Ask me anything with Sal Khan: April 16 | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone! Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our daily homeroom livestream. The whole goal of this is for all of us to stay connected during times of school closures. Depending on the day, this is a time for all of y'all to ask questions of myself, other guests, or team members we might have at Khan Academy. It might be about navigating school, the school closures, how to learn a subject, or frankly whatever y'all want to ask about. So feel free, if you're on YouTube, Facebook, or some other social media channel, start asking questions in the message boards. We have team members who are looking at those questions and then surfacing them to me on a little dock that I have on the screen right over here.

I also have my colleague Dan, who's going to be jumping in and help surface questions and other interesting things that y'all might pose. Hey Dan! Just as a reminder, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. We have a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. As you could imagine, we could have never foreseen this COVID-19 crisis and the school closures, but we think it's our duty, given what we've been building over the last decade and the resources we have available, to really try to step up as much as we can in this time.

So we've been trying to put all of the resources that we have from pre-K all the way through high school and college together so it can be coherent for parents, teachers, and students. We've been putting together learning plans, schedules, and webinars for all of you, and we've been doing this livestream. We are funded by philanthropic donations from folks like yourself, and that's becoming increasingly focal to telling folks that we've been running at a deficit even before the crisis hit. Our costs are going up, and there's more that we want to do because of the crisis, so that we can accelerate, hopefully over the course of the summer and into coming back to school.

So if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. I want to give a special shout-out to, in the last several weeks, Bank of America, followed by AT&T, Google.org, and Novartis. We need more help! If you're representing a corporation, please think about donating to Khan Academy in this time. Obviously, people are thinking about the virus and mental health, and they're thinking about the economy, but how do we keep kids learning, especially the kids most in need who might not have access to other supports? I think is a really, really key question, and we want to help where we can.

So with that, I'm happy to start answering some questions that we have here. So, I see the first question I have, and I have to say, Susana Garcia Dominguez, you are a regular at asking questions—good questions! These are the ones surfaced—there are no bad questions. But from YouTube, Susana asks, "Hi Sal, what was your last most memorable meal? Please describe that experience."

It's an interesting question! My most memorable, or rather my last most memorable meal—you know what it was? It was Thanksgiving, like four or five years ago. I had the idea to not eat for too fast before Thanksgiving. I have to say, when you fast for… I think I had fasted for 36 hours—kids, don't do this at home—consult your doctor and things like that—but I find every now and then to just do a water fast. So I was drinking water; it kind of gets your sensory acuity up. Going into that Thanksgiving, I had a cheesecake, and it was the best cheesecake I ever had. I think it was a good cheesecake, and I hadn't eaten for a long period of time. So yeah, that was the most memorable meal. Anyway, no dietary advice—please don't go fast without medical supervision! A standard disclaimer.

So we wanted to do something a little bit different today. We get a lot of amazing questions on this forum, but we also get amazing posts on social media, so we thought we'd share a few with our audience today. The first one is from a YouTube comment from Purple Sing. They say—or he says, "I give a roll of toilet paper to Sal Khan and Dan, thank you!" Karp, all I hope one day we got a chance to, I guess, share toilet paper.

That's a little… yeah, actually, I've been getting a lot of toilet paper offers lately, which I think is like the new gold, I guess! And I just want to let everyone know that, you know, my family—we consider ourselves fortunate. We have, I think, at least a solid two-week supply of toilet paper at home. So, we're doing good—no need to worry about that.

Great! And inside we have a question on YouTube from Russia Idris: "How many hours should an eighth grader study a day?"

How many hours should an eighth grader study a day? So, I think there's kind of a minimum. I think in anything, if you want to get better at it, it's good to build a habit to do a little bit every day. And so I would say if you're an eighth grader, especially in times of school closures, if you could put in even a solid, focused 30 minutes in each of the subjects that you want to make solid progress in, you're going to be in great shape when you go back to school in the fall.

So I would put in at least 30 minutes a day on Khan Academy. You could take a break on weekends, but Monday through Friday, try to put at least 30 minutes a day on Khan Academy. I would do at least 30 minutes, and on math, I would do 30 minutes a day of reading of some form. Find some books that are at your level that you really enjoy reading and read them for at least 30 minutes a day—hopefully longer than that, if you really enjoy the book.

I would do at least 30 minutes a day of trying to write. It might be a little bit longer; it could be as simple as journaling. It could be, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world today, right? Opinion pieces—create a blog, share it with friends and family. I think if you do those three things, you're going to be in decent shape.

Then if you feel like you have that under control and you're able to do other things, like go outside and run and spend time with your family and take on some fun projects that you've always wanted to do, then you could layer on a little bit more. You could maybe do another 30 minutes a day of science, and Khan Academy has a lot of resources there. We don't have as much as we like at the middle school level yet, but if you are looking to keep going, I think you could definitely look at some of the beginning units of our biology, high school biology, high school chemistry, and even some of the things on things like Newton's laws and physics. You can start getting a leg up!

So I would say that that would be a good—if you're able to do it consistently, that would be a good amount of learning on a daily basis. Now, obviously, you could do more, but I would just say, you know, that's great. But just don't stress yourself out! This is a time where we should make sure that we're taking care of ourselves and having time to run outside, play, and spend time with family as well.

So there's a good question from YouTube. Elliot H, who refers to me as Dumbledore, Sal, and I enjoy that! That was part of my motivation for growing a beard—that hopefully someone would one day see the resemblance. When is it better to innovate through business—examples: Apple, Google, or Tesla—rather than through philanthropy—examples: Khan Academy, Wikipedia? You judge that a free world-class education would be better achieved philanthropically. What similar meaningful innovations happen better through business?

That is a very, very good question, Elliot. So the way I think about it, I do believe, generally speaking, in market forces and capitalism. So I think, generally, free enterprise and, I guess you could say, the profit motive, when markets function well, can create a lot of innovation. Some of those things that, you know, the Googles of the world, the Teslas, the Apples—you can think of many other examples where people deployed capital in a place where they thought that they could create something of value to other people. People were willing to pay for that value and that it created a return on the capital and more money to invest in that effort. So that's great, and I actually think, rightly, that is most of our economy.

But I think there are segments of our economy where either the markets, for some reason, aren't working well. There are many reasons why markets sometimes don't work well. There might be externalities to what the market is capturing that aren't captured in the price. People think about some of those things in terms of pollution and things like that.

There are markets where there isn't transport information. There are markets where the buyers, the sellers, and the beneficiaries are different people, so you don't get that same accountability that you would have in a traditional marketplace. There are situations where the market might work, but what it does is it leads to outcomes that aren't consistent with our values. I would say the two areas where it's not a wholesale—there's definitely a lot of space for profits in education and in healthcare, but those are the two areas where I would say markets sometimes get a little bit fall into that gray area. You know, I think we as a society have a value system that if someone wants to learn, they should be able to learn regardless of their parents' income or what neighborhood they grow up in. If someone is bleeding or dying, we should treat them first before thinking about their ability to pay. I think those are, you know, two universal values that we all have, and sometimes markets aren't able to make that happen.

Now, some would argue that that's the role of government—that government can play those roles. But where I see the philanthropic sector being valuable is that gap. Sometimes government is a little bit slow to move into something; they maybe cannot innovate as fast.

And then, on the for-profit side, they can innovate fast, but sometimes the motivations aren't completely in line with the value system. And so that's where I think the philanthropic sector is really valuable. And, you know, Khan Academy, in theory, could have been a for-profit company. In fact, in the early days, some of the first folks I talked to were investors. They were like, "Hey, we could make this a real thing!" But, you know, the conversations around how do you monetize it—oh, we could give this stuff for free, but then we would have to charge for that stuff—that felt a little bit inconsistent with at least what I was hoping Khan Academy could become.

When I looked through the world and history of institutions that had been able to serve many millions or hundreds of millions or billions of people and had been able to do it over generations—not just that first 20 or 30 years where you might have that founding team that wants to operate in a certain way, but over many, many generations—it's consistently its nonprofits. You know, I think even some of the great for-profits that we know today, history would tell us that in 30 or 40 or 50 years, they'll probably be very, very different organizations than they are right now.

While many of the not-for-profits have a little bit more of a strong narrative over multiple generations. It was delusional when I was someone operating out of a walk-in closet, but I do hope increasingly—and I'm more open about it—that Khan Academy goes well beyond me and that in a hundred years folks around the planet are like, "Of course access to a free world-class education for anyone anywhere is there!" And who knows what kind of education that looks like then? It might be, you know, some type of virtual reality experience. It might be a pill you take. Who knows? But that was the thinking.

So we have a question on YouTube from teacher Schendel Red Queen of Wonderland. She asked, "Mr. Khan, do you have any advice for leadership? I've been trying to host Zoom meetings with my classes, and I find it really difficult to do so."

So Schendel, I'm assuming when you say you've been trying to advice for leadership with your classes, I'm assuming you're talking about like as kind of teaching or teaching virtually. Although, you know, I could give my two cents on leadership generally, although I'm sure many of the Khan Academy team members might roll their eyes—I'm sure they have a better sense of how effective my leadership is or not!

But, you know, if you're teaching virtually—and I have been working with several teachers here, and I've been doing a few myself, volunteering, trying to teach virtually—you know, it actually takes me back to 2004 when I was tutoring my cousins. And we didn't have Zoom back then; we didn't have Google Hangouts back then, but I was trying to use the phone, and we had some tablet software that we could see each other's writing.

What I found is the more virtual it is, the more that you have to really drive interaction. So I've run a couple of sessions with along with some teachers in a school district out here in California, and what we are all trying to do is put up a problem—just an example problem. It doesn't have to be a super structured lesson, but you put up an example problem—it could just be on a whiteboard, or if you have a digital tablet, you can share your screen—and then you say, "Okay, who has some ideas on the first step?" And so the more, you know, and then even cold call people, like, "Hey Michael, what do you think is the next step?"

I think the more that you can get that exchange, the better, and the more engaging it's going to be, especially if you're doing it on a modality like Zoom. You know, what I say is, if it's just me lecturing the whole time, that's no different than a video, so there's no reason to be on Zoom. You can just record that as a video and make it more available.

So that's my general advice. Leadership advice broadly—I'm on a journey myself to learn a lot there, but I'm a big believer that the more that you can be authentic, be your true self, the more that you can— you know, I think sometimes people say, "Oh, I have to be careful what I need to say because it might come off the wrong way."

And so therefore, I can't be authentic. But what I found is you got to be careful what you think. If you're thinking good thoughts—if you're thinking thoughts that would pass, let's call it the New York Times test, which is if your thoughts were published in the New York Times, would it be a good thing or a bad thing? If you can get your mind to the point of like you're generally thinking good thoughts, you're thinking of what is best for others.

Look, we all have thoughts every now and then that we're not proud of; I've had my share of what isn't. You have a little process; you're like, "No Sal, that's not a good thought." That's not... you know, that was a petty thought, or that was a thought that was driven by your ego. And what's best for other folks, if you can get good at that, then that I think that liberates you to be very authentic with your leadership because you are thinking things that you're not ashamed of.

You know, someone I met once said, "The best way to look like you care about people is to actually care about people!" So that's a little bit of a hack in life. So I would say, yeah, I would say there's that, and, you know, always being able to balance that tension between what your heart tells you is right and what your head tells you is a reasonable approach to being able to get there.

You know, throughout the last 10-12 years of this Khan Academy journey, we've always had these debates inside of the organization of like, "Okay, we know that there's that mountain someplace that we want to get to the top of—that's a world in which literally billions of people have access to a free world-class education."

Now there's a fog; we don't know exactly how to get there, and we'll just try to follow the gradient and work our way through that fog to the top of that mountain. We're going to make mistakes, but you really have to do is say, okay, sometimes your heart might make you want to go directly for that mountain, but there might be a pit in between so you're not going to be able to get to the mountain.

So your head has to say, "No, we got to go 100 meters to the right and cross that bridge over there." The other thing I would say is, you know, it's a lot like a chess game. A good chess player doesn't know exactly how they're going to win the game in the end, but they are definitely setting up their board so that they have as much optionality as possible and they have as much protection as possible.

So I say leadership, or strategy generally, that's a good way to think about it. You're never going to have the whole thing figured out, but never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox. I don't know if that's useful at all.

So Sal, you've been a wonderful teaching role model for folks, and you've actually created wonderful role models as well. So I wanted to share this tweeted video from Chanita731, and the tweet says, "My daughter is making her own videos using Mr. Khan's voice while doing her Kinder math packet. So thanks for the fun practice and instruction! Felipe, enjoy the video!"

Please take a look at this. So I wanted to thank all the people who are submitting and tweeting, and please send your messages. We continue to enjoy them and share them. Well, I think you know my earlier comment about Khan Academy being a multi-generational institution—I think we found my replacement! Surprise! She's got the colors down! See that? She's making us pause the video and try to enter it ourselves.

You know, I think Chanita's on to something! So yeah, I don't be surprised if in a few years we see more videos from her—that's great! And from YouTube, I see we have a question from Angel Chopra, who asks, "What courses would you recommend to take as an eighth grader who wants to take more advanced classes that will push me?"

Yeah, I would say, you know, there was a previous question about how much an eighth grader could study, etc. I mean, you know, math is foundational for a lot of things, so I would keep going on Khan Academy as far as you can go. If you're comfortable with seventh/eighth grade, go on to algebra, go on to algebra 2, go on to geometry—that's going to give you a good foundation.

If you're really looking to push yourself, you can start going into a lot of high school sciences—biology and chemistry. You probably already have enough math to tackle at least most of those subjects, at least at the kind of first-year high school level. And then physics—you know, once you've learned the basics of a little bit, and this is probably beyond where you are now if you're in middle school, although who knows? But once you get the basics of quadratics and some of the basics of trigonometry, you can also think about going into physics.

On the humanity side, we have a lot of content on civics and American history and world history. I think especially if you're looking to kind of push yourself, you're probably already ready for that material. Our official SAT practice actually could be interesting as well. That's math, reading, and writing.

What a lot of folks don't realize, you know, people normally take the SAT in their junior or senior years of high school, but a lot of that content is essentially at a middle school level! Actually, the highest math on the SAT is some of the more basic concepts from algebra 2, which a lot of folks cover in tenth grade. But most of the math on the SAT is stuff that you will see in eighth or ninth grade, and if you're trying to get ahead, you're probably going to see that a little bit earlier.

So that would be my best advice there! So let's see other questions I see here on YouTube—Levy Corp EO says, "What was the last fun thing you have done with your children?"

We, we do a lot of silly dancing! I know a lot of y'all are thinking, "Sal, there's no way you dance silly—you must dance incredibly well!" But I dance a little silly sometimes. So we do a lot of that, and yeah, that was the last fun thing we did. I mean, it was kind of a dance hybrid with wrestling on the carpet last night! I think that was the most recent fun thing we did.

Let's see, Enginie Boma Derek Guevara says, "What is your favorite book?" Well, I'll give several favorite books—I’ll give some books that play into my stereotype because I've talked to them a lot. I've talked a lot about science fiction and whether benevolent aliens are leveraging Khan Academy to prepare humanity for first contact.

In that stereotypical Sal, the books that I really have enjoyed are things like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. I've often talked about that series as being something of an inspiration for Khan Academy; it takes place in the future where someone is trying to collect the world's knowledge to shorten a galactic dark age by thousands of years. I've always enjoyed "Diamond Age." It gets a little edgy; it's a little bit cyberpunk, but I’ve liked the idea—the story is not necessarily my favorite, but I’ve liked the message, which is by giving these orphans who live on barges in some dopey future access to a free world-class education online, they're able to take over the world.

I really like "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." I mean, I could go through all my favorite science fiction books—"Childhood's End," Arthur C. Clarke's "2001." Those are all incredible books.

Okay, you know the general theme is about what could humanity become, either for better or for worse. I think books that people might not expect me to enjoy—I think my favorite, "Pride and Prejudice," is definitely one of my all-time favorite books. I'm a big Mark Twain fan as well—most of his books—but something about "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" I really enjoyed because, once again, it's about someone who gets transported from the Industrial Revolution to King Arthur's Court, and by educating a new generation of what would be kind of medieval children, they're able to help elevate what goes on.

And here we see a list of books that children will not want to put down. So if you look at those, there's a ton of other books that I'm sure I'm forgetting that I really, really enjoy reading.

So let us start reading this! This is a reading list that the staff put together categorized by different age groups. So these are lists from the staff, and recommendations from the staff are available in—correct me if I'm wrong—from our Learn from our schedules, and we have the, you know, "Keep Learning at Khan Academy" at org. If people go there, dig around a little bit, you should find all of these types of resources that we're talking about.

So let’s see, there are other subversive... We have from YouTube Sattvic Agarwal says, "Hey Sal, how do you learn so many subjects and such a great depth? What are your secrets of studying anything?"

So the secret is to enjoy it! When you enjoy it, and you're viewing yourself—you're not viewing yourself as like, "Oh, I gotta memorize this thing for tomorrow's test!" so that I don't feel… if you do it that way, nothing is pleasurable. If you do it that way! But if you say, "Wow, there's knowledge that for the last thousands of years humanity has been collecting, and I have access to it!"

And I get to ponder the connections between knowledge. You know, for example, sometimes things like textbooks, they give you the knowledge, but they don't connect the dots with things you already know. And so I think it's actually a fun exercise to ponder.

And actually, that's one of my favorite parts of my job now—if I'm trying to teach organic chemistry, to say, "Hmm, so how does this mechanism connect to what we learned before?" Or how does it… are there some general themes here that the book is saying or not saying?

And what you find is when you ponder it for a little bit and just ask people questions, some of those connections form. You get to be a little bit of a detective! So yeah, I mean, I view almost everything on Khan Academy and beyond as, look, we're trying to understand this mystery that we find ourselves in called life and the universe.

As human beings, I don't think there's anything more fulfilling than trying to make sense of that. And yes, sometimes some of the ways we get exposed to some of these—the mysteries, whether it’s in textbooks or other ways, might be a little bit cryptic. But that's fun too!

You know, when you watch the protagonist in a movie and they come up to some hieroglyphics, they don't just say, "Oh, this is hard to read! I'm going to give up and go do something else!" I'm like, "This is exciting! This is an adventure!"

You know, when Harry Potter discovers a spellbook, it's not like they just give up; they're like, "How do we read this thing? How does this connect to other things?" So I kind of view learning that way. And I have found, you know, a lot of folks say, "Oh, I'm a math person" or "I'm a humanities person."

I actually think if you stereotype yourself in that way, you're doing yourself an injustice! And I've been guilty of it myself. Early in my life, I didn't view myself as someone who really enjoyed writing, but now I do. The way that I kind of made that transition is to realize that when I was writing just to try to impress someone else, just to try to get a grade, I wasn't enjoying it that much.

But when I realized that writing is really just a way to get my point across, to communicate something, or to express my imagination, then all of a sudden it became super exciting! And it becomes one of my favorite activities—writing or communicating in other ways.

So I think it's all about a mindset to realize that very few people are either math people or writing people or humanities people. Once you're used to learning any subject, you can apply that same muscle to almost everything else and see the beauty in it.

So there’s Scott Yang saying he wants us to extend our live streams to an hour each. Well, that's tempting! As you can imagine, I am actually an introverted person, but obviously, once y'all get me on my soapbox, I do keep going. But I think for everyone's sustainability, we'll try to keep the homerooms as close to 30-40 minutes as possible.

But every now and then we might— we're lining up some guests over the next few weeks, and then I think if we’ll try to talk to them as long as we can, we can keep them going.

So let's see, there are other questions here from YouTube. Nikhil Govan wants to know, "Who's your favorite superhero?"

So, not having thought about it more than the last five seconds, you know, I've had an affinity to, you know, I think Batman is interesting because he kind of has a growth mindset about things. He’s not born with any innate ability, but he leverages the resources he does have. And I guess he, well, he was born with resources, according to the Batman legend. But he focuses on improving himself and becoming much stronger than whatever innate abilities he might have.

There's something very powerful about that! But I'm sure I'm forgetting many other superheroes that are quite compelling!

So we've done, Janie asking another question: "What is some advice you would give to students who are stressed about the situation?"

So on Janie, I mean the best thing to realize is, first of all, you're not alone! That's helped me sometimes, where I started getting a little worried about certain family members who might be living by themselves or, you know, they have a cough all of a sudden. And I'm like, "Oh no! Do they have COVID? Is that…?"

You know, we're all in this together! All you can do in life generally—to quote "Frozen 1" and "Frozen 2"—is, if you can't control a situation, kind of let it go! Don't try to think too much about it if it's out of your sphere of control.

And of the things that are in your sphere of control, do the next right thing, and then the chips fall where they do. You know, in Vedic philosophy, there's this notion of action—there's rajasic action where you're focused on the outcome, and then there's sattvic action, which is in Sanskrit, it's truthful action, which is you’re doing it just because it's the right thing to do, regardless of what the outcome is.

I think a lot of our stress in life, a lot of our anxiety in life, a lot of our suffering in life happens because we get attached to the outcome. “Oh, that thing has to happen, and then now what if it doesn't happen?” Then you start procrastinating, you get stressed, you get anxious about it! But if you just say, "Look, none of us have control over the universe, over this world. All we can do is just the next right thing."

And feel good about that! So we are at time—sorry Scott, we’re not going to go over today! Although, maybe in the future! But these were great questions! I really enjoyed.

You know, and Dan, thanks for bringing in some of this. This is our first time—every day—we're trying a few new bells and whistles. Felipe's in the background figuring out new ways that we can leverage this tool that we're doing to livestream. But I really enjoy this, and thanks for everyone for joining! This is a way for all of us to stay connected.

And just as a reminder, we are a not-for-profit, and if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. Thanks, everyone!