Sunday, March 30, 2014

Building A House

I went to CUE 14 in Palm Springs and saw keynote speaker Sal Kahn of Kahn Academy.  He made a great analogy in his speech I wanted to share.

Imagine that instead of building a student’s knowledge you are building a house.

You get a contractor to work on the foundation with a specified timeline. He does what he can in the time given, and an inspector comes to take a look. He examines it, says its about 75 percent good. You say, "OK, that’s a C+, so let's move on to building the next floor!" The contractor builds it, and inspector says it’s about 90 percent. You think "Great!" and  move onto floor three.

Eventually you're working on the sixth floor and the whole house tumbles down.

You want to blame the contractor, claiming he wasn’t good enough. You will also want to blame the inspector. But the truth is, you were aware of the deficiencies. You just ignored them.

How can we expect kids to learn when we rush them through the process of learning?

Interesting ...