard, books, and brought her classroom from home. Everybody was at home; now they're in this classroom outside.

It was so successful; the whole school now has their classrooms outside. So there's ventilation, there's separation because they have a big property. That kind of thing doesn't work so much in the inner city, but it worked wonderfully for this school in Wisconsin. Kudos for that teacher for saying, "I'm going to try something that I never thought of before."

That's exactly what's happening with the story that I'm going to have on tomorrow. It's about a science teacher in Washington, D.C. His name is Jonte Lee. You can see from some of the pictures he's concocted this arrangement inside his own home because he said to himself, “We've got a problem here in need of a solution.”

And as a science teacher, he said, "What can I do?" Listen to a little clip of our story: "Chemistry and physics is hard to do when you're face to face. How did you imagine you would continue teaching remotely?"

Well, as you can see that I turned my kitchen into my classroom, and that my kitchen also became my lab. The only way that I was able to think of doing it successfully was to make it as interactive as possible, and what better way to teach chemistry than from the kitchen? Because we do chemistry every single day.

On the side of our kitchen, it's heat, acid, bases. He's now become known as the kitchen chemist because of what this teacher did. He went above and beyond; he decided that if I'm going to have lab experiments, my students need to have lab supplies. So taking money out of his own pocket, he went and bought the supplies and then delivered them personally to each one of his 35 students.

And in so doing, he's putting up these videos. These videos have gone viral—not only around the country but around the world. People are tuning in to Mr. Lee's classes, and I said to him, “I didn't even think that students would want to do that.” He's got perfect attendance with his 35 students every single day.

Once again, I think a testament to a teacher who cares so much about his kids that he said, "I'm going to figure out a way to continue to connect with them, even if it's remotely." And he has a good time doing it.

Well, I mean, that's a fascinating story. And you know, my selfishly, my Khan Academy hat—we're actually doing a big push in middle school and high school chemistry. And I think you might have identified someone that we have to call up to help us out.

In fact, Saul—he's already connected; he goes to Khan Academy for some of his advice and some suggestions and ideas that can help him with his kids.

So you two are already linked?

Well, yeah! I mean, it's great if he can leverage us, but I think we might need to leverage him. So that's a separate thread that we'll take on.

A ton of questions are coming out, and a lot of it about your life and your life journey. So before I get into some of these questions, I am always fascinated by hearing the story. You know, I think a lot of kids when they're 10 years old or 15 years old, say, "I want to become a journalist," or "I want to be on NBC Nightly News."

Or you know, your parents will be like, "Alright, maybe." Your parents are kind of thinking about the probabilities in your head. It's like, "Well done, why don't you just go, you know, do something that—you know, go be an engineer, go be a doctor or lawyer or something like that—school teacher—where there's a clear pathway."

Did you always know that you were going to be a journalist, especially a journalist on TV? And how did you get to where you are?

I absolutely did not know that I was going to be a broadcast journalist. It was not until my sophomore year of college that I had a professor, and her name is Andrea Rushing. And she looked at a paper that I wrote about James Baldwin, and she said to me—I was a sociology major. She said, "The conclusion you came to in the paper was not exactly right, but the way you came to that conclusion and wrote about it was brilliant."

I respected this teacher so much—also an African-American woman—that it changed me at that point because she said, "I would encourage you to be a writer." I was just blown away.

And I think it’s one of those things about the real value and the importance and significance that a teacher can have in someone's life. We're even profiling such a teacher also on Nightly News this week: a young man who was growing up in a shelter, and he had a fourth-grade teacher who kept telling him, “You can be anything that you want to be.” He's now paying it forward, and he's a fifth-grade teacher.

So teachers are outrageously important in a young person's life. So in my sophomore year of college, I was inspired to take some journalism courses. I did not know what I would do with them, but I took the journalism courses.

I then took—had internships, which are so valuable. I had a college radio station. I was the host and the producer and the anchor of this college radio station. I was doing public affairs programming. And then I also wrote for my local newspaper.

And then I went away. I went to East Africa for a couple of years because I wasn't quite sure that journalism was the thing that I wanted to do, and I came back after I got accepted to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and that then launched me into doing radio. And from radio, I did television, and in television, I ended up in New York here with NBC—not what I had planned, but I am enormously grateful for where my journey has taken me, and all because of a teacher who inspired me.

You know, that has a lot of parallels to Lester Holt. Lester Holt was on this show. I always feel embarrassed calling people who do real shows, calling this a show, but he was talking about being kind of this radio geek even when he was very young. He would pretend to do a radio show even when no one was listening.

Eventually, he did so. It sounds like radio is a really interesting path. You know, just before I get to some of the other folks’ questions, what do you think allowed you to really stand out? What are the skills that you think you—and I know it's an awkward question to answer—but what are the things that you think have really stood out and allowed you to get to where you are?

I actually think time is everything; timing is everything. The time that I had with that professor in college, having the time to have radio stations who looked at me and said, "We will let you do this."

Then getting accepted to a great school, and from that great school, I got a scholarship. The scholarship—it was with what was called Westinghouse Broadcasting back then—and they wanted to, I think, cash in on their investment. They gave me some money, and they wanted to see if they could follow through on it.

And I ended up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, doing radio and then to television. I had a fantastic mentor who saw something in me and encouraged me to do things that I quite honestly, unlike Lester, imagining myself doing radio—I hadn't imagined myself doing it.

But having an opportunity to write—and in radio, I loved doing radio. One of the strengths of it is you have to create images with your words. People can't see, but they can hear. So all the sounds—the sound of my voice, the sound of the voices of the people whom I interviewed, the sounds in the neighborhood or the streets or the places where I went—using all of those sounds to craft a story, it was fascinating to me.

And again, I think some of it is luck, some of it is being in the right place at the right time, some of it is having people who encourage you to go on and do things that sometimes you don't even imagine that you can do.

And then also, I must say, having the parents that I had who just always told me that once I put my mind to something, I could do it. And so I've always followed that; it just keeps me going forward.

Were there any moments where you've kind of doubted yourself or you felt like, "Hey, maybe I'm not cut out for this," or "I'm not going to be able to make the dent that I want to have?"

Not really, but the moment that I felt when I was first starting in the business is that all of the monumental stories had already been told. Vietnam had happened, the civil rights movement had happened, Pearl Harbor had happened. So what was I going to do—a kid coming up in the 80s, going into the business? And I thought my life was pretty good, actually; the world around me was opening up, and opportunities for people who looked like me were beginning to open up.

And so what would the stories be that I could possibly tell? Boy, was I wrong! There has just been one story after another, and here we are now in the middle of a historic moment in terms of a pandemic. I couldn't have imagined it, and I don't think that anybody else could have either. But the minute you think that there's not a monumental story to tell, life changes—and it can be your story.

Absolutely! You know, there's a couple of questions here about—I'll ask both of them and we can kind of merge them. From YouTube, SmartBear says, "How do you include your NBC life with your kids?" I'm assuming they're asking about kind of work-life balance. And also from YouTube, Nish786 is asking, "What are some things that you notice now in your life after becoming a journalist that you didn't notice before?"

So generally speaking, you know, life work balance is a struggle for everyone. I can imagine you travel a lot; you're on the road a lot. How do you make these balances, and how has it affected your life?

One of the things that happened when my child, my son, came home was—to be honest with you—it was a rebirth for me. I began to see life completely differently from how I'd seen it before, and the things that worried me didn't worry me anymore. I was so consumed with trying to make certain that I gave my child the best possible life.

And at the same time, I'm a single parent, and so I had to keep working. I am so fortunate that I've had wonderful people in my life to work with me and to help me. So it's possible that if the phone rings, I can get up and go to that destination where the story is unfolding.

And that's about luck, and I think it's also about positioning yourself in your life and asking quite honestly to reveal to you—to ask the universe to help me do the kinds of things that I want to do in order to balance life with my work. My work is enormously important to me; I can't imagine doing anything else.

I really love this job, and I love my family. And people say, "Can you have it all?" Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. Sometimes your child needs to go to the pediatrician and a story is breaking, but your child needs to go to the pediatrician.

Story? Pediatrician? It really isn't that much of a hard call to make if your child needs something. And again, I have been so fortunate; I work for a company that also recognizes that I am a correspondent, but I'm also a human being.

And I think that NBC appreciates the fact that I will give my all every single moment that I can, and when it's time to take my time for my family, I have to do that too. That makes me a better journalist. I think it makes all of us better at what we do when we can have a little compassion and understanding about a little one who is dependent on us in order to grow.

So to that first question about how do I balance it, I balance it the best way I can, but I also have help to make it possible for me to do it.

No, that's a powerful idea because I think a lot of times when people talk about this, they talk about, "Oh, you should balance," like it's a trade-off. That hey, if you're going to take away from work to become a better parent, but to your point, especially when you're reporting about humanity, that element—that's going to make you a better reporter, a better correspondent—to have that aspect of your life.

I couldn't agree with that more. You know, we have a limited amount of time. One thing that I don't get—the questions, actually there’s a lot of questions coming in. I'll save one of these for again. But I am curious your views on just the state of the 80s and 90s when you know the nightly news was everything. Now we talk about social media.

Oh, it sounds like I might have clipped off. I would love your take on where we are in journalism, generally—you know, there's a lot of talk about polarization, people living in their bubbles, going on social media, getting their own version. At the same time, we still have the nightly news, which is kind of the—you know, which we've had, the three major networks, you know, since for many, many decades.

How do you see all of this evolving, and how has it affected how you all think about journalism?

Well, the way I think about it is that we're in this little bubble of infancy of communication and information. Technology is exploding; information is coming at us fast and furious and constant.

I often think of it—and I don't mean this to be disparaging in any way whatsoever, so please forgive me if someone attempts to see it that way. I often think of it as us being very young and almost childlike in the fact that we are bombarded with information. It's almost like a child in a candy store who's hungry for every single bit of candy and sweetness that they can find, and it's all around them.

Ultimately, the child learns that there has to be a diet of candy and other things—protein, other carbohydrates, and vegetables, and vitamins. You learn that! But at the beginning, it's just an explosion of excitement.

I think we're in that explosion of excitement; there's information everywhere, and I'm in the information business, so I would never be one to say, "Let's turn off the information." But one of the things I do think is important is to understand and to get a sense of media literacy. To know the difference between something that's just exploding at you and something that gives you context to the content.

And I want all of us to become really literate and understanding media—question sources, examine sources, and maybe go outside of our comfort zone and look at a variety of different things. In so doing, I think we'll become better educated on how to use this wonderful, wonderful opportunity of information that we have available to us right at our fingertips.

It makes a lot of sense! And maybe just to close out, you know, one last question I’m getting from YouTube again—actually another question from Nish786—what's some advice that you would give to teenagers?

I guess some teenagers who might want to go down a path similar to yours or people who want to go down any path. What advice would you give to your teenage self or to any teenage self?

Read everything you can. Information really is power; it also informs your thinking, it informs your writing, it informs your perspective. So you have to read! Sometimes we get just little tweets and think that now I'm really informed.

Well, you might be really excited and maybe excited to go examine something more in depth. One of the things that happens—and was said to me when I started in the business—is that journalists, we're kind of in a 30-minute broadcast of nightly news, we're a conduit of information. We certainly do frame what people think about, but I hope that we encourage people to say, "Now let me decide what I think about the information that you have channeled for me to take a look at."

And the only way we can do that—when you get a story—I hope that people then will say, "Let me read more about this. Let me find out more about that particular subject. Even let me find more about these teachers who are inspiring all of us and how we might be able to appreciate them a little bit more—not just on a short news clip that we provide, but going and exploring more."

I hope that anyone who thinks about getting in this business will become a glutton for information—of all kinds of information. That's what makes what we do powerful and important to the people who are our viewers or our readers.

It makes a ton of sense! And Rahima, I want to thank you for joining, and I actually want to congratulate you. You're getting a major award—the Legacy Award—from the National Association of Black Journalists. That's already been announced, but you're going to get the award, I think, in a few days.

But this is just another testament to the importance of the work and your career. And thank you for being part of this and giving us a little bit of wisdom.

It's a pleasure! Thanks for having me.

Thank you! Well, everyone, thanks for joining. You know these conversations always go faster than I expected. I could have talked to him for a very, very long time!

But definitely check out NBC Nightly News and these stories; there really are incredible stories on education and teachers. And for those of you all who are going to be future journalists, I think you just heard a great role model to think about how you might chart your career.

So anyway, I will see you at the next Homeroom with Sal. It's going to be an Ed Talk tomorrow with Brooke Mabry. I will talk to you all then!