Ask me anything with Sal Khan: May 8 | Homeroom with Sal

• Hey everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our daily homeroom live stream. If it's your first time and are wondering what is this? This is a live stream that we started doing every day since school closure started happening 'cause we realize as a not for profit with a mission of free world class education for anyone anywhere, we have a role to step up. It's our duty to step up to support teachers, parents, and students as we all navigate through this crisis. And so we've been trying to put as many supports out as possible: teacher webinars, parent webinars, (mumbles) class schedules, frameworks for learning plans for students, and also this homeroom. And this is a way to stay connected in times of social distancing and to just talk about interesting things. Many of which might be related to the crisis or whatever else is on folks' mind.

I do like to remind folks as I just did, that we are not for profit and we can only exist through philanthropic donations. So if you're in a position to do so please think about donating, we were running at a deficit even before the crisis and now we're seeing about two and a half to three times the traffic we normally see, and you could imagine that plus all of the other programs and content we're trying to accelerate are only making our costs go up higher. I do wanna give a special thanks to several corporate partners that stepped up over the last couple of weeks when they realized how big the need was to support everyone on the education front for COVID. Special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, Fastly, AT&T and Novartis. They've made a huge difference, but we still are running at a deficit. So any more help from either corporations or individuals is very, very much appreciated.

So with that we'll get into the heart of this live stream and sometimes we have guests and sometimes we don't or I guess you could say today I am the guest. And so we could treat this livestream as really just a ask Sal anything, so you can get on the Facebook and YouTube message boards and literally ask me anything and I have team members that are helping me surface interesting questions. But we also said that, given that this is the end of Teacher Appreciation Week that we wanna make sure teachers feel supported especially as they're all trying to navigate this world of distance learning or making videos. And so I'm also happy to answer questions for teachers who are wondering what are tips we might have for making content, for making videos and what are the tools we have? So feel free to put those questions in.

I already have a question from Facebook. Jay is asking, "I must admit that I would be happy if I just knew the name of the tablet that Sal uses to present. That is the biggest challenge when teaching remotely. I cannot tell you how many times teachers have said, if only we had tablets like Sal uses." All right, I will tell you the name of the tablet I actually have it right over here, and I'm not normally about product endorsement. So I'm not sure if this is the best tablet out there or what but it's definitely met my needs. So let's see this is the Intuos Pro Medium Pen Tablet. I think it costs 100 or $200, it looks like this, and it will come with a pen that... Whoops I'm pressing buttons on it, I hope (mumbles)... It comes with a pen that looks like this. This camera is kind of a reverse mode. So there you go. So that is the tablet and I think the cost really increases as you go from the small, to the medium, to the large. For many years at Khan Academy, I had the small version, which was I think was $70, and you can go pretty far with that. So yeah hopefully that is useful and obviously this is useful. Tablets like this are useful for making Khan Academy style videos.

And I actually use a tablet like that with a pen and I use Camtasia to record my screen and this is the microphone that I have. This is a Samson... And once again, I'm sure there's other good microphones let's see, Samson CO3U. I just realized it wouldn't make do much good if I'm reading the model number when my mouth is on the other side of the microphone. But just with that and Camtasia you can make exactly the types of videos I make. And obviously, this is useful for all of y'all who are also doing live, Zoom or Google Hangout type sessions as well 'cause you can share your screen and then use your art program. Oh, and I use SketchBook Pro for the art program, but you could use others. I like to just use something that's quite responsive. Some of the art programs that get super fancy there's a little bit of a lag and that bothers me. So that's what I try to do, and I've been working with some teachers running some live sessions as well. And so I use the exact same tools for that where I can share my screen and share the art program.

I will say a low tech hack for the live sessions, and actually in theory you could do this for your videos as well, is those small whiteboards that we have students do their problem on, you can literally just have one of those and write with a marker. I've actually found that to be reasonably good especially for the kind of the live sessions when you're trying to work with students.

So from YouTube, Matthew Masters asks, "Sal, do you think there will always be a place for classroom learning or will online learning eventually become the standard?" Simple answer is yes, I think there will always be a place for classroom learning, or I hope there will always be a place for classroom learning. Especially for students who haven't reached adulthood. So I would say for K through 12 for sure, because in theory yes students could learn a lot of the academic skills potentially on their own time and pace, on things like Khan Academy, and or you can have Zoom sessions and you can have this kind of distance type of learning, but that's only part of what really makes the school experience powerful.

There is a whole other level of having incredible teacher mentors, being able to form bonds with them, being able to do extracurricular activities, all of the socialization that goes on in school, knowing how to work in groups, knowing when to communicate, when not to communicate, know how to get your point across. These are all super important skills that you'll never see on any standardized test, but we all know that they're very, very important for overall life and success. So, I've always said, if I had to pick between an amazing teacher and amazing technology I would pick the amazing teacher every time and I would prefer to have that amazing teacher in person, so we should definitely strive for that. And I think I would want it for my own children and frankly all children.

And so I think the interesting question over the COVID crisis is, how do we get as close to that as possible given the constraints that we have of social distancing? And then longer term, hopefully when we get out of this crisis sooner than later. How do we leverage the best of both worlds? So I think hopefully we're gonna go back to school, kids are gonna get that socialization, they're gonna be back in those classrooms with their amazing teachers, but then everyone has built a stronger muscle for sometimes maybe the distance learning does work maybe over summers, maybe over breaks, maybe after school. It doesn't have to just be between the teachers and the students, it could be older students and younger students or it could be the peers working together, so I think that would be a good takeaway from this whole process.

I think higher education, there are some real questions. I loved my college experience, I loved sitting in the dorm and pontificating about philosophical questions and I met my wife and many of my best friends in college. So I definitely think that was a very valuable experience, but there's a lot of students who, there's huge trade offs. They need to help support their families, they might want you to start making money while they're in college, and so I think in cases like that when just you have more of adult learners, I think there will always be a place for the in person college experience. But I can imagine some adult learners decide that that's not for them and that they could still get their college degree and learn all the material, but do it at their own time and pace and be a little bit more flexible because maybe they hold a job or they have to support their family and things like that.

So, my personal view is I hope we only double down on the physical experience but leverage some of the tools we're all exploring with a little bit more as well. So from Facebook, Jaya Gupta asks, "How can I become a good teacher? Because I'm teaching my students, but some students are not taking it seriously. Please tell me, dear sir, what to do?" Jaya, I won't pretend like I have all of the answers. And I in the Khan Academy journey I've done a certain flavor of teaching, but there's a whole other dimension of teaching which you and many other amazing teachers are doing on a day to day basis that I think I can learn a ton from y'all versus the other way around.

My best advice, though, is try to make it as interactive as possible, and when you do that think about it. And this actually goes to the earlier question about in person versus digital. I think there'll always be a place for in person, but we should always be conscientious of what maybe digital, or online, or software, or videos could do. So, if you're just giving a lecture for 10 minutes straight in theory, that could happen over a video. And so if that could happen over video then maybe it should happen over video, but then that liberates you to do something else. And it's not like all of a sudden there's nothing to do, you could have a Socratic dialogue, you could have a simulation, you could have a project, you could put a problem up on the board that's a little bit more challenging and have the students struggle with it a little bit. Have them break into groups and try to come up with their own answers, and then present it and you're walking around nudging them, giving them a little hint for the ones that get stuck.

So I think there's a huge opportunity for that classroom to just interact with more with each other. Those students that you might be describing whose eyes are glazed over a little bit, I generally think if you told that student, "Hey, pair up with the person next to you or form a group of three or four, here's a puzzle, here's an interesting challenge, here's a philosophical question." To ponder, their eyes will light up and in a lot of ways it can take a little bit of the burden off of you. I've definitely sat in front of a classroom of students and tried to teach them and you're like, "What are they thinking? They're staring at me, I have to be on for the entire 40, 50 minutes." It's incredibly draining both physically and emotionally, and as soon as you kind of get out of that kinda being the person on the stage so to speak and then you're kind of with the students and you're tackling something with them together.

It actually allows you to not have to feel as on, which I've actually personally found good. People might be surprised to hear, I'm very much an introvert I can pretend to be an extrovert (laughs) like I do on this live stream, but I recharge my energy when I'm having one on one conversations with people, when I'm able to go a little bit deeper, when I have a little bit more quiet time. And so for me, it's incredibly draining to be on for long periods of time, but it's very energizing if I can sit next to a student and work with them that way. So those are my tips: make it as interactive as possible, have the students help each other, and things like Socratic dialogue, simulations, games, challenging, make it active. I think would move everything in the right direction.

So from Facebook, Alicia Moody says, "The hardest part of this as a math teacher is supporting my most struggling students who are already behind. I teach high schoolers, some of whom have critical thinking skills closer to fourth to sixth grade. What are your favorite supports for students struggling with connecting the abstractions of algebra with real life when they don't have much foundational number sense, any online games or basics focused activities targeted towards teens?"

Alicia or Alicia, you're asking a central question. And this is something we think a lot about at Khan Academy because you've probably heard me talk about it, and the traditional model kids keep moving forward, they get to C on one test, a D on another, that 20% that 30% gap, those things accumulate and then they get to your classroom, and as you mentioned they're kind of operating at a... At least they're ready for the math at a fourth through sixth grade level.

So there's a couple things we've done, we've seen and really this is learning from other teachers, we've seen teachers, especially teachers who are serving students who might be many grade levels behind who haven't maybe had gotten all the supports they might need to start them at the beginning. So, I'll tell you what you could do today and then I'll tell you what I hope you can do in about two months, 'cause we're working on some things that I think will help solve this problem.

So today, I would actually have those students start on our arithmetic course and just go from the beginning, from one plus one straight through the arithmetic course. And they can use course challenges and unit test to accelerate. So what I would suggest is have those students start with the course challenge on the arithmetic course, and then the stuff they got right, that's great, and then the stuff they got wrong they can go into those units and remediate. And if they're getting 70, 80% on the course challenge they should keep taking it, and then they'll get to be able to show the mastery on those skills, and then they can go back and get mastery on the things that they need to fill in those gaps.

And then they should do the same thing with our pre algebra course, and if they do that it's kind of going slow to go fast, they're gonna have a very strong foundation, they're actually gonna build a lot of their confidence and you're gonna have a lot more fluency, and they're gonna be ready for your algebra class. A lot of times when a student in an algebra class says, "Hey, teacher, when am I gonna need this in life?" I think they might be asking when are they gonna need it, but it also might be a defense mechanism. In some ways they're trying to protect their self-esteem that this doesn't matter, because they're lost, they have a gap in decimals, they have a gap in negative numbers, and all of a sudden there's an equation on the board that has negative numbers and decimals and even if they're aware that they have those gaps they might be embarrassed 'cause they know it was fourth or fifth grade material.

And so I think the best way to short circuit that, "Hey teacher when am I gonna need to know this?" is by making sure kids have that fluency and that strong foundation from the beginning and they have as few gaps as possible. And the example I show is that when you're in PE class, when I was in ninth grade and I wasn't the strongest basketball player, but I didn't ask the coach, "Hey coach, when am I going to have to throw an orange round ball into a 10 foot hoop in life, when do I need to know this?" And the reason why I didn't ask that is even though I wasn't the best player I was able to engage, it was interactive to the previous question, and I was enjoying myself.

And so I'm a big believer that if most students are able to fill in their gaps and feel like they can engage all of a sudden they actually will get excited about that topic. Now, a very good answer when someone says, "When will I have to use this?" Sometimes the teacher, we sometimes hem and haw and say, "Well, if you become an engineer you'll..." And then the student goes, "Well, I'm not gonna be an engineer." "Well, if you're going into finance." "Well, I'm not gonna go into finance." "Well, if you go into medicine or medical research." "Well, I'm not." And you know... "Well, if you become a lawyer you need these critical thinking skills." And you can imagine it becomes this kind of duel (laughs) between the student and the teacher.

I find just tell them straight up, the world is gonna evaluate you by this and it look, you can believe me or not, but these critical thinking skills are going to be super valuable. There was one of the early funders of Khan Academy he ran a large restaurant chain, and he told me that he divides his employees by folks who understand algebra and folks who do not understand algebra. And that doesn't mean that you need to do a lot of deep algebra if you're the manager of a restaurant, or if you're the district manager, or if you're the head of marketing, but what that told me and it makes a lot of sense is, for him the folks who knew algebra had the critical thinking skills to tackle complex things, simplify them deductively, make logical deductions about things.

But whenever I tell that story to anyone who is kind of like, "When am I gonna need the algebra?" They're like, "Oh, wow." You know, my future bosses (laughs)... I wanna be... (mumbles) When they divide the world into the people who know algebra and the people who don't know algebra, and the people who know algebra get a lot more opportunity and a lot more income, I wanna be divided into the people who know algebra. And it's also frankly just gonna give you a lot more confidence in life because you know that you're gonna be able to tackle problems and deductively reason about things.

So from Facebook, Jane Molnar asked, "Sal, do you have any tips for working at a distance on Khan Academy with children who cannot yet read, but are too old for the preschool Khan Academy? Thank you." So Jane, you kind of just described my youngest child and what I would encourage is take a second look at Khan Academy kids. And the reason why I'm telling you that is 'cause I recently took a second look at Khan Academy kids. The first version of Khan Academy kids starts with the letters, the numbers, and it kind of went through the pre-K and the K and the kindergarten standards.

And my son had already kinda known that and when I was putting that in front of him he's like, "Oh, this is easy, this is baby stuff." What's cool is in the last month Khan Academy kids just launched the first grade standards, and I'm finding that that is really hitting the sweet spot for my five and a half year old 'cause he's learning to read he's not fluent at reading yet, and it's really hitting exactly where he needs to be and I'm guessing that's where your child might be ready for as well. So go on to Khan Academy kids you can actually change the grade setting for your child, and now there's actually teacher accounts and which you can also access as a parent, where you can go to your account and if you click on your username it'll say become a teacher at Khan, and you can say you're teaching first grade.

And then you can actually assign first grade content to your child as well. So, if your child's account gets turned into a first grade account then he or she will see that first grade content and the system naturally keeps track of where they are, and then makes the recommendations accordingly across math, reading and writing. And then if you're a teacher or a parent you can also direct them to certain activities. You can sample them and then direct them. So I highly take a second look at it 'cause it'll get your child through the basics of reading. So the fact that they're not reading yet, this is definitely going to be useful for them.

So YouTube, from YouTube, Alan Yab says, "Hi Sal, what do you think is better remote learning or in person?" Well, it's not a comparison I think they're good at different things. The ideal is in person, but what matters, you know... Let me put it this way, when you, you know, I remember my in person college classes were 300 people in a lecture hall, or actually, maybe it was a lecture hall that could fit 300 people, 100 people showed up. The professor would kind of give the lecture essentially read the lecture notes that he might have been using for the last 18 years, and there's like 20 people in the front who were paying attention and then there's a group of people someplace in the middle or the back and they're trying to stay up, but they're kind of dozing off a little bit.

That's not a great in person experience, and I could imagine a virtual experience that is at least as good or better than that. If you just have a video of that you're already maybe as good because you can pause and repeat and watch it at two X speed. And then you can imagine a Zoom session or Google Hangout where the professor is asking questions, having a Socratic dialogue, giving you a challenging problem and making you work in groups on that problem before coming back to the professor. So that comparison is a highly not interactive physical experience versus a highly interactive virtual experience, in that world that virtual is better.

Now, the dream scenario is a highly interactive in person experience. So the ideal experience, what I want for my children, what I would want if I'm a student and frankly what I would want as a teacher is everyone's in the room, but it's not just me projecting something that could be a video, it's me facilitating, designing, interactions, dialogue that's gonna form deep meaningful connections with each other. So that's the real value of person to person in person interaction.

Now, distance learning is able to do a few things that you can't do in person, if students are traveling, obviously we're in an emergency situation right now, distance learning can be more flexible around time and space, you can run a class at 9:00 PM and it could include people from all over the country or all over the world. So, it does introduce some flexibility there. I think the ideal is a is getting the best of both so that learning is never bound by time or space, but you are for sure getting that in person socialization, that in person connection, which is gonna be very hard to replace by digital until we get... Until virtual reality probably... We have 50 years of development of virtual reality before we can even get close.

So let's see other questions. Let's see from YouTube. (mumbles) Kumar asks, "What are the books behind your back?" Well, there's all sorts of books behind my back. This is actually the walk in closet where Khan Academy got started 10 years ago. It's a nice walk in closet, it actually has good lighting. I'm looking at it a window there, we have a nice little garden out here. So you shouldn't feel too bad for me that I'm operating out of a closet. Yeah, but there's just a ton of books here. I mean, these are a lot of science fiction books, I've got the foundation series, We've got a little Robert Heinlein here we got, all around Ron Hubbard battlefield Earth.

We've got some Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, up here I have some philosophical and religious books. I've got the Bhagavad Gita there, I've got some passage meditation, I have a translation of the Quran, I have... Let's see, I have a Bible someplace over here, so I've got some of that stuff. Let's see, that's just some nonfiction. My wife's medical textbooks for medical school right over here. So yes, that's the walkthrough through our closet library.

So from YouTube, A asks, "Hey Sal, I just want to know how to organize my time again, I mean because of this pandemic I'm unable to study like I used to before." Well A, what I would say is structure your day as much as possible and try to front load your activity. So what I do is, it's a good habit to just try to wake up every day at the same time, my body's so used to it I don't even need an alarm clock, my eyes just kind of open (mumbles) at 7:00 AM. It might just be because I'm old now, but... (mumbles) And obviously for that to happen go to sleep at a reasonable time. And I try to front load, you know, first thing I try to do things that give me some easy wins. I make my bed, and you might say, "I don't care if my bed's made or not." And I'll say, "First of all, it is very nice at night to get into a well made bed where the sheets are nice and uncreased and all of that." It's a nice thing to have in life, but even more valuable than that it takes you about three, four minutes to make the bed.

And by doing that, you're like, "Okay I got a win, this is gonna be a good day." And then I have a little bit of a ritual in the morning, I like to meditate at least 15 minutes in the morning, maybe 30. That just clears my mind, it gets me a really positive frame of mind, all my stresses seem to kind of melt away when I do that. Then I try to do some physical activity, I mix it up a little bit, I might go for a mile run, I might do some handstand push ups, or go do some pull ups in our garage, I have a little pull up bar there. And then I get ready, and then if I... Well, COVID or not I try to do some of the stuff that takes a little bit more cognitive work for me.

So, videos take a lot of mental processing and so I try to do those in the morning, and I always tell myself, "Hey Sal, you got 40 minutes before your next meeting just try to accomplish this one or two things, and if you accomplish that give yourself a break." And then I keep doing that throughout my day. And then I'm not hard on myself if by the... And I used to be frankly, by the late afternoon if I'm like, "Hey, you know, I got a lot done Sal, why don't you go for why don't you go for a walk, take it easy a little bit." I have to admit, before I had trouble doing that, I would just keep working, working, working, working until I'm just kind of like so brain... My brain is so fried that I can't do anything else, and that's not so healthy and especially in this time of COVID and social distancing.

Another thing that I'm doing, I know this isn't the question you've asked you asked about how to use structure or things like that, but another thing that I've been doing is as much as possible when I have meetings, I try to go on walks. It just gets fresh air and it gets my blood flowing to the brain. So let's see, Ricky R asks, "Hi Sal, any advice on where I can find a checklist of what my child should know before entering fourth grade?"

So, there's two ways to think about it and actually I just... That question makes me realize that I didn't answer an earlier question about how do you remediate students from that teacher who teaches algebra students. So today, what I would do if a student's about to enter fourth grade, I would have them either... I would have them work on our third grade course on Khan Academy, and they can accelerate by taking the course challenges in the unit tests, but if they get through the third grade course completely, they're gonna be very ready for fourth grade. Even better is if they get started on the fourth grade because then when they see it next year in school it'll be kind of they've already been exposed to it, and so they'll have more of a cushion in case some of those concepts are a little bit more difficult to understand.

Now, one thing that I said I was gonna talk about, but I didn't but now I will, is we are actively working on what we're calling foundations courses. So there's gonna be a foundations for fourth grade, there's gonna be a foundations for algebra, a foundations for geometry, a foundation's for everything, for all of our courses, each of our grade levels. And what that's gonna be is a short course that covers all of the prerequisite skills that you need to engage in that grade level, and the reason why that's a little bit different than just going through third grade is that you actually don't need every third grade standard to necessarily engage in fourth grade, and there's actually certain maybe even second and first grade standards that you do need to engage in fourth grade.

And so this is going to be a new course, type of course that we're gonna curate. And you can imagine most fourth graders might know a lot of that material, and so they can take the course challenge and the unit test to accelerate through it, but then the material they don't know they'll be able to fill in those gaps and then there'll be super prepared for fourth grade. So today, use the grade level before on Khan Academy, get your kids to master that and they can accelerate with course challenges in unit test. You might also want to use the arithmetic course, and hopefully in about two months expect to see these foundations courses, which are kind of exactly what students need to get to grade level as quickly as possible or at least to know... At least feel good that they have the foundations to be prepared for grade level as quickly as possible.

So from YouTube Quacker Diesels asks, "Hey Sal, how does the Khan Academy staff coping up with this crisis?" It's great question, Quacker. (mumbles) I would say overall reasonably well, we were already a reasonably distributed workforce. We had about 35, 40% of our team members were not based in our office here in California, and so we always had a... We were always using Google Meet and Zoom for our meetings, and we always, you know, in almost every meeting we almost always had someone who was distributed or remote, and so that was a pretty easy transition for us to stay functional.

We just leaned heavier on those tools. I think the difficult part is people are going through stuff, they're worried about their family members, I haven't heard of any of our team members yet with a family member who's gotten very sick from COVID, yet. Thank goodness, but you can imagine people are worried. I think the biggest drain has been on a lot of parents of young kids. I'm in that bucket, but I'm lucky I have myself, my wife, my mother in law, we're all in the house together. My kids... As teachers have been doing an amazing heroic job at KLS, keeping the kids supported and keeping them learning. So I feel very fortunate there, but we have team members that they might be a single parent, they have a two year old or they have two kids or they might be (mumbles) both them and their partner, but they have two or three young children. You can imagine it's very hard to keep the two or three year old occupied while the same time you're trying to work, so that has definitely caused some stress for folks.

And we've been very clear with our team members that if you can try to do it, you can. This is Khan Academy's moment to step up for the world, but this is also a time that we, you know, some of these team members have done such incredible work over the years, we're not going to, you know... They have to take care of themselves and their families first and foremost, but for the most part I think the Khan Academy team is doing well, thanks for asking.

So from YouTube. If YouTube... Okay, this is a real time math problem. Avinash Carr says, "A popular website requires users to create a password consisting of digits only. If no digit may be repeated and each word, password must be nine digits long. How many passwords are possible?" This is... I was a little worried, I thought you're gonna give me a hard one, but I'm probably jinxing it because I'm probably gonna in real time make a mistake, but no. So if I understand correctly, nine digits, you're not you can't repeat it.

So the way I think about it, think about the leftmost digit. There are 10 points possible digits, so there's 10 possibilities for that leftmost one. And then for the one to the right of that you've already used one of the 10 possible digits, so now you have nine possibilities for the next one, and then you have eight possibilities for the next one, and so it's gonna be 10 times nine times eight times seven and so you're gonna do that all the way down to two. So, if I did that right it's gonna be... Because the last one you're gonna have two digits left because you're using a nine digits long.

And I'm assuming we're going with nine digit passwords, obviously... Well, I can see how it could be trick because you say it has to be at least nine digits long, so you're saying it could also be 10 digits. So if I were to say just a nine digit how many nine digit passwords are there, it would be 10 factorial, and then how many 10 digit passwords are there? Well, for each of those nine digit passwords it would kind of determine what that last digit has to be. So, you would then get an extra password essentially for each of those nine digit passwords. So, I think you would get two times 10 factorial is the answer, and you obviously can't have more than a 10 digit password 'cause you can't reuse the digits. Don't know if I did that, right. But here's to making ourselves vulnerable and answering math questions in real time.

All right. (laughs) Maybe I'll do one more question to redeem myself just in case I made a careless error on that one. From Facebook, and y'all see I'm reading this real time there's no prep in this, so y'all are getting me as I am. So by Enza Charity says, "Hi Sal, how can I study better while waking up early in the morning without getting distracted? How can I also make my studying more interesting while enjoying and understanding?"

With the distraction problem, well there's a couple of things, meditation is great. Your mind just gets a little bit trained to not get scatterbrained I guess is one way to think about it. I think the morning is the best time to do it, try to find a quiet time. And I would... (mumbles) We talked about the Pomodoro Technique in the past, which is, it's called the Pomodoro 'cause it's named after a timer shaped like a pomodoro tomato. But give yourself 20 minutes to say for this 20 minutes I'm gonna focus and do what I need to do, and then I'm gonna give myself a 10 minute break, 20 minutes focus and then give myself a 10 minute break.

And there's actually some research on that, that that tends to ease procrastination can allow you to get a little bit more focused, while also being able to recharge. You know, how did you make study more interesting? What I would say, you have an opportunity right now. During the normal school year you have so many things on your plate and extracurricular activities that you're like, "Oh, I just have to cram this so that I can do my homework or so that I can learn for tomorrow." And so you don't have the time and space to ponder and to really enjoy the concept.

I hope that now that certain things have been taken off of our plates, social things, et cetera. There's more time to ponder and the pondering is the fun part. So when you're reading, you know, I don't know what you're trying to study, chemistry, and you're like, "Okay, PV equals nRT." Instead of just memorizing that, why does that make sense? All right, well let's just imagine N represents the number of molecules. I mean it's measured in moles, but that's just a quantity of molecules. R is just a constant (mumbles) to make the units work out, and then T is temperature.

So the number of molecules and the temperature, see the more molecules, the higher temperature, they're bouncing around more vigorously. Yeah, either if I hold volume constant it's gonna create more pressure, or if I hold pressure constant in order to do that I'd have to expand the volume. Or if I hold pressure constant the balloon would blow up so to speak, and you're like, "Oh, that makes a lot of sense, this is intuitive. Of course PV equals nRT." And then it becomes exciting and then when you look around the world all sorts of things make sense, and you start to see it in the real world.

I remember the famously Tom Brady in Deflategate, there was this debate about whether his footballs were deflated inappropriately. That was actually a PV equals nRT problem, and I made some videos on that and it's still under debate, but you start seeing these things that you think are these random academic formulas, you start seeing them in the world when you start pondering them, and you start making connections to other concepts in your life. You know, what I remind every student is what you get to learn today on Khan Academy, from your textbook, from your teacher, most of these things are the culmination of someone's life work or often times the combination of many people's life works over hundreds of years and you get the answer. Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, they would have killed to have your physics or chemistry or biology textbook, it would have saved them a lot of work, and you get it.

And so realize that, realize that there are profound answers. I mean, the nature of DNA, these are mind-blowing things that Watson and Crick would have loved, Mendel would have loved to get their hands on and you get those answers. So look at it in that lens you're getting the answers, and do them justice, think about them, ponder them, don't just try to memorize and regurgitate it for the next test. So that's my advice, and I realized I'm all out of time. This was a fun one, and I...

Oh, (mumbles) given that this is the end of Teacher Appreciation Week, I wanted to make sure that we give a special shout out to all the teachers everywhere. So I will see you on Monday, but we're gonna go out with a special thank you to all of the amazing teachers around the world, from our team at Khan Academy. See y'all on Monday.

• To Mrs. Cordell, my fourth-grade teacher.
• To Miss Peterson.
• To Mr. Gobet.
• To Mr. Jones.
• To Ms. Wolf.
• To Mrs. Young.
• Mr. Chavez.
• Mr. Bodie, fifth and sixth grade.
• To Mr. Blake.
• To Mr. Lester.
• To Mr. Howard.
• To Mr. Zarnecki.
• Dr. John.
• To Mrs. Alvarado.
• To Gail Wills and Janice Souza.
• You know, Mrs. Mayhew.
• To my high school humanities teacher.
• To Mrs. Valentine, my kindergarten teacher.

(upbeat music)

• Who taught me how to analyze literature and to write.
• Who first introduced me to the magic of TV and film production.
• Who helped me find my voice in writing.
• Who encouraged me to write my first program.
• Who helped me figure out how to think about and what I think about so many different things in the world.
• Who brought so much love and joy into the classroom.
• And demanded excellence while treating us with respect.
• Who helped me get over my fear of public speaking.
• Who gave me a book, began my love of science and fiction.
• Who believed in us even when we blew everything up.
• Who taught me the value of telling stories to teach and listening to other people's stories.
• Who is such an amazing woman I named my daughter after her.

(upbeat music)

• And for making us all feel special all the time.
• And you were exceedingly patient with me.
• For helping me discover my love for writing.
• For pushing me to always be the best version of myself.
• And for teaching me that I could accomplish anything I put my mind to.
• For telling me I was good at math.
• For making sure that I knew I could do accelerated work.
• For encouraging my love of reading and writing.
• For making me feel welcome in her classroom as a recent immigrant to the United States.
• For inspiring me to become a kindergarten teacher in turn.

You've touched so many lives, both your students and your students' students more than you'll ever know.

(piano music)

• Thanks, Mrs. Mayhew.
• Thank you, Mr. Blake.
• Thank you, Mr. Chavez.
• Thank you, Mr. Gobet.
• Thank you, Mrs. Cordell.
• Thank you, Mrs. Graham.
• Thank you, Mr. Lester.
• Thank you, Mr. Howen.
• You've made a huge impact on my life and so many others, thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.

(piano music)