This article is a partisan attempt to discredit Sal's great work. Pick one example where the content has a flaw and use it to claim that all of his content is therefore "useless". I don't know the author's motives. Is it an altruistic care about the children or a personal motive to protect his career and to defend the methods he uses to teach versus a new potential disruptive threat.
I'm really excited to see how the experiment in Africa of giving out thousands of tablets letting children self learn with limited teaching from a traditional teacher. Because of the number of students to teachers they are acting more as tutors in the case the children are stuck and can't figure it out with help from their peers.
Hi. Original poster here. I have amended the line in the post to make clear that the "useless" claim was not intended to apply to all of Khan's videos; only to the decimal ones.
As for motives, I would invite you to read deeper on the blog to get a sense of what motivates my work. See especially the "Talking Math with Your Kids" series, where you will find the following sentiment expressed in multiple ways:
"But I don’t want Griffin and Tabitha‘s mathematical educations to depend on better telling. I want them to explore and to wonder. I want them to commit to their ideas and see what the consequences of those ideas are, and to revise their thinking when their present ideas are not good enough to explain what’s going on in the world.
And what I want for my own children is no different from what I want for my students, and no different from what I want for all children.
There is a place for good, mathematically correct explanations. I want kids to experience those when they’re the right move.
More importantly, I want them to learn to think for themselves."
> As for motives, I would invite you to read deeper on the blog to get a sense of what motivates my work. See especially the "Talking Math with Your Kids" series, where you will find the following sentiment expressed in multiple ways:
Do you have any videos of your own we can watch, so as to get a better handle on the way you think these things should be made?
Pick one example where the content has a flaw and use it to claim that all of his content is therefore "useless". I don't know the author's motives.
You don't know the author's main point either. He did not assert this at any point--he instead commented on the necessity of expert/experienced input in developing these videos, using the decimals content as an example.
I'm really excited to see how the experiment in Africa of giving out thousands of tablets letting children self learn with limited teaching from a traditional teacher. Because of the number of students to teachers they are acting more as tutors in the case the children are stuck and can't figure it out with help from their peers.