Homeroom Office Hours With Sal: Tuesday, March 17. Livestream From Homeroom

Okay, I think, uh, third time did the trick. Sorry for all the stops and starts. As I mentioned, uh, this is all very, um, impromptu and very improvisational. But yes, now even this dashboard that I'm using says that I'm online on at least Facebook and YouTube. So I will just keep going and power through this because I think there's a little bit of a delay between what I'm starting and stopping. So, I'm pressing start, it starts, and then everyone says it's working, but by that time I thought it wasn't working and then I started again. But I think we're good. I'm just going to keep powering; I’m just going to keep going through this.

So I'll start over just for those of y’all who are wondering where I am. I'm in a walk-in closet off of my master bedroom because out here in California, we have these stay-in-place orders. Uh, and as I mentioned, this is the walk-in closet where Khan Academy all got started. I have, uh, spent a year in this walk-in closet back in 2010. So I'm prepared to spend at least many weeks or months in this walk-in closet if necessary. But as you can imagine, there's a lot going on.

For those of you that this is the first time that you're coming to this live stream, the whole point of it is we obviously have these mass school closures going on, and we at Khan Academy find ourselves in a somewhat unique situation of realizing that this is what Khan Academy, to some degree, was made for. Even though we've never really thought of this circumstance actually happening. And this is clearly a very situation I don't think anyone would want. The ideal circumstances are that the schools are open; Khan Academy is somehow a substitute for live experiences. We've always imagined them being in partnership with incredible teachers and classrooms and you have your peers, and you can liberate the classroom to then go to higher-order tasks.

But we've also imagined Khan Academy being used in parts of the world where students might not have access to school or might not have access to certain instruction or curricular material of certain qualities. And we now find ourselves in a situation where most of the world is going to find ourselves in, um, that second category. So, um, a couple of things are happening. You know, I've been taking questions from parents, teachers, and students. I would love to get more student questions, actually. I know there's some concern about the cancellation delays of some of the SAT administration tests.

On Friday, we released some schedules for students of different ages, and one thing that we recommended for sure for high school students is to use our official SAT practice. Obviously, you can use this for math, you can use us for the sciences, you can use this for the social sciences, but we also have the official SAT practice that we partner with the College Board on. Even if you aren't taking the SAT, or even if now your SAT has been delayed, I encourage you to think about using that because it covers math, reading, and writing, and it'll really make sure that those skills don't atrophy, even if you aren't taking the SAT anytime soon. If you do end up taking the SAT in the next three to four months, uh, it'll be really useful.

But what I would love to do is make this as interactive as possible. I'd love to take questions from all of you. I see, let's see if I can scroll down here. I get a question: I'm a foreign student who's aiming for a mathematics course in the USA. What courses exactly should I examine in Khan Academy? Are linear algebra and multivariable calculus needed, and what tests do I need to take?

Well, Muhammad, it depends on what level you're coming into the United States. It is, um, I just saw a comment that Sal is getting old. We all get old. But, um, the, it depends on what level. If you're coming at the college level, uh, you would probably have to take something like the SAT. There might also be things like the TOEFL, which is measuring your, I think it's a test of English language, um, test of English language fluency or fluency language, something like that. English fluency; I forget the acronym. But for those tests, actually, the level of mathematics you need is not overly advanced.

For the SAT, you really have to master Algebra 2 and know it well. There are some tricky questions on there, but for the most part, they're Algebra 2 questions. Uh, and, uh, similar for the reading level, reading comprehension level. Things like linear algebra or multivariable calculus, which are typically a freshman or sophomore level course in college in the United States, are definitely not required for entry level into college.

Obviously, if you think about graduate studies, linear algebra especially tends to be applicable in a lot of the technical fields. Let’s see, other people are asking questions. Is Khan Academy in Mountain View closed as well? Yes, we have shut down the office. It's actually by law now unless you work in our area in a, you know, healthcare facility or grocery store or gas station, something that's considered essential. Uh, they're telling folks not to go to work.

Alright, so hi Sal, this is from Basil. Hi Sal, I'm a 17-year-old high school student, and I've been teaching for around three years for physics, chem, and math. Do you recommend any sources to improve someone's ability to teach? Uh, I think it's a great question. I've never had quite that question. The number one thing is really mastery of the material yourself. You know, I think even for myself when I first learned a lot of that material in high school and college, I was a good student and I understood it quite well.

But it would be great if, uh, but when I when I started doing Khan Academy it would, um, and sorry for the team; all these slack questions are coming across and it's making it a little bit disruptive. I'll look at the iPad in a second. But for the, um, to learn how maybe to practice teaching better, obviously there's nothing like teaching itself. I highly recommend trying to make resources that cover that material and I think you'll find that you'll learn the material a lot deeper.

And see, I'm going to go to the questions that the team is looking at, okay? So I'm looking at the Doc team and so I'm looking at the top of it. So yeah, and what's going on right now is our team is looking at the various streams and then they are curating the questions for me to look at this iPad. So there's a lot of homebrew things going on here, but I'm happy to continue to answer questions. I will look at the stream that I see on this dashboard and see what other questions people have. Let's see, people have asked, um, I- it seems like the quality is subpar, my apologies for that.

Well, I will try to before tomorrow find a place in the house that hopefully has a better quality Wi-Fi. I have three full, I have four full bars here, but I guess that's not doing the trick. This is my first day that I’m doing this at home, so hopefully get better every day. So please ask any questions. The team is looking at it. They will update the stock that I'm working from. I don't see any of the questions just yet, so one questions Jr. Gilroy asks, will you be leading a nationwide SAT ACT study session? A great question, Jr. We, as part of our effort to support everyone, we are thinking about things like that. As you can tell even for this live stream, we're trying to figure out the technology.

But I hope that over the, especially if this school shutdown situation is protracted, um, if it keeps going, I hope that we can find ways to support you in multiple subjects and SAT especially is an area that we might be able to do either live streams or, you know, large scale video conferencing and help answer folks' questions. So I hope that we can go to something like that.

Any chance K can students access Khan Academy cutting through gaming platforms? Unfortunately, that does not exist just yet. Let's see, um, other questions. Okay, Zapata says, I've been assisting contest students around me, not just students. It's been helpful. I'm so happy I'm one of your ambassadors. Oh, so for those of y’all who don't know, we have a thousand teacher ambassadors around the world who are teachers, but they've been super users of Khan Academy and they're also in their region not just helping their own students use Khan Academy but they're helping other teachers help their students use Khan Academy.

So thank you New Yorker for being one of those teacher ambassadors. And, you know, one of the things that we're brainstorming here at Khan Academy, we would love ideas from all of you. Especially our teacher ambassadors are ways that, uh, teachers, and I know teachers are also sorting out their own lives right now; their kids are at home; they're trying to figure out how to support their own students. But if this crisis, or if the school shutdown continues, I hope we can find ways to work with teachers who might be able to volunteer, and not just teachers, anyone who might be able to volunteer to help support students around the world who right now are feeling maybe a little bit socially distanced and, um, and need more support above and beyond what Khan Academy can do on its own.

Our hope is, you know, we've released those schedules on Friday that Khan Academy is able to, uh, is, we've been able to structure a day so that students of most ages are able to use Khan Academy for most subjects. But I hope that can be supported with other things. Yesterday, we talked about ideas like if there's a classroom or cohort of students who are working on something at the same time, maybe they can share a video conference link, a Zoom or a Google Hangout where if any of them have questions, they can go on. It could maybe be staffed by a volunteer parent or by their teacher, and we're going to think about ways we might be able to do that at a larger scale or maybe even give templates or directions for anyone to be able to do that type of thing.

Once again, none of this is ideal, but we're lucky that we have access to technology and a lot of resources that will hopefully, if this happened 30 years ago, we would have been a lot tougher of a situation. So that's our hope. Let's see, so I have a question here. Does Khan Academy provide social emotional programs? So Khan Academy historically has been didn't explicitly do social emotional programs; we tried to make put some social emotional best practices in our product experience and even in our content. What we're told people like our some of our content because it just feels relaxing and fun, sometimes improvised, kind of like what you're seeing right now.

And, um, but what we've been doing over the years is trying to think about other ways that we can supplement our core content and experience with social emotional programs. We've had programs at schools like Learnstorm, the app Khan Academy Kids that has been recently launched, that was about a year and a half, almost two years now, that is for younger students, ages three to about six, goes through the first-grade standards, and that does cover social emotional learning above and beyond math, reading, and writing. That's just to develop some of that, you know, how do you deal with others, cooperation, and build your resilience. But that is something that we hope to explore further over time.

And let's see, other questions that I might; let me see, someone Kay Gretz says, do you think that school will be cancelled for the rest of the year? Uh, I'm not an expert, although I'm not 100% sure that anyone has a clear idea right now. What I do know I, I posted a video on Saturday about the virus itself and about its spread. And if you look at the patterns in other countries, the peak cases from the stage that, and it depends who I'm talking to in what part of the world, but if you're looking from an American point of view, it looks like the peak cases start to level off about two or three weeks after, or maybe four weeks after there's a serious, whether you call it a shutdown or a stay in place. Like here in California, we haven't had a full shutdown; we're allowed to go outside, but they are enforcing a stay in place. So there's only some very basic functions that are in place.

China and Wuhan did a full shutdown, and so they probably saw pretty good, and it still took them two to four weeks to get to a leveling-off period. Uh, so in, in places like California where it's not as full of a shutdown, I hope that can happen in that time frame. But even if you imagine that, which I think would be on the more optimistic sides of things, it's not that all of a sudden people are going to open up all of the institutions at peak because the worst thing you want to do is that things start to level off and then you open everything up and then things go back exponential.

So my best guess is that it's going to be several weeks, and you can imagine the school year, at least in the northern hemisphere, we have about two months left, two and a half months left. So I think it’s quite a, it’s possible that this goes through, through the end of the school year—not an expert though.

Let's see, so Isaiah Hong says, hi Sal, a fellow college student here. Maybe I don't look so old to Isaiah, he says fellow college student. How will I know myself if I have mastered the material I've been studying? Any tips or key indicators to know if I have demonstrated mastery? Well, one of the key tenets for those of y'all listening and don't know about mastery and mastery learning at Khan Academy is this notion of mastery that in traditional academics oftentimes you're exposed to the material and maybe you get a grade, and then the class might move on to the next subject, and then that gap—maybe it's in something pretty fundamental—it might be in basic exponents. Now, all of a sudden you go to the next unit that's on negative exponents, logarithms, and you're expected to understand it.

And so Isaiah, I think there's two ways to think about it. There's kind of the general term of mastery that people use in everyday language, and then there's the, I can say more academic version that we use called mastery learning, which is making sure that you can learn at your own pace and fill in all of your gaps. So to answer your question is how do you know that you've mastered it? I think the question maybe is, uh, mastered at a certain degree of knowledge.

And that's why when you go, for example, in math or in many of the sciences on Khan Academy, we have what we call these mastery mechanics so that for, uh, every skill you can, you get to familiar, proficient, or mastered, depending on have you done it on kind of skill-focused practice? Have you done it in kind of a context-switching environment on our unit test or our course challenges? So if you're in Khan Academy and if you're in a course and you get full mastery by doing the unit tests, the mastery challenges, the course challenges on that course challenge, you can get a 90 plus percent; you will have mastered that content, at least in the modalities that Khan Academy is presenting them to you.

If you want to go even deeper in a subject, especially in something like math, then I expect, you know, then I would go after some of the more multi-part questions. You know, even for, for some of things like our AP prep, we have videos that go into deeper questions that you really can't do in a multiple choice in a free response modality and there, pause the video before I work through it or one of our video creators work through it and try to work through it on your own.

And I think if you're seeing that, you'll have mastered it. I think the next level, maybe even above a mastery—and this goes to a previous question that someone asked—is teach the material to other people. That's really the best way to ensure that you can master it, because if you can really distill it in simple ways and teach it to others, then I think you know the material.

Okay, other question—yeah, my apologies, uh, the—I've gotten multiple points of feedback now that the internet connection here is not good. So I'm going to try to fix this overnight and have a better internet connection for everyone tomorrow. So let's see, other, other questions. Kim McDonald is a parent and says, is there an easy way to learn how to make assignments for my kids? I'm new here and I want them working every day.

And so, uh, the simple answer is yes, you can make assignments on Khan Academy. You can actually register using the teacher tools as a parent, and then you can either add your child on as one of your students or there's a little code and then they can add you on as their coach or their teacher. And then once you're a teacher, if you go to any piece of content, you can actually see a little, um, thing that shows up at the top that says you can assign it and you'll only have one student or however many children you have. So yes, you can assign content, but I also encourage, especially in subjects like math, let your student learn at his or her own pace so that they can master concepts at their own pace, time and pace, and that for you to support them, answer any questions they might have, and provide some motivation.

See other, other questions. So someone asks, hey Sal, it's really hard for me to concentrate at home. Any advice for finding motivation when you don't have any outside pressure? This is a very good question, and I think this is something that we all face, especially now that most of us, or all of us, are going to be working from home. But it's an important skill because especially once you're out of school, you know, my day, I don't have someone saying, hey, do this for the next hour, then do that for the next hour, or sometimes I do. But the way I try to do it is I give myself a list of things that I hope to accomplish in a given day or in a given week.

And what I do is as I'm able to hopefully accomplish some of them and some of them are longer ranging things that can't be done in an hour, but some of them are things that can be done that hour and it could be in progress to something bigger. And what I tell myself is if I can knock this stuff out, then I have earned, you know, a right to whatever: take a break, go for a walk, uh, whatever else. I find that pretty motivating. I think it's also motivating just to remind yourself, you know, this is your opportunity to really invest in yourself. A lot of times I think teacher students maybe have the wrong mindset to school where they're, uh, they're kind of just like, oh, I gotta be here, what do I have to do?

We have to realize school is a massive investment in you, in your capabilities, and now that you're home, and we'll try to support you as best as we can and try to come up with more mechanisms to support you. But the simple answer is, uh, this is your chance to build that other muscle, not just the algebra or the reading comprehension or the signs, but build the muscle of actually learning how to learn and learning to self-motivate here, which I think is in some ways the most valuable meta skill you can have in life.

Okay, see someone asks, I just missed a question that was an interesting one. It says, what is, let me get back on the questions from the team. So you have another question, tips on how you make videos for students? So I wish I could show you my office right now, which I'm not at because of the stay-at-home orders that we have here in Northern California, but my setup is pretty simple. I have a basic laptop; actually, this is the laptop that I've recorded many Khan Academy videos on. I have a $150 Samson microphone; you could probably find it online or at a local electronics store. It doesn't have to be that one; just something that sounds decent. It's not a super all-out professional microphone, and I use a Wacom tablet to, uh, draw on.

So it's a, it's a tablet that you can write on, and it takes a little bit of getting used to, but I've been doing it for 10 years now, so I'm very used to it—14 years now. On top of that, what I use is a drawing program. In the old days, I used Microsoft Paint, then I ended up using other tools; now I use Sketchbook Pro as the art program, and then I use Camtasia Studio to do screen capture while I'm drawing on the art program. So that is how I make the videos.

Kind of the meta tips I would have if you want to make videos is just get started. I think it's very easy to over-plan or to convince yourself you're not ready, and there's nothing like kind of jumping in and getting started, especially if your audience is for people you know and you care about. I think it was a blessing for me that Khan Academy started with my cousins. It allowed me to say, alright, you know, it's my cousins; I'm just gonna press record and see what happens. But I think that allowed the videos to be more conversational, to be a little bit more comfortable.

I think you don’t want to be super improvised, but a little bit of improvisation is nice. People can recognize that it's not being constructed by some corporation with large focus groups, etc., etc. It's one human being trying to communicate with another human being. So I really encourage you—I can't tell you how many—I had friends that I tried to recruit to make videos in the early days of Khan Academy; they're brilliant people who know how to explain things, passionate about their subject. If I talked to them at a coffee shop about it, I'm like, oh, can I just record you? Because the way you just explained quantum physics is inspiring and really easy to understand.

But then, as soon as I tried to make them do a video, they would get all tight, and they'd be like, okay, the next step is what happened to you. And I think sometimes you can get into your head, and you're so concerned what other people would think that everyone gravitates to a safe space and they try not to be themselves. They try to be what they think other people think an expert should sound like. So I, I wouldn't do that. I would try to be yourself, have your personality out there, and be vulnerable with your students.

And, and, but you know, obviously feel very comfortable with the material, uh, and I think it'll come out just, just great. Let's say, let's see, Jessica Swanepoel says, not a question, but wanted to say my daughter followed the schedule yesterday and loved it. She was very excited to get started again this morning. Awesome! That's great news to hear, because we put the schedules out over the weekend, and it's, um, it's good to get feedback. And you know, positive feedback helps sometimes, but negative feedback is good too.

So everyone should be encouraged to give negative feedback, critical feedback, because that was our first draft schedule for students, and we hope to refine it as we learn more. So also give us feedback if you say, hey, that period was a little bit too long for students of that age, or actually she wanted to do more but the schedule said move on to the next thing, or that break was a little bit too long or we have ideas for other parts of the schedule. Let us know; we would love to make that schedule better and better.

Somewhat see Heather Johnson says, is Khan Academy free? That's a question I love to answer. Khan Academy is free; that's why we exist. We are a not-for-profit organization with a mission of providing a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. The next question you might be wondering is how is it free, because it costs many millions of dollars every year, many tens of millions of dollars every year to put out. Even just our server costs are seven million dollars a year, and I have a feeling based on some of the numbers we saw yesterday that they’re going to be in excess of 10 million a year shortly.

That's paid for by philanthropic donations, and so I will say if any of you, you know, for those of you who are in a position to donate, you can go to khanacademy.org/donate. If you find value from Khan Academy, if you want to ensure that it's up and running as we go through this crisis, that students around the world who don't have the resources or don't have access to high-quality materials, uh, you know, think about even a five-dollar, ten-dollar, one-time or monthly donation. But that's how we are free for everyone.

Let’s see, this is from Dishonest Abe. I respect your honesty in your username. Where do you get the emotional energy to learn all the time? You know for me, learning actually gives me emotional energy. I tell a lot of folks when they learn that Khan Academy is now a 200 person plus organization, you know, they kind of imagine that I'm your traditional CEO who might, you know, sit in a boardroom all day and be in meetings all day. And some of that is kind of true, uh, but I'm a fairly non-traditional CEO.

But for me, and, and all of that's really important. You know, you have to have a team that you get aligned with, that you can work with, that you can do big things together, because you're not going to be able to do it by yourself. And this is true even beyond Khan Academy, why before partnerships and things like that. But for, for my emotional energy, for me to be able to get into the walk-in closet or go into my office and to be able to learn some new, some new history or new science or just to be able to communicate something that I've always loved, which is almost everything I've ever learned, that's the stuff that puts me in a good mood.

When I come home and I'm grumpy, uh, my wife will say you probably didn't make any videos today. It's usually, she's usually accurate. I'm usually in a good mood once I've had a chance to immerse myself in some academic content. And, and I think the thing you have to appreciate is this academic content that you're seeing in textbooks or Khan Academy, almost every concept someone had dedicated their life to figuring out. And sometimes people dedicated their lives to figure out, and they couldn't figure out. They couldn't figure out how did plants grow? How did they take carbon from the air and use sunlight and water to somehow store energy? You know, how do we know that a squared plus b squared is equal to c squared?

People pondered this for sometimes decades, hundreds of years, and you have the answers. And, and it's all there, and you just have to decode it a little bit. It's like you're Harry Potter, like someone figured out all this stuff, and I can learn this magic without having to have gone through all of that and maybe one day push the frontier. So I, I, Dishonest Abe, I think, uh, I think it's just, you know, if you look at it the right way, it's an incredibly magical and, and it could be a source of emotional energy, a learning versus a drain on emotional energy.

So you see, maybe we have time for one more question, and you see the science enthusiast says, my sister is struggling with fractions. I want to teach her; how can I teach her in a way that she likes? So I think the number one thing—so if she's struggling with fractions, I would go to Khan Academy section on fractions. You can search on our page; you can even actually go to arithmetic, the whole arithmetic course on Khan Academy. There's a whole unit on fractions, and I would start at the beginning of that unit, and I would have her work on that material while you were sitting next to her.

Don't answer the questions for her; you can give her a little, little pushes every now and then, little nudges if she's getting a little demotivated or she needs a little bit of a reminder or just to say, well, read the question again. What are they really asking? And see how she's doing. If you think her question, her problem is really in fractions, then try to just answer any questions she might have. But always push her; she has a question, say, watch the video first. Make sure you know, let her build that sense of agency so that she can learn to learn, and you're there to support her.

But if the video isn't properly explaining it or it's just not resonating with her, the hints to each of the exercise items are not resonating with her, then it's a great time for say, okay, well think about it like this. But I think the hardest thing when you're doing it live is the patience, and I say that because people say I sound very patient in the videos. Hopefully, I do. But, you know, sometimes when it's, you know, when I'm with my kids sometimes, and I feel like I'm, you know, I, I think their brain is drifting; they're probably getting frustrated with me because they're thinking, dad's saying the same thing over and over again; it's not making progress.

So respect, you know, appreciate that she is trying, that she's not just drifting, and she's not listening to you and just trying to be as patient as possible. I think that's where tutoring sessions oftentimes break down. The tutor gets frustrated; the student gets frustrated, and everyone wants to walk away. So have that patience, keep motivating her, and I think little by little, I saw this with Nadia back in the day in 2004 when I was tutoring her.

Um, as long as you keep that regularity, I think you are going to see a lot of progress. If you see that even at the earliest fractions thing, so even, you know, adding two-thirds to one-third, somehow she has some difficulties with things like that, it might be from gaps that are coming earlier in her learning journey and some of the more, uh, basic arithmetic. So that's another thing that you might want to do is have her start earlier and build some confidence. That's one thing we've been recommending on the schedules is having students maybe even start as early as kindergarten. For example, your sister, I’m guessing she's a third or fourth-grade student, start around kindergarten, and she'll get through that super fast.

She might learn a thing or two; uh, probably it'll take her half an hour, an hour to get through kindergarten, then first grade might take her an hour. It'll build confidence; she'll see that, okay, she can do this. Then second grade, then third grade. If she gets to third grade, she's going to start hitting, uh, her zone of proximal development, her learning edge, so to speak. And, but she'll know that she's approaching it with a very strong foundation and the more that you can be around there for her, uh, the better. And motivate her.

So I will, I think that's all for today, especially with all of the technical difficulty. Thanks everyone for being part of this. Uh, this is one of the things that keeps me, um, happy in this time of what we call here in the the U.S. social distancing to hopefully stop the spread of this virus. But I really enjoy connecting with all of you. I hope that this provides some form of connection in this time of social distancing for all of, uh, all of you as well.

And, um, stay tuned. I'm going to do this every day so that we feel together. We want to support you not only on your learning journeys but just as human beings. This is something, you know, one day someone will do Khan Academy videos about this time in history, uh, because it's, I think it's, it's pretty interesting. So I will leave y’all, and I'll see you tomorrow.