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Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
cato institute ^ | 7-25-11 | Andrew J. Coulson

Posted on 07/28/2011 11:39:35 AM PDT by netmilsmom

The free Web tutoring service “Khan Academy” has gotten much well-deserved attention, including a feature story in the current issue of Wired. That story includes a quote that literally took my breath away:

~~~"Even if Khan is truly liberating students to advance at their own pace, it’s not clear that the schools will be able to cope. The very concept of grade levels implies groups of students moving along together at an even pace. So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you wind up with a kid in fifth grade who has mastered high school trigonometry and physics—but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies? Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”"~~

This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly. In a competitive marketplace, educators have incentives to serve each individual child to the best of their ability, because each child can easily be enrolled elsewhere if they fail to do so. That is why the for-profit Asian tutoring industry groups students by performance, not by age. There are “grades,” but they do not depend on when a student was born, only on what she knows and is able to do.

But why should a monopolist bother doing that? It’s easier just to feed children through the system on a uniform conveyor belt based on when they were born.


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: homeschooling; khanacademy
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My husband sent me this. My 11-year-old is almost through Algebra 1 and my 13-year-old is 22 lessons away from Trig. I wonder what they would do with them in school?
1 posted on 07/28/2011 11:39:39 AM PDT by netmilsmom
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To: netmilsmom
I always preferred self paced classes myself. It allowed me to outrun the slackers. It does intimidate the teachers. Especially the marginal ones who are barely qualified to take attendance and step through the "approved" textbook. Screw that insanity. Cattle car education holds back the best and brightest to the pace of the slowest dullard in the room. Sometimes that is the teacher.
2 posted on 07/28/2011 11:46:45 AM PDT by Myrddin
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To: netmilsmom

Perhaps some of the many teachers of mathematics who are clueless about the subject matter they are supposed to be presenting will use the Kahn tutorials to come up to speed themselves?

Recommended reading:
Underground History of American Education
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm


3 posted on 07/28/2011 11:49:11 AM PDT by Blue_Ridge_Mtn_Geek
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To: netmilsmom

“I wonder what they would do with them in school? “

Bore them to the point they would rather do drugs than learn.


4 posted on 07/28/2011 11:50:47 AM PDT by driftdiver (I could eat it raw, but why do that when I have a fire.)
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To: netmilsmom
I wonder what they would do with them in school?

Punish them.......seriously, they would punish them.

Teachers do not like it when they have certain students who are way ahead of the class, look at the resentment so many asian kids get for trying to get ahead.

5 posted on 07/28/2011 11:54:06 AM PDT by Sonny M ("oderint dum metuant")
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To: Myrddin

We homeschool. When people would ask what grade my “3rd-grade” son was in, I would reply 3rd, 4th and 8th. He had the opportunity to study each subject at the level appropriate for him.


6 posted on 07/28/2011 11:55:23 AM PDT by fightinJAG (Please stop posting "helpful hints" in parentheses the title box. Thank you.)
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To: netmilsmom
This is a non-problem, other than public school teachers being unable to grasp how to educate kids that tend to move along at different levels in different subjects.

Back in the 1960s, I attended a small church school that solved this problem by going "ungraded". The different levels of elementary school subjects were not 1st through 6th grade, but identified just by the teacher's name (so as not to hurt the kids' widdle feelings, I guess). The kids moved from class to class as though they were in high school -- and their classes were tailored to their abilities in different subjects.

So - let's use me for an example - In third period I went to Mrs. Corbett for English because I was already reading on a high school level, but I went to Cdr. Galloway in second period for math because that wasn't my strong suit! Other classes I was somewhere in the middle.

I had no problem transferring to a more conventional junior high school at the end of elementary school. They did want to test me, but that would be true of homeschoolers coming out of elementary school as well.

7 posted on 07/28/2011 11:55:35 AM PDT by AnAmericanMother (Ministrix of ye Chasse, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment))
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To: netmilsmom

See if anyone is re-running old episodes of “Watch Mr. Wizard”.

http://www.mrwizardstudios.com/watchmrwizardtvshow.htm

Take your kids to a Maker Faire and get them interested in robotics, amateur rockets, rapid prototyping. In other words, CREATING THINGS!

http://makerfaire.com/

http://www.harris-educational.com/reinventing-science/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/user/UniversalHovercraft#p/u/1/ZnHdTh1eouk “Hoverkids”


8 posted on 07/28/2011 11:57:10 AM PDT by BwanaNdege (For those who have fought for it, Life bears a savor the protected will never know.)
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To: BwanaNdege

http://hoverkid.hovercraft.com/

Easy to build models for science, industrial arts, physics & math students. Our projects have been successful for thousands of young adults interested in building technical projects with inexpensive materials and minimum tools.

Grade school, middle school, high school and universities can all apply these projects into current curriculum to help increase student interest.

Cub scouts, Boy scouts, after school programs and engineering clubs, have all used our projects to keep young minds interested in their respective programs. Our projects are based on using simple tools and extremely inexpensive materials to create stimulating projects such as hovercrafts, rockets, air cars, airplanes, paddle boats, sail boats, spin copters and water rockets.


9 posted on 07/28/2011 11:59:17 AM PDT by BwanaNdege (For those who have fought for it, Life bears a savor the protected will never know.)
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To: netmilsmom

Being the parent of a couple of those kids who knew math almost with out being taught, who are now successful and well-adjusted adults (who vote right!), please let me suggest that you just allow them to be ordinary kids.

They only get one chance to do that, and their social and spiritual development is every bit as important as their academic ability. It all comes together eventually to form a well-rounded adult.

“What would they do with them in school?” you ask.

They would put them in advanced classes in the subjects in which they excel and let them succeed academically. Our kids earned more than a year of college credit through AP work in public high school, but still lived as normal teenagers under our guidance.

Their AP teachers were excellent.

Worked for us, splendidly.

God bless as you rear those kids.


10 posted on 07/28/2011 11:59:58 AM PDT by Jedidah (I'll vote for an earthworm before I'll vote for Obama. So wiggle on in, Rick Perry.)
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To: netmilsmom

I had taught math to my oldest son. He ended up coasting through math in school for several years, basically learning nothing new, until they caught up with him. If they ever did.


11 posted on 07/28/2011 12:00:37 PM PDT by Elderberry
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To: netmilsmom

I LURVE khan academy. At age 50 I breezed through the parts of Calculus and Physics that kicked my behind in college.

It’s a great resource and screw the education NAZIs who think it’s a problem.


12 posted on 07/28/2011 12:01:55 PM PDT by PhilosopherStone1000
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To: netmilsmom

I teach in a home school enrichment program where my high school students regularly get their AA’s from the local community college the same week they get their high school diplomas. Home schoolers are consistently off grade level.


13 posted on 07/28/2011 12:03:57 PM PDT by LiteKeeper ("Who is John Galt?")
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To: netmilsmom

Mindless blighted Educrats are the enemies of education.

With the power of the NEA and AFT they have sucked the public dry while maintaining vast numbers of students in their cesspools of non-achievement.

Will Khan’s approach shatter the rigid age-cohort approach of current Educrats?

Sure, so what, learn and adjust folks, as all real educators would be eager to do!!!


14 posted on 07/28/2011 12:05:12 PM PDT by Enchante (Are there any honest politicians in Washington, DC??)
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To: AngieGal

ping


15 posted on 07/28/2011 12:05:17 PM PDT by PetroniusMaximus
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To: reed13; reed13k

bfl


16 posted on 07/28/2011 12:08:41 PM PDT by reed13
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To: netmilsmom

“but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies?”

It’s not really the writing and history that concerns them; they are thrown in for affect.

Their real concern is that the child not miss the “social studies” - political indoctrination, that every state education curriculum is filled with.


17 posted on 07/28/2011 12:09:49 PM PDT by Wuli
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To: Sonny M
You're so right. My middle son convinced my wife and I to let him go to a "magnet school" for marine biology. It was sponsored by Scripps. To participate, he waited for a bus at 5:30 AM daily and took a ride into an elementary school in barrio Logan. He returned at 5:30 PM. After a couple weeks, we suspected something was wrong. The "marine biology" part was a mere ONE HOUR on ALTERNATE weeks. A whole 2 hours each month. The remainder of the time, he was in a classroom with substandard teaching. The school's primary mission was to feed the students 2 meals a day and provide daycare service for parents. My son was so far ahead of the other students that they would beat the crap out of him on the playground for doing better than the remainder of the class. Being top fly on the manure pile is no fun.

My son asked to be transferred back to our neighborhood school. It took 3 weeks to catch up on work that his classmates were doing in the neighborhood school that was not being done in the "barrio" "magnet" school. He not only caught up, but kept accelerating his efforts. I checked his English compositions after the "teacher" corrected them. Total crap...on the part of the teacher. I finished the job and made him rewrite the papers. In the end, he was tutoring the AP classes in high school in evening sessions. He often stepped in for the assigned teacher because he knew the material better than the teacher. His exam scores were 5 on all tests. Final GPA was 4.33.

Back to the original issue. Doing significantly better than your peers may result in punishment by the teacher and your peers. Expect it. Don't let it impede your desire to excel. The world is full of Luddites.

18 posted on 07/28/2011 12:10:16 PM PDT by Myrddin
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To: Wuli

19 posted on 07/28/2011 12:10:34 PM PDT by null and void (Day 918. When your only tools are a Hammer & Sickle, everything looks like a Capitalist...)
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To: netmilsmom
My grad degree was in a form of math and I have been brushing up by taking Khan Academy tests and watching his videos. He is the best teacher I have ever had.

What Khan has done is deliver a mathematics toolkit that anyone, at any level, can use to quickly and easily access whatever math skillset, program, or formulae is needed to solve any problem or meet any work challenge. And he offers this toolkit in brief youtube videos.

His basic idea is that in conventional school systems create problems when students move to higher and higher grades with only a 70 or 80 grade. When schools permit this they are passing students with proficiency in only 70% or 80% of the material presented (and they are failing to become proficient in 20% to 30% of the material).

In Khans view, this leaves students with a swiss cheese like understanding of math...and this eventually leads to failure.

He has changed the paradigm. He makes sure that students master EVERY area of math. And he demonstrates that it is so easy, anyone can do it (with a little persistence).

IMHO Sal Khan has sparked a revolution that will be impossible to stop.

Sorry for any errors...I am a newby.

Khan Academy

20 posted on 07/28/2011 12:12:20 PM PDT by RoosterRedux
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