———————————————
 

 
The Miami Heat and New York Knicks are playing this week in the first round of the NBA playoffs. After a controversial flagrant foul call on Saturday, all eyes will be on Heat superstar LeBron James and Knicks center Tyson Chandler.
 
Which has us at Mathalicious HQ wondering, Who’s better? In particular, who was the better scorer during the 2011-12 regular season? Name recognition aside, our analysis may surprise you.
 
Using stats from the NBA website, we broke down each player’s performance by shot type.
 

POINTS MADE
	3-pointers		2-pointers		Free Throws
	Shots Made	Points Made	Shots Made	Points Made	Shots Made	Points Made
Tyson	0	0	241	482	217	217
LeBron	54	162	567	1,134	387	387

 
In the regular season, LeBron contributed 1,683 points to Tyson’s 699 and outscored him in every shot category. When we take into account playing time — points per game and points per minute — we see that LeBron outperformed Tyson there, too.
 

 
Based on this, it seems obvious: LeBron is the dominant offensive player.
 
But there’s a catch. When we talk about how good a player offensively, we tend to focus only on the points they score. But what about the points they miss?
 

POINTS MISSED
	3-pointers		2-pointers		Free Throws
	Shots Missed	Points Missed	Shots Missed	Points Missed	Shots Missed	Points Missed
Tyson	2	6	112	224	98	98
LeBron	95	285	453	906	115	115

 
When we re-analyze the data, we find that LeBron missed 1,306 points worth of shots, while Tyson — who tends to take safer, higher-percentage shots — only missed 328. We can then combine this with the previous numbers to come up with a new statistic, “net” points (pardon the pun): points made – points missed.
 

 
When we take into account points missed, the results look very different. Before, LeBron was clearly the dominant scorer, but it now appears that he and Tyson performed roughly the same during the 2011-12 regular season. Mathematically it seems like Tyson Chandler and LeBron James are identical players when it comes to offensive output. (Actually, Tyson comes out a bit ahead, since he averaged 12.5% more points for every minute he was on the court.)
 
Of course, it may be a bit disingenuous to rely too heavily on “points missed.” After all, just because a player misses a 3-pointer doesn’t necessarily mean he “costs” his team three points. For one thing, a teammate may have gotten the rebound and scored (in which case the missed shot was more like an assist). Also, deducting “missed” points implicitly assumes that there’s something to deduct them from — that the team was going to score otherwise — when in reality there’s no guarantee that this will happen on any given possession.
 
We have to be skeptical of the Tyson=LeBron conclusion for another reason, too: it’s totally contrary to what almost any NBA fan, player or coach would say. If you ask who they’d rather take the final shot — Tyson Chandler or LeBron James — most would pick the latter. LeBron is a superstar, and part of being a superstar means taking difficult, off-balance, buzzer-beater shots…
 

 
…and sometimes missing.
 
At the end of the day, relying on “points missed” may unfairly penalize LeBron for missing a shot that probably wasn’t going to go in, but that the Heat needed him to take anyway. Casey may have struck out, but he was still the guy Mudville wanted at bat.
 
Still, this doesn’t mean we should dismiss “points missed” altogether. While calculating “net” points may not be perfect, it’s still a more accurate indicator of offensive contribution than “points made” alone. By over-emphasizing this, we implicitly favor ball-hogs who take lots of shots even if they’re not very good ones, even if there was a higher percentage shot one skip-pass away. Meanwhile we risk overlooking players who don’t shoot as often but whose shots have a better chance of going in…players like Tyson Chandler, whose 2011-12 regular season field goal percentage was among the highest in NBA history.
 
So who’s a better scorer: LeBron or Tyson? On one hand, LeBron James is an undisputed all-star and we should be skeptical of anything that suggests otherwise.
 
On the other hand, we should also be skeptical of our skepticism. Because math doesn’t lie. It may mislead, but so too do the billboards and the hype and all the other things that over time have convinced us that LeBron is the best offensive player on the floor. Maybe he is.
 
Then again, maybe Tyson Chandler is just as good.
 
Note: we’re sure that many NBA fans are crying foul (though perhaps not too many Knicks fans). How could anyone suggest that Tyson Chandler is a better player than LeBron James?! So before anyone charges the court, let’s remember what we’re asking: we’re not asking who’s the better player, which would involve assists, rebounds, steals, etc. Rather, we’re simply asking who was the better scorer during the 2011-12 regular season. And on paper, at least…
 
———————————————
 

Wouldn’t it be great if students learned math through conversations like these? They can, but we need your help to make it happen.

 

 
If so, please support our Kickstarter project for Math52, a video series offering a fresh vision of how to teach math. To be successful, though, we need to raise $164,000 by June 16. So far the biggest backers have been teachers themselves, but they need help from people who make more than $40,000/year.
 
So here’s what we propose:
 
Tyson Chandler made $13,000,000 this season and LeBron James made $15,000,000. Both of these guys could fund Math52 for what they make in a single game…and that’s exactly what we’re asking. We’re asking the player whose team loses the playoffs to donate a single game’s salary to help improve education for thousands of teachers and millions of students across the country. The playoffs will end, but the impact of this generosity would last forever.
 
The Heat are leading the Knicks 2-0 in the 7-game series. The series could end as early as May 6. Here’s what we need you to do between now and then:
 
1. Visit www.Math52.com to show your support

2. Tell your friends on Facebook about how Math52 is trying to Kickstart a revolution in math education and needs their help

3. Send the following tweet to LeBron James and Tyson Chandler, and encourage everyone you know to do the same: @kingjames @tysonchandler Help make country smarter! I challenge winner to donate final game $ to Math52.com bit.ly/KpfSAS
 

 
Let’s help teachers engage their students with great conversations and teach math at the same time! Let’s offer the world something valuable! Let’s make it happen!

How does your enjoyment change as you eat more candy on Halloween…
…and what is the relationship between income and happiness?

 
The debate on Dan’s site revolves around the teacher’s role in posing questions. If a student comes up with a question that’s more obvious but less rich than the one the teacher had in mind, can the teacher trump? (It’s actually a bit more nuanced than this and gets to the proper delivery of Socratic questions, but it’s the gist.)
 
For the most part, 101qs is motivated by, No, the process works best when questions come from students themselves. There is truth to this and works very well in certain situations.
 
At the same time, it’s unlikely that a 13 year-old is going to come up with the question, Based on behavioral economics, how much is $1 really worth? That’s where the teacher comes in and says, You may not have thought of this, but I did. And now I’d like you to explore it and see where it takes you.
 
Asking which version is more interesting is a bit like asking which is better: hip-hop or jazz. (And I’m sure anyone reading this will agree that multiple choice tests, while easy to grade, are a bit silly.)
 
Still, everyone has a preference and I’m no different. I started Mathalicious because I find myself inspired by these types of questions and would like to live in a world where middle school students can have them, too. I think this is important not only for intellectual reasons but also social ones. We live in a country that seems less and less able to have a conversation with itself — that tears itself apart over healthcare reform and seems more interested in talking points than talking — and I believe that math lessons, intentionally crafted, can help change that. That they can put teachers in a position to not only teach calculus in eighth grade (as in the case of the candy lesson) but also to provide their students a more holistic way of viewing the world:
 
How much is $1 worth? It depends on how many you have.
 
This awareness starts with a question, too. Even if this question can’t be encapsulated in a photograph, I still think it’s interesting. Even when the question isn’t obvious to an eighth grader — perhaps especially when it’s not obvious — I still think it’s worth asking.
 

 
Because at the end of the day, I’m more interested in the content of the video than I am in how long it’ll take to upload. Does this mean I think my version of “interesting” is better than the type presented on 101qs.com? No. If I were still teaching, I’d incorporate both because I think they’re both valuable.
 
And I suspect Dan does, too.
 

Mathalicious Kickstarts a Fresh Way to Teach with Math52

Alexandria, VA – 04/25/2012
 
Today, Mathalicious, a leader in innovative math curriculum, launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Math52. Math52 is a video series that explores creative applications of math in everyday life. Each week for a year Mathalicious will release a new video accompanied by a lesson for classroom use that will help teachers engage their students and transform what it means to teach math.
 
American high school students perform far below their foreign peers in math which puts America’s role as global high-tech leader is at risk. According to a 2009 Raytheon report, 61 percent of middle school students would rather take out the garbage than do their math homework. Much of this is due to ineffective math instruction and the widespread student belief that mathematics is irrelevant to their lives. Through the Math52 video series, Mathalicious will help teachers teach math in a way that engages their students and challenges them to think about the world differently.
 
The Math52 video series will explore such topics as:
 
- Do people with small feet pay too much for shoes and should Nike charge by weight?
- Is it ever a good idea to buy AppleCare and what can this tell us about health insurance?
- How far would you have to run to burn off a Big Mac and what would happen if fast food restaurants rewrote their menus in terms of exercise?
 
“People across the country are frustrated with education and want to help,” explains Mathalicious founder Karim Ani, “but aren’t sure how. Kickstarter is an incredible platform for people to support something they care about and that really matters. For less than what LeBron James makes in a single game, we can transform the way millions of children learn and help create a smarter, healthier and more curious generation of students.” Mathalicious plans to raise $164,000 through this Kickstarter campaign.
 
About Mathalicious:
 
Since 2009, Mathalicious has provided teachers across the country with lessons that help them teach standards-based math through real-world topics that students care about. Find Mathalicious online at www.mathalicious.com, and on Facebook and Twitter.
 
To learn more and view the Kickstarter project, visit www.math52.com.
 
###

Name & Age	Alonso, 20	Beatriz, 47	Chris, 63	Delilah, 76
Health Status	Healthy	High B.P.	Double bypass	Mostly healthy
Odds of Surgery	1%	25%	50%	16%
E.V., Insurance	$400	$10,000	$20,000	$6,400

 
As you can see, everyone has a different expected value for health insurance. The higher someone’s risk, the more insurance is worth to them. Since Alonso is young and relatively low-risk, he only “expects” to spend $400 on heart surgeries and is therefore only willing to pay $400 for health insurance. He still wants it — who wouldn’t want AppleCare, after all? — but only at a certain price. Chris, on the other hand, has a history of heart problems, is much higher-risk and is therefore willing to spend much more. (Oh, we’ll also assume that everyone could afford an insurance policy at any price. It turns out that Econ 101 is a slippery slope towards the absurd.)
 
Now we know how much everyone is willing to pay for health insurance. But this is only half the story. We also need to know how much the insurance company plans to charge.
 
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume the insurance company — like Apple — charges everyone the same price for health insurance. In this case, how much will it cost?
 
In this magical country where everyone knows their likelihood of needing surgery, Alonso & Co. aren’t the only ones pulling out their calculators. The insurance company “expects” to spend $400 on Alonso, $10,000 on Beatriz, etc. If everyone buys insurance, the company expects to spend $36,800 on heart surgeries in total. To stay in business, the company must charge $9,200/person.
 
But at that price, will everyone buy it? This is where things start to get interesting…
 

 
For Beatriz and Chris, insurance is worth $10,000 and $20,000, respectively. To them, $9,200 is a bargain and they’ll buy insurance in Year 1. But Alonso and Delilah won’t; insurance costs more than their expected values, so they’ll decide to save their money and roll the dice.
 
From the consumers’ perspective, the whole system is working just fine. If they want insurance, they’ll buy it. If they don’t, they won’t.
 
From the insurance company’s perspective, though, things aren’t so great. The low-risk people have left the pool, leaving the company with higher-risk customers. This is what economists call adverse selection: the only people who buy insurance are the ones who really need it, i.e. the customers the insurance company wants the least.
 
Since Alonso and Delilah have opted out, the company now expects to spend $30,000 in heart surgeries. This is less than the $36,800 from before, but now it’s only divided between two people. What this means is that in Year 2 they’ll have to raise the price to $15,000/person…at which point Beatriz will bolt.
 

 
To summarize, after two years only 25% of the population has health insurance, which leaves the rest vulnerable to a freak heart attack. Meanwhile, the price of a policy has jumped by over 60%. What a mess! Is there a way to fix this?
 
“Yes,” the insurance company CEO says. “The reason insurance is so expensive is because of high-risk people like Chris. If we didn’t have to sell insurance to him, we could make it cheaper for everyone else.” (Alternatively, the insurance company could sell insurance to Chris but simply not cover his heart condition. After all, Apple won’t sell AppleCare for an iPad that’s already broken, so why should a heart be any different? Since heart surgery is the only procedure in our hypothetical country, though, this pre-existing condition clause is somewhat moot.)
 

 
In this case, insurance does cost less in both Years 1 and 2. Like before, though, only 25% of the population is insured by Year 2; it’s just Beatriz this time. Looks like we’re still in trouble.
 
“But wait,” says Chris. “It’s not my fault insurance is so expensive. It’s Alonso’s! If everyone were required to buy insurance, it would be a lot cheaper.”
 

 
As you can see, Chris is right: insurance is cheaper…for him. This individual mandate effectively saves him and Beatriz $10,800 and $800, respectively. On the other hand, it forces Alonso and Delilah to spend way more than they’d like. Each year Alonso has to pay 23 times what insurance is worth to him, even though he only has a 1% chance of needing it. The mandate extends a hand to high-risk people…but requires low-risk people to foot the bill!
 
Clearly there are still some kinks in our insurance market.
 
But wait. Throughout this process we’ve been treating health insurance as equivalent to AppleCare. In reality, of course, they’re very different. If your iPad breaks and you don’t have AppleCare, you might have to shell out for a new one. But if you break and you don’t have health insurance, you could go bankrupt or even die. Because the possible consequences of not having insurance are so great, people often buy it even when it costs more than its expected value.
 
Returning to our hypothetical country, let’s imagine that everyone is actually willing to pay 1.5 times their expected values for health insurance; instead of $400, Alonso is now willing to spend $600. Since everyone’s chances of needing surgery haven’t changed, of course, the insurance company still expects to spend the same as before.
 

 
Instead of 25%, now 50% of the population has insurance. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely better than before. The higher-risk people are insured. The lower-risk people aren’t. And maybe it’d be okay to leave things like this. Okay, that is, until…
 
Alonso has a heart attack.
 
Unlike Apple and a broken iPad, the law requires hospitals to provide emergency care even when patients don’t have health insurance. (Even if the law didn’t require this, the Hippocratic Oath might.) To stay in business, the hospital will pass the $40,000 cost onto the insurance company, which will in turn pass the cost onto Beatriz and Chris. In Year 3 the price of an insurance policy will rise from $12,133 to $32,133. At which point nobody will buy it. At which point the insurance company will go out of business. At which point the hospital will, too.
 
Which is to say, if there’s a 1% chance that an uninsured Alonso will have a heart attack, then there’s a 1% chance that the entire healthcare market will suffer a nuclear meltdown. Hmph.
 
Of course, this is a very simplified model. In reality we don’t live in a country with four people, and there’s much more to insure against than just a heart attack. Furthermore, individuals may have very little idea of how likely they are to need medical care (although insurance companies have a very good idea of how much customers will cost and price their policies to guarantee that they not only break even but generate huge profits for their shareholders).
 
Unlike in our hypothetical country, the health insurance industry in the United States hasn’t disintegrated beneath the weight of cause-and-effect, and lots of Americans have health insurance.
 
Then again, lots don’t. People with pre-existing conditions often can’t get insurance or can’t afford it. Young and otherwise healthy people do get into car accidents every once in a while. And because of this “free-riding,” people who do have insurance pay on average $1000 more for their policy than they would otherwise.
 
Which is to say, as simplified as our model is, it still highlights the general forces at play in any health insurance market. And as contentious as the discussion has been surrounding health care in America, the issue itself is relatively straightforward and comes down to basic math. If we can understand expected value — if we can understand how insurance is similar to AppleCare and how it’s different — we’ll be much more able to discuss how to address heart attacks without actually having one.

d(t) = (4t)^2 = 16t^2.

 
According to the song, Javert fell for eight seconds, meaning the bridge must have been (16)(8^2) = 1024 feet tall. To put this in perspective, the Golden Gate Bridge is only 200 feet, while the Eiffel Tower is 1063 feet!
 
It gets even crazier when you ask, “How fast was Javert traveling when he hit the water?” To answer this, we can create a table to estimate the speed over various time intervals.
 

From this, we see that Javert would have been traveling between 240-272 feet per second, or 160-185 mph, when he hit the water. (If the actor could have held the note for 27 more seconds, he would have broken the sound barrier…and probably won a Tony, too.) With a little calculus, we can be even more accurate:
 

s(t) = 32t = 32(8) = 256 ft./sec. 

 
Of course, this whole scenario is a bit absurd.
 

 
If we assume that the average Parisian bridge to be 30 feet tall, then Javert would have really fallen for
 

d(t) = 16t^2
30 = 16t^2
1.875 = t^2
t = 1.37 seconds

 
at a speed of s(t) = 32t = 32(1.37) = 44 ft./sec., or around 30 mph. In other words, perhaps it should have looked like this:
 

 
In the end, maybe community theater actors aren’t worse singers than their Broadway colleagues. Maybe they’re just better mathematicians!

Because a large segment of the material in IPI is presented in programmed form, the questions often require filling in blanks or selecting a correct answer. Therefore, this mode of instruction places and emphasis on answers rather than on the mathematical processes involved.

In other words, students who used IPI may have identified that 1 + 1 = 2 on a multiple choice test, even without understanding the concept of addition. As we might expect, Erlwanger concluded that IPI did not help students learn math in any meaningful way, but instead

Through using IPI, learning mathematics has become a “wild good chase” in which [the student] is chasing particular answers.

Erlwanger’s “wild goose chase” finding should come as no surprise. As anyone who’s ever taken traffic school knows, there’s a big difference between passing a test and learning the material.
 
To recap: rote procedure; multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions; lack of conceptual understanding; ineffective. Though this was written in the 1970s, it still applies today:
 

 
Of course, fans of Khan Academy — which, to be fair, includes many teachers, parents and administrators — say that their students are engaged and performing better than ever. Still, this may be a false sense of security. The Khan Academy computer may conclude that students have learned math — the students, teachers and parents may, too — but all they will have really learned is how to game the system. Indeed, that’s all it asks them to do!
 
In the end, Erlwanger concluded what numerous studies have since: that the best way for a student to learn math is to work closely with a teacher trained in pedagogy and supported by effective curriculum. There are no shortcuts.
 
Yet even with all this evidence, many people continue to believe…
 
 
THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT
 
I attended a conference recently where an influential proponent of Khan Academy began his keynote by promising, “You know, every year we say, ‘This time it’s different,’ but we always end up right back where we started. Well, this time it really is.”
 
The reasons, he explained, were twofold. First, technology has finally gotten to a point on the exponential growth curve where we can create “adaptive learning” systems that analyze student behavior and tailor personalized learning opportunities just for them. Second, schools and districts are finally under such budgetary pressure that they’ll have no choice but to adopt resources like Khan Academy.
 
There are a number of problems with this argument. For one, proponents of educational technologies — laptops, tablets, interactive whiteboards, etc. — have been making similar claims for years, yet student outcomes are as bad as ever (if not worse). Not only that, the budget cuts he seemed so giddy about invariably mean fewer teachers, and to argue that this is somehow beneficial to learning is to argue against years of research and practice.
 
When we say that Khan Academy will revolutionize education, what we’re really saying is that the rules no longer apply; that everything we’ve learned about how humans learn is just one microprocessor away from obsolescence.
 
Nowhere is this philosophy more widespread than in Silicon Valley, which in recent years has become the epicenter for educational innovation and investment. On one hand this is great. Education is a mess — it’s bureaucratic, resistant to change — and could use some of the ingenuity that characterizes the Bay Area.
 
On the other hand, Silicon Valley has a very particular mindset: a secular faith that technology is the solution to everything. Have a bunch of stuff that you want to sell? eBay. Tired of waiting in line at the bank? PayPal. This works well when you want a new way to distribute coupons, but it’s problematic when we try to impose technological solutions on problems that aren’t technological in nature.
 
And at its heart, education remains a fundamentally human endeavor. Yes, there are places technology can help — Edmodo helps teachers connect with one another, while Better Lesson provides a platform for them to share their lessons — but these only work if there are good teachers and better lessons in the first place. (Of course, these companies already know this: both were founded by teachers!)
 
In the end, the “exponential growth + budget cuts = Khan Academy” argument is a non sequitur. After all, industrial farmers have made incredible leaps in bioengineering, while thousands of families across the country struggle to make ends meet. Still, it doesn’t follow that McDonald’s is therefore the solution to the hunger crisis.
 

 
Ultimately, the biggest problem with the “this time it’s different” mentality is what it says about our collective ability to tackle large, complicated challenges. By appointing what is objectively a website for homework help as the “next big thing” in education, we’re simply holding our breath for a simple solution. Instead of getting our hands dirty, we’re putting all of our chips on a shiny new toy.
 
And that’s the danger. Today it’s Khan Academy. But when that doesn’t pan out — and it won’t — we’ll move on to something else tomorrow. Meanwhile, the longer we keep telling ourselves that this time it’s different, the longer things will stay the same.
 
Still, this may not matter so long as …
 
 
GOOD ENOUGH IS GOOD ENOUGH
 
There’s a telling scene in the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley in which a young Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are debating the merits of Macintosh vs. Windows:
 

 
To a large extent, Gates’s best doesn’t matter mentality has come to define what we expect from public education in the United States. For all the talk about turning students into creative problem solvers and 21st century critical thinkers, the truth is that our current system still very much revolves around the institutionalized mediocrity of standardized testing.
 
In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama urged:
 

 
Yet presidential pardons notwithstanding, as long as we tell kids that the state test is the raison d’etre of the school year — as long as we evaluate (and even pay) teachers based on test scores, and shutter schools that fail to meet adequate yearly progress — this is just rhetoric. We can talk all we want about moving beyond testing, but it’s still the only thing that people are immediately incentivized to care about.
 
In this environment, Khan Academy is very much like Windows itself: good enough. It helps students do their homework. It may even help them pass the end-of-year state tests. Indeed, the website is a wonderful resource for people looking to bone up on basic skills, and certainly makes good on its promise to “help you learn what you want, when you want.”
 
But that’s the problem. What we want isn’t necessarily what we need.
 
Of course, because so many of us experienced math education in the same rote way, we may not even know what we need; we may have trouble envisioning it. It’s like living in a world of black & white; someone can tell you about color, but it doesn’t mean much until you actually experience it!
 
By all measures, Khan Academy offers substandard math instruction. It focuses exclusively on basic skills. It has no pedagogical underpinnings, and we have decades of research that demonstrate that it doesn’t work. Yet we love it, and think it has the potential to revolutionize education. It’s nobody’s fault. We just don’t know any better. It’s the inevitable product of optimism and ignorance.
 
Still, even if we woke up and were suddenly able to see in color, it might be too late. And this is one of the most overlooked — and ironic — consequences of Khan Academy:
 
 
KHAN ACADEMY MAKES IT DIFFICULT FOR SOMETHING BETTER TO COME ALONG
 
One of Khan Academy’s biggest selling points is that it’s free. For schools and districts across the country faced with budget cuts, Khan Academy sounds like a godsend.
 
Except it’s not really free. Just as corn subsidies allow the price of a Big Mac to remain artificially low, the millions of dollars that well-meaning philanthropists have donated to Khan Academy have distorted the market for educational resources. In the name of leveling the playing field for students, they’ve inadvertently created barriers for other organizations whose products may be better, but also more expensive.
 
At first glance this may not seem like a big deal. And who can begrudge Sal’s commitment to providing, as the website claims, a “free world-class education to anyone anywhere?”
 
The problem, of course, is it’s not world-class. It’s just free. Yet for an administrator in a cash-strapped district — and particularly one desperate to raise test scores — this may be all that matters. They save money in the short term, but end up losing out in the long.
 
It’s a conundrum.
 
On one level, it’s great that Khan Academy doesn’t charge. I’ve heard Sal speak at various conferences, and I truly admire his commitment to sharing his knowledge with the world at no cost. (As cheesy as that sounds, it’s true. I’m sure he could have sold Khan Academy for millions, but he hasn’t.)
 
On another level, though, Khan Academy and its donors may preclude better products from coming along: products built by experts that actually can improve how students learn. And ultimately, this may be the most dangerous thing about Khan Academy: not that it exists, but that it’s the only thing that does.
 
For as long as we remain hypnotized by the Siren song of free, then we risk postponing the conversation about what better might look like. As long as students and parents are convinced that earning a Black Hole badge is the same as learning — as long as schools and districts giddily delude themselves that it’s possible to solve the problem with the problem — then we’ll remain shipwrecked on the rocks.
 
And if this happens, “free” will end up costing a lot.
 
 
THAT WAS A BUMMER. SO NOW WHAT?
 
I know this seems like a downer. I’m sure it sounds like I’m a Khan Academy hater. I’m not.
 
I actually really like Khan Academy. (Seriously.) I’ve used it, enjoyed it, and think the world is better for it. Thousands of videos on everything from biology to credit default swaps and millions of “lessons delivered?” This is incredible, and I’d be a fool to argue against that.
 
But we’d be equally foolish to hold it up as the panacea for all that ails education. Khan Academy is great for what it is — a supplemental resource; homework help — but we’ve turned it into something it’s not. Indeed, something it was never intended to be.
 
It’s worth remembering the origins of Khan Academy. Sal started the site to help tutor his cousins in math, not to become the so-called “Moses of math education.” And yet that’s exactly how we’ve coronated him. In a fit of irrational exuberance mixed with an obsession with celebrity, we’ve taken someone who never taught a day in his life and appointed him America’s Professor. It’s silly. And also very dangerous.
 
But it’s not Sal’s fault. It’s ours. We have allowed desire to trump reason, and a rose-colored media narrative to overshadow everything we’ve learned about how students learn (not to mention our own common sense). We’ve begun to beat the drums, and that rarely turns out well.
 
There’s no question that we have a crisis in education, but fixing it requires more than a Wacom tablet. To address our challenges, we need to do what every other successful country has done: invest in professional development; give teachers more time to collaborate; and provide them with resources that help them not only meet the learning standards, but exceed them.
 
This isn’t rocket science. It’s not new. We’ve always needed to do these things, and deluding ourselves that “this time it’s different” won’t just perpetuate the problem. It’ll make it worse.
 

 
I heard Sal speak at a conference once, and he explained why people like his videos so much. “They sound so casual,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll sit down and start recording without even knowing what I’m going to say.”
 
It’s fine for Sal to be casual; he gives homework help. But teaching is different. It’s intentional. Socrates didn’t just wing it.
 
And this is the biggest danger of all: that we ignore this. Because the president was right: teachers do matter. Steve Jobs was right: quality does matter. Because in all things — but education especially — Good Enough isn’t.

In his recent book Born to be Good, author Dacher Keltner describes a “jen ratio” in which positive messages/observations are in the numerator, while negative ones are in the denominator. For instance, imagine we’re at a park and witness the following:

• A brother shares his ice-cream with his sister (+)
• A mother hugs her child (+)
• Two teenagers tease another (-)
• A man hits his dog with a newspaper and yells, “No!” (-)
• A roller-blader falls, and a stranger helps her up (+)

Here, the ratio of positive:negative observations is 3:2, so our jen ratio is 1.5. The lower the ratio, the worse we feel. The higher, the better, and the more attuned we are to the better angels of our nature.

Of course, these examples are hypothetical, so let’s look at something real. If aliens visited this morning’s CNN homepage, what would they conclude about the state of human jen? (Click image to enlarge.)

In the Mathalicious lesson Jen Playlist, students explore this jen ratio in more depth. They begin Act Two by watching a mashup of news clips & TV shows which are predominantly negative, including the 1999 “breaking news” about Columbine, and clips from the X-Factor in which Simon Cowell insults everyone on stage. Told that many consider a good jen ratio to be 5:1, students calculate the number of positive messages they’d need to make up for the negativity, and then watch a series of positive videos in attempt to get the jen ratio back on track. The lesson ends on a high note, and hopefully students will carry that positive energy with them for the rest of the day, and even share it with others.

What was so interesting to me when writing the lesson, though, was how much easier it was to find negative examples than positive ones. Newspaper headlines. Music videos. I considered including Ice-T’s It Was a Good Day until I remembered why it was such a good day in the first place (“I didn’t even have to use my AK”).

I was excited, then, to read Nicholas Kristoff’s editorial in this morning’s New York Times. His article, Are We Getting Nicer?, begins,

It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet. So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries. War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer.

I appreciate Kristoff’s sentiment, and would love to agree that humans are “getting nicer.” But notice how he defines “progress.” It’s not that we’re necessarily becoming more peaceful and more tolerant, but simply less violent and less racist. We no longer expect women to stay at home with the kids, but we’re not exactly rallying for equal pay, either.

Mathematically, the absence of negative is not the same as positive. It’s one thing to refrain from kicking the roller-blader when she’s down, but quite another to help her up. And so I’m left to wonder: is it that we humans are getting nicer, or simply less mean?

Ultimately, there’s no way to know. Newspapers, political debates: they all feed off of some kind of division, and using them as a barometer for humanity’s jen ratio sets us up for disappointment at worst, ambivalence at best. Ultimately, I suppose it’s an act of faith of sorts: do you believe that humans are inherently negative, or do you believe that we’re positive? Put another way, do you agree with Dacher Keltner that we’re “Born to Be Good?”

I do.

Since writing the Jen Playlist lesson, I’ve found myself passing over the negative headlines and focusing more on the positive ones. It’s not conscious. It’s not that I’m intentionally trying to increase my jen ratio as part of some mathematical experiment, but simply that the positive messages feel more authentic. They resonate more deeply. The negative messages don’t feel false, but they don’t feel true, either.

Fortunately, there are examples out there that do feel true. Examples that vibrate with such pure energy that I can’t help but be moved, that I can’t help but feel more optimistic. That I can’t help but become…nicer.

Here’s one. It’s great and I love it. I hope you enjoy it. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy jen ratio’ing.