You don’t have to wait for somebody to get it for you. īut I think there is space for individual students, families, and teachers to take action. I hope, I believe, that next school year might be the first truly normal school year we’ve had since. But it’s hard to do it by just putting more pressure on teachers who are trying to deal with so much. Should we accept that we’re in a pandemic and that such fatigue (and the interruptions to normal timelines that follow) are a normal response? Or should we be trying to change that?Īt a high level, we should try to get back on the highway. And in a lot of other places, the complexity is even higher. That’s the kind of thing that is incredibly taxing. Oh, four of the teachers got COVID, and you find out about it that morning. Oh, one of the teachers got COVID, alright, we all have to for that person. Families have a lot of support, it’s reasonably well-resourced. This is a school that had all of the pieces in place. You know, we have Khan Lab School, which I’m the chair of and very involved in. But now they’re paying $70 to $80 an hour, and teachers are still not willing to do it. Historically, if they paid $50 to $60 an hour, there were teachers who were more than happy to do it. And they were just saying how impossible it was to find people to staff it. I was working with a school district, and we were thinking about doing an after-school program where kids could do more Khan Academy work.

You have teachers that are feeling depleted. You had faculty, administrators, students, everybody trying the best they could. Tell me more about what you make of that.

It isn’t just something they can fix in a month, but something they’re going to want to fix over the next three, four, five years. I think the whole system is still in that mode.Īt the same time, we have all of these districts we’re working with who are recognizing that learning loss is a very real thing and they’re going to have to invest. The metaphor that is popping into my head is a spare tire, that’s not full-sized and you can only drive 40 miles per hour on, and can’t take on the highway. There’s less aggregate learning time happening in the system right now. But even this year, I think they’re not covering as much.

Khan academy arithmetic