Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores | Sal Khan
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it when discussing how gaps in basic knowledge pile up and how mastery learning could fix that.
What it is
Sal Khan of Khan Academy argues that schools push students forward with gaps in their foundations, and that students should instead master concepts at their own pace. He compares it to building a house on an unfinished foundation.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2016 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Recommends icc97 · 2017-01 · on “When You Are Depressed, Make Something”
I've run across this quote a few times recently and like it a lot. But there's always the nagging doubt / imposter syndrome telling that you don't really have taste either. Like the people who can taste good food, can't necessarily cook good food. Perhaps it's just enough that you care about something and want to get good at it. I liked Sal Khan's TED lecture [0] about the possibility of us all having the capacity to be cancer researchers in the same vein that people 200 years ago assumed that only the best would be able to read. [0]: [this video]
Recommends JesseAldridge · 2018-08 · on “Learning Math for Machine Learning”
I think a lot of people need to start from the basics because they don't have a good foundation in math. The core problem is schools will push you along if you can somehow produce the correct answer for 70% of the problems on a test. Combine this with intense pressure not to fail and you will very likely end up in higher level math courses with many gaping holes in your foundational knowledge. You thus end up relying on tricks and memorization rather than useful understanding. Here is a TED talk where Sal Khan of Khan Academy talks about this: [this video] After struggling to understand advanced math in a lot different contexts I decided to go through the entire K-12 set of exercises on Khan Acad
Cites sjayasinghe · 2016-12 · on “Show HN: Skov – A visual programming environment”
In many cases what differentiates a programmer who is better at dealing with inherent complexity than another has a lot to do with the ability to apply the right patterns, tools, or strategies under the right circumstances. This ability is largely influenced by having been exposed to similar problems in the past and having applied various strategies to solve those problems. One reason why a lot of programmers struggle is because our current educational systems do not expose students to computational thinking at an early age. They've simply not have had enough exposure to that kind of thinking. Even though computational thinking draws on computer science as a formal discipline the insights ar