Khan Academy

One of the important parts of my tutoring is Mathematics. Currently I'm capable of teaching Maths up to Year 8. There are sections of the Stage 5 curriculum that I can teach as well, but I don't know all of it well enough to teach so I can't advertise myself as a K-10 Maths tutor.

I currently have some Year 8 students who I will lose at the end of the year unless I know the Stage 5 curriculum. So there's a financial and personal motivation to improve my Maths skills. They're all great kids who I love working with. 

Consequently I've decided to do work to improve my Maths, I've picked up a copy of the fine instruction book Understanding Maths Years 9 and 10. I use some of their books with the kids anyway because they're well laid out and place a lot of emphasis upon clear explanations with fully worked examples. You can pick up a copy from http://www.understandingmaths.com/. I'll be using this to assist me in updating my skills in some of these topics.

The big focus of my efforts has been at Khan Academy. This is another site I use with my students and it's a fantastic site. It's completely free and is intended to remain that way. It provides Mathematics instruction from primary school level to the end of high school. It's also providing instruction in a few other subjects with the long term goal being to offer  "A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere". It's not there yet, but it's a hell of a good site even so.

The site offers activities for you to complete about varying topics, to pass an activity you need to correctly answer 5 questions in a row. Instructional hints and explanatory videos are included to help you understand the topic. To master a topic you need to go through 4 levels, but you can complete Mastery challenges on subsequent days rather than completing another full activity. Additionally, you earn energy points for every activity and those energy points help you earn badges of achievement. You also earn badges for varying other things, such as quick, accurate work, persistence on a difficult topic, consistently working at the site on a daily basis, participating in forums, among numerous other things.

I like the motivational side of it and rather enjoy collecting points - I have 160 000 so far and hope to become a millionaire one day :) The hints work very well at explaining something if I don't get it. I find that the videos are of mixed quality, some of them explain the topic at hand very well, some of them simply haven't explained it fully enough, they've explained one part of the topic but not that part that I didn't understand!

I'm currently visiting the site and using it on a daily basis and I expect that to continue for a while as I'm having fun. It's all very well to have the long term goal of being a better qualified tutor but that isn't going to be enough to motivate me to do the necessary hours unless I'm enjoying the process of improving my skills. And I am.

Part of that is because it's a chance to put right what happened over a quarter of a century ago to my Maths performance in high school. At the end of Year 6 I was in the top 4 of my primary school in Maths, by Year 12 I finished about 55th out of 60 in 2 Unit Maths! And 26th out of 26 in Physics! OK, that was largely because I didn't do any work, apparently you need to work hard at new material in order to learn it - who'd have thunk it?

Nevertheless, pointing out that I wasn't working is the superficial answer - the real question is why wasn't I working? I was certainly suitably dedicated in all my humanities subjects and achieved results that reflected that. I've thought about this many times over the years, as I was a serious student, I may have been a bit lazy with the odd homework assignment, but doing well at school was important to me, being "smart" was the dominant part of my self-concept so it was  uncharacteristic for me to allow some critical subjects to go to pieces, it wasn't because I didn't value Maths in the way I didn't value Industrial Arts or some other subjects that weren't directly academic.

The problem was that I didn't know how to handle failure - I found some parts of high school Maths to be difficult and I didn't understand them, lacking anyone to explain them to me I decided giving up was better than admitting that I wasn't smart - 'smart' people should be able to get it right was my thinking. The idea that giving up on important subjects and failing them outright is the antithesis of smart never occurred to me :). I preferred to fail where I had a convenient excuse in that I didn't try as opposed to doing my best and still failing which was what I felt was happening.

That fear of failure leading to quitting something has turned up in other contexts subsequently so it's something I find I need to be watchful of when I'm trying to improve myself. But it hasn't been a problem so far because I have all these options to find out the information - beyond the resources offered by Khan Academy or my books, there's an ocean of additional resources a mere Google search away. So I feel very confident that if I can't work something out, that I'll be able to given some persistence.

Additionally, there's no pressure to pass exams and do a set amount of work every day, I'm doing it because I'm enjoying the learning. It makes little noises when I get a question right!  Yesterday I was looking at the topics that I will be studying once I finish my current Khan Academy mission and I'm looking forward to them. I never did get the hang of trigonometry at school and I only understood certain parts of calculus and I am excited about the prospect of finally being able to say that I can do it!

The ultra competitive little know it all that I was in high school is still cut about having failed at Maths, it still burns that I couldn't stand the heat in that particular kitchen.There's a little bit of redemption going on every time I log on to Khan Academy.

I don't get that from Bejeweled Blitz.