Free Talk Live

The story of how 1 man is revolutionizing the education system. By putting out free videos online that students can watch and do problem sets at their own pace. The results are astonishing, with test scores and classrooms being turned on their heads (in a good way). An interesting look at how technology can provide for such an innovative solution to a complex problem - for FREE.

Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere and is by any measure the most popular educational site on the web. Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day -- nearly double the student body at Harvard and Stanford combined. Since he began his tutorials in late 2006, Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide.

Khan Academy began in 2006 as a tidy collection of math and science tutorial videos from its founder Salman Khan, a hedge-fund analyst who had posted the material to help friends and relatives. Its popularity snowballed, and in recent years Khan has beefed up the software that sits behind and around the video lessons, delivering interactive practice exercises and enabling conversation and remote teaching. From just two programmers at the beginning of 2011 and five programmers a year ago, Khan is up to 20 coders now, not counting 15 summer interns.

As a third-grader in Winsted, Connecticut, last year, Matthew Asselin was sick -- a lot. He was lethargic and plagued with a persistent wet cough, respiratory infections and painful headaches. As the school year wound down, Matthew's health worsened. In all, Matthew missed 53 days of school. But over the summer, a strange thing happened. Matthew was healthy. He was energetic. "When we put him back in school this year, within three weeks, he missed 10 days with a respiratory infection," Melissa Asselin said. That's when she had an a-ha moment. "When he was out of school, he was well.

In 1918, Alexander Inglis said about the true goal of public education "Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole."
1) The adjustive or adaptive function.
2) The integrating function.
3) The diagnostic and directive function.
4) The differentiating function.
5) The selective function.
6) The propaedeutic function.

Air Force Academy: Training Ground for future soldiers. Now those the believe in 'the Rule of 3' and other Earth-based religions get a designated worship area. Since this is a Military Academy, you can better believe tax dollars are involved.

"It's about our commitment as airmen to protect freedom and defend freedom. To me this is a freedom thing," he [Lt. Col. William Ziegler, one of the academy's chaplains] said.

So where's the designated worship area for the Sceintologists? Satanists?

I am writing in the hope that you would do a story on how FCAT preparation negatively impacts opportunities for creative play, exercise, physical education, and family time. Specifically, Nob Hill Elementary has failed to provide physical education in accordance with State law.

On April 17, the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, reported on a military exercise dubbed “Mangudai,” named after the special forces of Genghis Khan’s Mongol army who could fight for days without food or sleep. The Kentucky newspaper portrayed the exercise as an effort to train soldiers to battle the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does not endorse spanking for any reason, citing its lack of long-term effectiveness as a behavior-changing tactic. Instead the AAP supports strategies such as time-outs when children misbehave, which focus on getting kids to reflect on their behavior and the consequences of their actions.