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and the Khan Academy developers have been listening, and I have had interesting off-forum email interaction And THERE is the difference between genuinely-given

by crusso 14y ago

and the Khan Academy developers have been listening, and I have had interesting off-forum email interaction And THERE is the difference between genuinely-given constructive criticism and the questionably-motivated smearing that those folks working with the Washington Post are attempting to deliver. Thank you very much for the links. I've already sent some of them on to my wife so that she and I can research them a bit more as instructional aids for our children.

jshowa 14y ago
There is a difference between being interested and doing something. All I can say is, trusting a site run by a former middle school teacher/math coach as the "savior of education" is completely stupid. Yet we have all these influential people saying such things. You would think Khan Academy would be more vocal about being a supplement and not a substitute.
Trianglemancsd 14y ago
As one of those who worked on one of the Washington Post pieces, I would invite you to come by my blog, <a href="http://christopherdanielson.wordpress.com>Overthinking http://christopherdanielson.wordpress.com>Overthinking My Teaching</a>, where I think you will find my motives to quite pure-better understanding of student learning of mathematics. In fact it was very important to me that the piece I co-wrote <strong>not</strong> be a smear piece. I can't speak for the comments I did not write. But a careful read of the post itself should reveal a claim backed up by evidence. The claim is that Sal Khan is lacking some important knowledge for teaching. That's not a smear. I would gladly engage in a discussion that pointed to evidence that he does know some important things about how people learn.
- crusso 14y ago
  I looked at your blog. From my perspective, you folks are down in the weeds. Khan isn't using the optimal technique for teaching decimals? Who cares? The problem isn't that kids aren't learning optimal methods. The problem with education in this country is that we funnel most all of our public education dollars into a system and related organizations that are only tangentially motivated to educate our children. Watch how the public school systems and teachers unions react to vouchers and charter schools and you'll see how much they care about educating kids vs protecting their turf and power base. I've noted that those within the education system or closely aligned with it absolutely hated "Waiting for Superman". They nitpick it and try to blow up minor faults with it in a similar way to how you're going after Khan. To those of us outside of that power structure, that documentary showed how the establishment is utterly opposed to actually solving problems in education in this country if those solutions occur outside of that establishment. I view your articles vs Khan to be in a similar vein. What Khan has done is he's added a solution to our society for our education problems that operates outside of the current public education power structure. Rather than build on what he's done and improve on it through working with Khan or doing something better -- you folks have taken the route of trying to publicly take him down in the media.

by crusso 14y ago

jshowa 14y ago

There is a difference between being interested and doing something. All I can say is, trusting a site run by a former middle school teacher/math coach as the "savior of education" is completely stupid. Yet we have all these influential people saying such things. You would think Khan Academy would be more vocal about being a supplement and not a substitute.

Trianglemancsd 14y ago

As one of those who worked on one of the Washington Post pieces, I would invite you to come by my blog, <a href="http://christopherdanielson.wordpress.com>Overthinking http://christopherdanielson.wordpress.com>Overthinking My Teaching</a>, where I think you will find my motives to quite pure-better understanding of student learning of mathematics. In fact it was very important to me that the piece I co-wrote <strong>not</strong> be a smear piece. I can't speak for the comments I did not write. But a careful read of the post itself should reveal a claim backed up by evidence. The claim is that Sal Khan is lacking some important knowledge for teaching. That's not a smear. I would gladly engage in a discussion that pointed to evidence that he does know some important things about how people learn.

crusso 14y ago
I looked at your blog. From my perspective, you folks are down in the weeds. Khan isn't using the optimal technique for teaching decimals? Who cares? The problem isn't that kids aren't learning optimal methods. The problem with education in this country is that we funnel most all of our public education dollars into a system and related organizations that are only tangentially motivated to educate our children. Watch how the public school systems and teachers unions react to vouchers and charter schools and you'll see how much they care about educating kids vs protecting their turf and power base. I've noted that those within the education system or closely aligned with it absolutely hated "Waiting for Superman". They nitpick it and try to blow up minor faults with it in a similar way to how you're going after Khan. To those of us outside of that power structure, that documentary showed how the establishment is utterly opposed to actually solving problems in education in this country if those solutions occur outside of that establishment. I view your articles vs Khan to be in a similar vein. What Khan has done is he's added a solution to our society for our education problems that operates outside of the current public education power structure. Rather than build on what he's done and improve on it through working with Khan or doing something better -- you folks have taken the route of trying to publicly take him down in the media.