Con's Academy

This week I read two very interesting books on very different subjects.  First Salman Khan’s treatise on what is wrong with education and how his open source brain-child KHAN ACADEMY fixes many of today’s educational ills.  As a veteran educator, I usually steer clear of books written by non-educators about education’s woes.  Technically Salman Khan is now one of us, so that helps. Also, unlike many of his contemporaries who have a penchant for offering simplistic solutions to the complex issues of education, his ideas would actually benefit those who do NOT learn things at first pass as well as those who do. For anyone who is interested in education, technology, motivation or creativity, this is a fascinating book.  Equally fascinating is the story of how his materials’ rose to popularity and went viral (spoiler alert:  Bill Gates’ imprimatur on your product doesn’t hurt!)  I found myself writing down several quotes from his first 60 pages, which, coincidentally, deal with mastery learning, how education happens, and how to fill gaps in learning which he calls the “Swiss Cheese” problem.  Here are a few of the best:

“There is a balkanizing tendency to divide learning into separate subjects…”  And he doesn’t see it as a positive tendency, and I quite concur.  He talks about integrated curriculum aligning with current brain research that shows that neurons grow stronger when we make connections for students, not dividing lines. 

He says Khan Academy “...creates a context that gives free rein to curiosity.”  That's compelling rhetoric. He points out that we know that brain activity dips after 20 minutes maximum, but we still insist on the stultifying 50-minute lecture.  He is a strong advocate of mastery learning, which had a couple of heydays, but he thinks should return permanently because of the Swiss Cheese effect most student learning exhibits when non-mastery is tolerated.  He sites personal responsibility for learning as a reason to like Khan Academy’s approach, as well as self-paced learning, for the when, where, and tempo of the learning is defined by the learner.  As someone who benefited greatly from an English teacher taking me aside and giving me a self-paced advanced grammar book as a sophomore while the rest of the class continued diagramming sentences, I can say having someone realize you need your own pace is liberating and empowering. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough to gobble up the next grammar goodie.
He says everyone should…"have a healthy measure of skepticism and caution when looking at standardized test results” because of the one-time, moment in time nature of such tests, which echoed my mentor Pam E’s cautions.  Finally, two more quotes:  “You can standardize curricula, but you can’t standardize learning” and he refers to GPAs as a “blunt instrument at best” and asks the sage question of whether or not a person with a 3.2 GPA has less to offer the world than someone with a 3.6 GPA.  Again with the healthy skepticism.

I enjoyed this book partially because he agrees with me on so many issues (lucky him!) but also because he questions so many assumed premises in education that have no business being taken as fact.  His description of flipping the classroom left me wondering if we aren’t seeing a revolution in the making.  I know several school districts have adopted his materials (Des Moines, for example, I believe?) and he’s going global with his materials already translated into several languages.  Perhaps most importantly he makes a good case for how technology, when used wisely, allows a teacher to do more teaching.  That’s always a good thing.  This book is worth the coin. Also check out Khan Academy website to see if there is a course there just right for you.  It’s all free, all the time.

Second, Anash Kapur's sobering book India Becoming is one person's account of his voyage to America for college and after, then his return in the 90's to a very different India.  His book is written in parts, parts that parallel his emotional roller coaster at returning home and seeing such prosperity, then looking again and seeing how the prosperity has excluded the poor entirely and is robbing the country of it's natural resources (clean air for example) at an alarming rate.  And he come to speak about a real and omnipresent problem in India, its garbage.  As someone who has been forced to use air conditioning to try to stifle the stench of burning garbage outside her room, this section really hit home. It's almost as if the country has two personalities, one of the up and coming global power, and another that ignores the garbage in every street and the poor air quality they breathe.  He captures these two personalities well through protracted interviews with Indians from different walks of life and different generations.  You hear the fear of the old farmer for the loss of his livelihood as the real estate market gobbles all the land, the distress of urbanites who are on the one hand hungry for their piece of the luxury living pie and on the other hand stressed, tired, and missing the slower pace of their villages.  It's a troubling book, at points hopeful, and other points not so.  I would highly recommend this book as a great insight into the pros and cons of meteoric development.  And, thanks to daughter #1 for gifting me this for my birthday, along with my next read, Salman Rushdie's newest book. Back to the books!