- We have this big moment and the moment is
that for
35 years of my teaching career
I walked into the classroom having no idea
if the kids had done the homework
or
what their commitment was to the subject.
And then suddenly there's this coaching platform
on Khan Academy that was a total game-changer for me.
I wasn't imagining
that the Khan Academy
calculus content would become
a big part of our curriculum.
I imagined frankly and wrongly
that we'd use these exercises,
suggest kids use it for review.
And when we discovered the coaching platform
and how powerful that was,
a group of us said,
"Let's give it a go.
"Let's try using Khan Academy
"as a major part of our curriculum."
And my goodness, it changed the way I teach.
For instance, five minutes before I walk into class,
I can go to the platform
and I can look through my list of students
to discover that all but two of them
had done the homework, had watched the videos,
had cleared the hurdle, if you will,
of the exercises that I had given them.
So, when I walked in the room,
I didn't have to go over homework anymore.
That was liberating.
So, if there were two students
who didn't do the homework,
it gave me the opportunity to pull them aside
and say, "Hey, I see you didn't get to it,"
or, "I see you struggled with it.
"Is there a way that you and I can meet later today?
"It's because I don't want you to get behind in this."
The first 15 minutes of class now
all the sudden we're breaking new ground.
We're doing harder problems.
The kids responded so well to it
because I think they had years and years and years
of math teachers going over the homework
for the first 15 minutes of class.
The poor kids must've been bored to death,
or, "Why bother doing the homework
because he'll do it on the board anyway?"
That was just totally liberating
and gave me an opportunity to really
think hard about teaching.
Since we started using Khan Academy,
the one thing that we can't help
but notice is that we're having more kids
make it to the end of BC Calculus,
and it's clear to me that we're having
more girls and more underrepresented kids
finish our BC Calculus class than we ever did before.
I gotta believe it's
our new way about thinking about teaching.
And using Khan Academy in the classroom
and for homework assignments
has gotta be a big part of that.