The One World Schoolhouse – Salman Khan ebook free download pdf
This is a short, easy to read, nonacademic (few references) book. it has som shortcomings on matters dealing with test taking and intelligence tests, but isnt that important for the main topics of the book. this book shud be read by anyone interested in public policy regarding education.
As always, quotes and comments below. quotes ar in red.
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I was born in Metairie, Louisiana, a residential area within
metro New Orleans. My father, a pediatrician, had moved
there from Bangladesh for his medical residency at LSU and,
later, his practice at Charity Hospital. In 1972, he briefly
returned to Bangladesh and came back with my mother—who
was born in India. It was an arranged marriage, very traditional
(my mother tried to peek during the ceremony to make sure
she was marrying the brother she thought she was). Over the
next several years, five of my mother’s brothers and one cousin
came to visit, and they all fell in love with the New Orleans
area. I believe that they did this because Louisiana was as close
to South Asia as the United States could get; it had spicy food,
humidity, giant cockroaches, and a corrupt government. We
were a close family—even though, at any given moment, half
of my relatives weren’t speaking to the other half.
Chuckle
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Let me be clear—I think it’s essential for everything that
follows—that at the start this was all an experiment, an impro
visation. I ’d had no teacher training, no Big Idea for the most
effective way to teach. I did feel that I understood math intu
itively and holistically, but this was no guarantee that I ’d be
effective as a teacher. I ’d had plenty of professors who knew
their subject cold but simply weren’t very good at sharing what
they knew. I believed, and still believe, that teaching is a sepa
rate skill—in fact, an art that is creative, intuitive, and highly
personal.
i think he is right about that. so, it makes no sens to me when danish politicians focus on having research-based education. this means that the teacher must be a researcher himself. but given the nonperfect and perhaps low (?) correlation between teaching ability and researcher ability, that seems like at best at bad idea, and at worst, a dangerusly bad idea.
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It ignores several basic facts about how people actually learn.
People learn at different rates. Some people seem to catch on to
things in quick bursts of intuition; others grunt and grind their
way toward comprehension. Quicker isn’t necessarily smarter
and slower definitely isn’t dumber. Further, catching on quickly
isn’t the same as understanding thoroughly. So the pace of
learning is a question of style, not relative intelligence. The tor
toise may very well end up with more knowledge—more use
ful, lasting knowledge—than the hare.
it pains me to read stuff like this. u gotta into g mr. Khan.
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Let me emphasize this difference, because it is central to
everything I argue for in this book. In a traditional academic
model, the time allotted to learn something is fixed while the
comprehension of the concept is variable. Washburne was
advocating the opposite. What should be fixed is a high level
of comprehension and what should be variable is the amount of
time students have to understand a concept.
obvius, but apparently ignored by those that support the current one-size fits all system (based on age). well almost one size. ther is special education for those simply too stupid or too unruly or too handicapped to learn somthing in a normal class.
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The findings of Kandel and other neuroscientists have much
to say about how we actually learn; unfortunately, the standard
classroom model tends to ignore or even to fly in the face of these
fundamental biological truths. Stressing passivity over activity is
one such misstep. Another, equally important, is the failure of
standard education to maximize the brain’s capacity for associa
tive learning—the achieving of deeper comprehension and more
durable memory by relating something newly learned to some
thing already known. Let’s take a moment to consider this.
yes, this is very important. hence why mem-based learning works really well (an online learning site, www.memrise.com, is based on this idea, and it works very well!). also think of how memory techniqs work – they ar based on associations as well. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorization#Techniques
recently, quite a few books hav been written on this subject. probably becus of the recent interest in memory as a sport disciplin. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Memory_Championships
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Active learning, owned learning, also begins with giving
each student the freedom to determine where and when the
learning will occur. This is the beauty of the Internet and the
personal computer. I f someone wants to study the quadratic
equation on his back porch at 3 a.m., he can. I f someone thinks
best in a coffee shop or on the sideline of a soccer field, no prob
lem. Haven’t we all come across kids who seem bright and alert
except when they’re in class? Isn’t it clear that there are morning
people and night people? The radical portability of Internet-
based education allows students to learn in accordance with
their own personal rhythms, and therefore most efficiently.
good application to fix the morningness vs. eveningsness problem (in DA: a-menneske vs. b-mennesker). cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morningness-eveningness_questionnaire and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype
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Tests say little or nothing about a student’s potential to learn
a subject. At best, they offer a snapshot of where the student
stands at a given moment in time. Since we have seen that stu
dents learn at widely varying rates, and that catching on faster
does not necessarily imply understanding more deeply, how
meaningful are these isolated snapshots?
yes they do. achievement tests correlate well with g factor.
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And all of this might have happened because of one snapshot
test, administered on one morning in the life of a twelve-year-
old girl—a test that didn’t even test what it purported to be
testing! The exam, remember, claimed to be measuring math
potential—that is, future performance. Nadia did poorly on it
because of one past concept that she’d misunderstood. She has
cruised through every math class she’s ever taken since (she
took calculus as a sophomore in high school). What does this
say about the meaningfulness and reliability of the test? Yet
we look to exams like this to make crucial, often irreversible,
and deceptively “objective” decisions regarding the futures of
our kids.
it implies that it isnt a perfectly valid test. no one claims that such tests hav perfect validity.
it doesnt say anything about reliability afaict.
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What will make this goal attainable is the enlightened use of technology. Let me stress ENLIGHTENED use. Clearly, I believe that technology-enhanced teaching and learning is our best chance for an affordable and equitable educational future. But the key question is how the technology is used. It’s not enough to put a bunch of computers and smartboards into classrooms. The idea is to integrate the technology into how we teach and learn; without meaningful and imaginative integration, technology in the classroom could turn out to be just one more very expensive gimmick.
[had to type it off, apparently, the OCR cudnt handle bold text???]
Surely mr. Khan is right about this.
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I happen to believe that every student, given the tools and
the help that he or she needs, can reach this level of profi
ciency in basic math and science. I also believe it is a disservice
to allow students to advance without this level of proficiency,
because they’ll fall on their faces sometime later.
living in a dream world. good luck teaching math to the mentally retarded.
lesson: this is why NOT to use words like <every> and <all>. it is not possible to raise everybody to full mastery of basic math and science. but it is surely possible to lift most people to new heights with better teaching etc.
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It turned out that Peninsula Bridge used the video lessons
and software at three of its campuses that summer. Some of
the ground rules were clear. The Academy would be used in
addition to, not in place of, a traditional math curriculum. The
videos would only be used during “computer time,” a slot that
was shared with learning other tools such as Adobe Photoshop
and Illustrator. Even within this structure, however, there were
some important decisions to be made; the decisions, in turn,
transformed the Peninsula Bridge experience into a fascinating
and in some ways surprising test case.
The first decision was the question of where in math the kids
should start. The Academy math curriculum began, literally,
with 1 + 1=2. But the campers were mainly sixth to eighth
graders. True, most of them had serious gaps in their under
standing of math and many were working below their grade
level. Still, wouldn’t it be a bit insulting and a waste of time to
start them with basic addition? I thought so, and so I proposed
beginning at what would normally be considered fifth-grade
material, in order to allow for some review. To my surprise,
however, two of the three teachers who were actually imple
menting the plan said they preferred to start at the very begin
ning. Since the classes had been randomly chosen, we thereby
ended up with a small but classic controlled experiment.
The first assumption to be challenged was that middle-
school students would find basic arithmetic far too easy. Among
the groups that had started with 1 + 1, most of the kids, as
expected, rocketed through the early concepts. But some didn’t.
A few got stuck on things as fundamental as two-digit subtrac
tion problems. Some had clearly never learned their multiplica
tion tables. Others were lacking basic skills regarding fractions
or division. I stress that these were motivated and intelligent
kids. But for whatever reason, the Swiss cheese gaps in their
learning had started creeping in at a distressingly early stage,
and until those gaps were repaired they had little chance of
mastering algebra and beyond.
The good news, however, is that once identified, those gaps
could be repaired, and that when the shaky foundation had been
rebuilt, the kids were able to advance quite smoothly.
This was in vivid and unexpected contrast to the group that
had started at the fifth-grade level. Since they’d begun with
such a big head start, I assumed that by the end of the six-week
program they would be working on far more advanced con
cepts than the other group. In fact just the opposite happened.
As in the classic story of the tortoise and the hare, the 1 + 1
group plodded and plodded and eventually passed them right
by. Some of the students in the “head start” group, on the other
hand, hit a wall and just couldn’t seem to progress. There were
sixth- and seventh-grade concepts that they simply couldn’t
seem to master, presumably because of gaps in earlier concepts.
In comparing the performance of the two groups, the conclu
sion seemed abundantly clear: Nearly all the students needed
some degree of remediation, and the time spent on finding and
fixing the gaps turned out both to save time and deepen learning in
the longer term.
if that is really true, thats a HUGELY important finding. any replications of this?
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As we settled into the MIT routine, Shantanu and I began
independently to arrive at the same subversive but increasingly
obvious conclusion: The giant lecture classes were a monu
mental waste of time. Three hundred students crammed into
a stifling lecture hall; one professor droning through a talk he
knew by heart and had delivered a hundred times before. The
sixty-minute talks were bad enough; the ninety-minute talks
were torture. What was the point? Was this education or an
endurance contest? Was anybody actually learning anything?
Why did students show up at all? Shantanu and I came up with
two basic theories about this. Kids went to the lectures either
because their parents were paying x number of dollars per, or
because many of the lecturers were academic celebrities, so
there was an element of show business involved.
i feel exactly the same about my university classes. i want to learn goddamit, not sit in class waiting for it to end.
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Then there are the standardized tests to which students are
subjected from third grade straight on through to grad school.
As I ’ve said, I am not antitesting; I believe that well-conceived,
well-designed, and fairly administered tests constitute one of
our few real sources of reliable and relatively objective data
regarding students’ preparedness. But note that I say prepared
ness, not potential. Well-designed tests can give a pretty solid
idea of what a student has learned, but only a very approximate
picture of what she can learn. To put it in a slightly different
way, tests tend to measure quantities of information (and some
times knowledge) rather than quality of minds—not to men
tion character. Besides, for all their attempts to appear precise
and comprehensive, test scores seldom identify truly notable
ability. I f you’re the admissions director at Caltech or in charge
of hiring engineers at Apple, you’re going to see a heck of a lot
of candidates who had perfect scores on their math SATs. They
are all going to be fairly smart people, but the scores tell you
little about who is truly unique.
mr. Khan obvisuly knows little about intelligence tests. sure, SAT, ACT, GRE tests are achievement tests, but those correlate moderately to strongly with g factor, so they are okay to decent intelligence tests. and ofc, IQ tests like RPM are really good at measuring g factor. they really can measure a students potential, in that it measures the students ability very well, and that is closely related to the students potential.
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For me personally, the biggest discovery has been how hun
gry students are for real understanding. I sometimes get push-
back from people saying, “Well, this is all well and good, but it
will only work for motivated students.” And they say it assum
ing that maybe 20 percent of students fall into that category. I
probably would have agreed with them seven years ago, based
on what I’d seen in my own experience with the traditional aca
demic model. When I first started making videos, I thought I
was making them only for some subset of students who cared—
like my cousins or younger versions of myself. What was truly
startling was the reception the lessons received from students
whom people had given up on, and who were about to give up
on themselves. It made me realize that if you give students the
opportunity to learn deeply and to see the magic of the universe
around them, almost everyone will be motivated.
it will be interesting to see just how many students care.
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Is Khan Academy, along with the intuitions and ideas that
underpin it, our best chance to move toward a better educa
tional future? That’s not for me to say. Other people of vision
and goodwill have differing approaches, and I fervently hope
that all are given a fair trial in the wider world. But new and
bold approaches do need to be tried. The one thing we cannot
afford to do is to leave things as they are. The cost of inac
tion is unconscionably high, and it is counted out not in dol
lars or euros or rupees but in human destinies. Still, as both an
engineer and a stubborn optimist, I believe that where there are
problems, there are also solutions. I f Khan Academy proves to
be even part of the solution to our educational malaise, I will
feel proud and privileged to have made a contribution.
indeed, never trying anything new implies no progress.
reminds me of another book i want to read soon.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13237711-uncontrolled?auto_login_attempted=true
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