Sometimes I think people confuse rote learning with traditional conceptual instruction.
— Sal Khan
I learned from my peers, and I learned from doing projects, and I learned from mentors, but I learned very little from lectures, and I've talked about how little I attended them.
There are things you can get in that physical experience you cannot get virtually.
Louisiana was as close to South Asia as the United States could get: it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches, and a corrupt government.
If high-quality content can be effectively delivered via technology, teachers can devote more time to creating innovative experiences, leading Socratic dialogs, or coaching students one-on-one in more targeted and focused interventions.
As my kids grow up, I think a lot about the lessons and values I want to impart to them. More than any particular skill or even financial support, I believe perseverance and resilience will serve them best, regardless of what curveball life inevitably throws them.
Being a billionaire is sort of passe.
We don't believe that you should ever replace physical education. Even in a thousand years, a computer will never be able to do so.
I grew up with plenty of smart people. They would beat me at chess; they could solve brain teasers before I could, but then they would struggle in algebra. These were incredibly smart people who simply did not have the foundation in math that I had.
A lot of times, when kids have problems with algebra or trigonometry, it has nothing to do with the subject matter, has nothing to do with their innate intelligence. It's just they that they had some gaps in elementary school that they never got to fill in.
Creating a clear and engaging video explanation of a complex concept is a great way to demonstrate mastery and to help others understand and love the subject, too.
No one goes on a direct path, even though it sometimes feels like your peers might be racing ahead. Everyone's trying to figure it out. But if you just put yourself out there, step out of your comfort zone, establish yourself in terms of skills, mentorship, but leave space for your passions, then you're going to turn out pretty well.
The math you need for most of finance is ninth-grade algebra, and most people feel reasonably comfortable with that. But I think the financial world there has been - I don't know if it's by design, or this is how it's evolved - there are bad actors who have wanted to obfuscate because you can benefit from the lack of transparency.
I'm not the kind to hang out on Facebook or Twitter or even talk on the cellphone, really.
I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.
I am infamously bad at asking for money.
Our goal with Khan Academy Kids is to inspire a life-long love of learning.
I love Victorian novels, the way they capture the nuances of the human condition.
There is too much acceptance of people saying, 'I am a math person, or I am an artsy person.' It makes me cringe.
To be clear, people are the most important part of any classroom. If given the choice between a great teacher and the world's most advanced education technology, I'd pick the teacher any day for my own children.
All too often, technology is treated as a silver bullet for perceived problems in education. This sometimes leads to knee-jerk investments, using scarce resources to invest in software or hardware without a clear notion of how either might actually empower learning.
Rather than saying, 'I can't do this,' 'Sesame Street' encourages us to say, 'I can't do this... yet!' That one word changes everything. It emphasizes that your capability isn't fixed. It highlights the reality that our brain is like a muscle.
What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master's in four years. It wasn't slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everything than sitting in lectures.
One's perception of themselves has a much bigger role than has been acknowledged to determine who succeeds and who does not.
I've learned that certain things are much harder than when you write about them in a book.
It's an old idea. It's arguably the first way that people learn, that, hey, if you need to learn something, if you're having trouble with it, keep working on it until you master it and then you go to a more advanced concept. But in the education systems that all of us grew up in, we all learned at a fixed pace.
Our mission at Khan Academy is a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere, and college readiness is a crucial part of that. We want to help as many students as possible prepare for college and for life, and since the SAT measures preparedness for college, our partnership with the College Board is a natural fit.
My personal narrative - I was lucky early on in my career to have some really strong mentors. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's what really built me up.
One of the biggest ways to level the playing field is to give all young people the same context on what opportunities are out there. And that means touching on some of the questions that are a little taboo in society: How much money do you make? What are your stresses? What would you do differently if you could?
I'm actually a bit of a technophobe, which surprises people. I like to stay unplugged as much as possible.
Every school is different and serves different populations.
Some of the beauty of a university is that every professor is given a lot of autonomy over what he or she does. That's also what makes it very hard for even a very forward-thinking president to change courses.
We're so used to the tests telling me if I'm smart or not. It's telling me if I know the material or not.
Just as computer science is missing from our school system, so is science fiction.
If a student has access to a great school, Khan Academy can supercharge it. It should help a well-resourced school, and if you don't have that, then Khan Academy can have even a bigger impact. But I don't see it as replacing the actual schools... we want to empower teachers and fill in the gaps.
Teachers can use technology-based assessments to inform their instruction. These assessments can quickly produce data and surface patterns that help teachers identify where students are faltering and intervene with targeted coaching immediately, before the student falls too far behind.
Later in life, when my kids struggle to understand a tricky concept or master a new skill, I want them to have the strength and experience to tell themselves, 'I don't know how to do this... yet!' I want them to be confident that, even if something seems challenging today, they have what it takes to figure it out.
When I used to try and describe what the Khan Academy was, I would tell people that if it were a for-profit, I would be on the cover of 'Forbes.'
By early 2009, tens of thousands of students were watching tutorials on the Khan Academy every day. The software I wrote for my cousins had become so popular, it was making my $50-a-month web host crash. The possibilities surrounding the academy were so exciting that I had trouble doing my day job properly. And soon, I quit.
I realized that there are many people who are very good students, but they think of themselves as bad students. At the end of the day, what they are really missing is way to understand where their gaps are and a way to address those gaps.
I never viewed technology as a replacement for the human experience. I viewed it as something that could liberate the human experience.
What you have in most education software is that they're catering to the decision-maker who makes the budget allocations, and that decision-maker has a lot of check boxes. Does it do this? Check. Does it do that? Check. They could care less about the end user experience.
In Idaho, we hope to see educators using Khan Academy to individualize their instruction. Instead of a one-size-fits-all lesson, teachers will be able to focus their attention on specific students who are struggling while the rest of the class engages with material appropriate for them.
Something happens in school sometimes where you're like, 'Oh, I'm not an expert, and I have to defer to people who are.' And it happens not just in school: it happens in religion, too. Defer to the experts. A printing press is a big deal - they got the Bible, and all of a sudden they could read it for themselves.
I was always asking people about their work. How do you do a job like that? Do you love it? What does it pay? I was lucky to have access to people who could answer my questions. Otherwise, my life could have turned out very differently.
I'm big fan of soulful music - classic rock with a folk-ish twist.
Suffice it to say that our over-reliance on testing is based largely on habit, wishful thinking, and leaps of faith.
The single most important personal finance decision you make is your career.
