Episode 2: Why is my child doing so many worksheets right now?

Hi, Diane.

Hey. I was hoping you could help me out with something. Carson has been pretty engaged in the classroom, but now he's really struggling working on his own.

Distance learning is only a few days

a week at his school and otherwise he's supposed to learn from linked videos and textbooks, but when he reads the

material, he just doesn't seem to get it.

This isn't the way he learns and

I'm not sure what I can do to help him.

Can you help me?

Hey, I'm Diane Tabner.

And I'm Michael Horne. Thanks for joining us on Class Disrupted, a podcast that looks at how the pandemic has disrupted school and how we can approach teaching and learning differently to better meet students needs.

In the last episode we talked about how getting Internet and computers to every student is an achievable goal and why it's worth it.

And today we want to talk more about the worth it part and get into digital learning tools. Diane I'm going to be honest. I'm for one excited to explain what digital tools look like and how as with most tools, some are great and some really aren't. In other words, just because it's digital doesn't inherently make it good or bad. To help us, we're going to hear from Larry Berger, whose company, Amplify, is on the forefront of designing some of the best digital learning tools in the world. He'll help us learn about the impact the textbook industry has in the landscape of curriculum today and how that helps explain why assigning worksheets and reading from textbooks has been the answer for many districts for many years.

Going to be fascinating to talk to, Larry, but first I think we need to ask a bigger question that gets to why any of this matters and speaks to what parents are noticing. Worksheets and textbooks do very little to motivate students to learn.

No kidding.

I mean, what we're seeing, what so many people are seeing right now is in fact they more often have the opposite effect. And so parents are seriously wondering, Michael, if this is the best we can do. And I for one as an educator feel a little embarrassed, quite frankly. And so while we're at it thinking about that, let's think a little bit bigger too. Answering textbook questions and worksheet questions encourages a rule following approach to taking in information and spitting it back out. It trains kids to do what they're told, when they're told and how they're told. And you know, that drives me crazy.

I do indeed.

Because the reality is our kids, the jobs that our kids will have one day demand something really different from them. The good paying jobs require people who can creatively problem solve and to who can figure out what needs to be done. There are so many fewer and fewer jobs that require workers to come in and do what someone tells them to do over and over again.

But first, and I'm sorry, I can't resist, Diane, I'm going to interrupt your flow and this episode to bring you a pop quiz. And the first question, of course, is to you, because you're the only one out there right now. What's the 15th element on the periodic table? Diane?

Michael, you know chemistry is my weakness. Indeed, you went right for it. And like so many high school students, I know I'm going to totally dodge

your question, but here's the point. You turned out okay. More than okay, I'd say. You may not be able to answer high school chemistry trivia, but so what? You got a good enough grade that you went to a good college and then a good graduate school. And I guess what I'm saying is that I suspect there's a lot of people out there listening to us right now who might say, so what's the problem? Is this a system we really want to disrupt?

I do think a lot of people ask that question. And I guess for me, one problem is that I didn't develop any real skills in chemistry or most of science, quite frankly, and sadly, a bunch of other areas as well. And so, like many students, I read a lot of textbook pages, I did a bunch of worksheets, I took a bunch of tests, and like you said, I got good enough grades, but I didn't actually learn science and I didn't actually learn history. And I wonder, what if I had? What if I had actually liked it? What if I pursued it? And in this moment in time, in this pandemic, even if none of that had happened, what if I just knew more to engage in my daily life about those subjects?

Yeah, it's a really good point. And the reality is we actually know a lot more now than when we did when you and I were in high school. Right. Research and frankly, some common sense tells us that you learn by actively engaging, not passively complying. That means setting goals, interacting with the material, applying knowledge to real life problems, getting frequent feedback, and then having the opportunity to reflect.

Michael, now you're talking about the type of education that I get excited about. And it really reminds me what you're describing of how people learn and get good at sports. And I think sometimes sports are easier to imagine. So, like, let's just imagine a basketball player for a moment who wants to get better at making free throw throw shots. I mean, that's a pretty common goal that basketball players want to achieve. And so. So how does this basketball player, how does she get good at a free throw? I mean, I don't know. I think mainly she practices, Right?

Yep.

And so what does that look like? She stands at the free throw line. She sets her body in a particular way. She positions her elbows. You're nodding like you've done this before.

Yeah, I spent hours on my driveway as a kid growing up.

Right, right. Like fixing your elbow, focusing on your wr, follow through, and then you shoot. Ultimately you shoot the ball and you see what happens. And here's the great thing about sports. You get immediate feedback. Did the ball go in the hoop or not? There's immediate feedback. And if it did, you try to do the same thing again. And if you didn't, then you try to make some adjustments to see if it'll go in next time.

And that's a far cry from a worksheet. Right. Where the only way a kid gets feedback is, is searching for the answer key. And that feels artificial. And students often view it as a way to, quote, cheat, to get the answer before they've put in any effort. And some effort is always required for learning.

Exactly. But effort alone isn't enough. And that's where the coach comes in. And so the coach is going to watch this player and offer tips based on what that coach has seen in countless other players and knows about free throw shooting. But, you know, the coach can't always be there when the. When she's practicing at home or on the weekend or on the driveway like you were. And so maybe a parent films her shooting so she can look at it and study it. That's a cool new invention. Maybe she practices with a teammate and they give feedback to each other. Or, you know, maybe her knowledge of free throws comes from all these different sources. So she engages in deeper and deeper practice and development.

Yeah, I love this analogy. I mean, think about what this player in your example is doing. She's learning through active practice. She's getting feedback. She's drawing from a bunch of sources. She's reflecting on how it's going, and then she's working at it and working at it until she's satisfied and ideally accomplished her objective, not just because she has 25 more free throws to go through on the proverbial worksheet, even if one of her teammates has the same goal and the same tools. What's interesting is that person's path will also probably look different. And I think that's the whole point here, right?

That's exactly the point. And so when you translate this metaphor to the physical classroom, or let's even take the online classroom that we're in now, where there is one teacher, 30 kids, and a stack of worksheets, you start to see the problem. Essentially what the teacher does is give the same lesson to everyone. No matter if you've never held a basketball or if you've ever played on a team for years and years and years, it. It's the equivalent of a coach saying, here's how to shoot a free throw. Copy it down in your notes, do a worksheet, study it, memorize it, I'll test you on it, and then we'll move on to rebounds.

Totally right?

I. I mean, I don't think anyone will believe that someone will good get good at free throws this way. But for some reason, we think that kids will get good at math and writing like this. And all the things that we think about learning, listening to a lecture, taking notes, repeating the information, we know that there are far better ways to learn. You've got to actually do the thing like you said, and in order for it to stick, you've got to do it over and over and over again. And you need feedback so that you can take that information and use it to improve. You know, the big bottom line here is imagine shooting a free throw and not seeing if it goes through the hoop.

It's crazy to even imagine. And there's strong research that shows that data that allows a student to improve their performance can actually be incredibly motivating to learning. But if you use data the other way to sort of punish someone, how we often do in schools today, it has the exact opposite effect.

It is so, so true. I see it time and time again when kids get feedback on how they're doing and what they can do to improve. They're eager to get better, and they like, get right back in there and get to work so that they can get better. Kids do not want to fail. Kids actually want to learn. We just don't set them up to do that. And now what's happening is so many parents are overseeing their kids schoolwork in a way they never have. And they're seeing the limits of this traditional approach. And what they're noticing is their kids keep calling them over for help. And what's going on there is their kids really have an Intuition about what they need in order to learn. And so what they're asking for from their parents is feedback so that they can get better and learn.

Actually, when you think about the zoom lectures that we're seeing happen right now, it's incredibly passive. Right. And so they're actually literally replicating all the things that we say don't work, ideally putting it into an environment where you're effectively isolated and estranged from your fellow classmates and teachers. And of course, it's not working.

Of course it's not working.

So now that brings us to digital learning tools. And there are all kinds of them. There's what I just described, which is passive and not working. And it replicates the worst of worksheets, textbooks, and lectures. You know, learners sit back, they watch without truly engaging in the material, or they receive little feedback as they mindlessly work through problems until they've done them all.

That's exactly right. And let's be clear, this is not just happening online right now. This is what kids have been doing in classrooms too.

Totally. But here's the thing. A good digital tool can be really powerful. It can act as the hoop, the video, the adjustments, the hundreds of shots by offering instant feedback about whether an approach worked and then allowing the student to make adjustments and keep practicing.

And what is super cool is that while every student is actively engaged in learning, so no time's being wasted, the teacher can be the coach. This is the work that most teachers wanted to do when they entered the profession. Michael. And they get to work with individual students or small groups. They get to offer the feedback that is personalized because they actually know the students.

So let's turn to Larry Berger now. Diane. I think he's the perfect person to bring in right now. CEO of Amplify, Founder of Amplify. He's been in the field of digital learning for 20 years, since the days of dial up connections. And what was great is he agreed. Can you. Do you remember that?

Barely.

Barely. So he agreed to let us pick his brain about what the best digital learning tools can do. But maybe, maybe more importantly for this conversation, why so many schools haven't actually adopted them.

You have worked with digital learning tools for so many years at this point, and we'd love to just hear from you at their very best, what do they do well or differently from other learning tools?

My top five, if you let me do my top 15, I would go on, would be that technology sometimes enables quicker feedback and more feedback. So as you're learning, you get stuff in real time. In a way that it is only otherwise experienced in one on one tutoring situations which are hard to achieve. And also you can sometimes just get more feedback. It observes more things about what you're doing. It can help you do your homework and be there in class and everything in between. It can create experiences that are hard or even impossible to do in a real classroom. So if the science teacher said, I have an idea, let's dump 100 billion tons of methane into the atmosphere and see if it warms up, that would be frowned upon by the principal. But in a simulation you can do that and you can see what happens. It creates data around experiences that are available to the rest of the system. So teachers, schools, whole systems can start to understand, well, what's actually happening, where are the kids getting stuck, where, how could we improve? And when you're in the world of paper or analog learning, much harder to make that happen. And then many of those things I just said add up to maybe two other ones, which are when it's used well, there is sometimes more productivity for the same reason we use email instead of putting letters and envelopes with stamps these days. There's just a few of those tools that make it faster to read, faster to write, faster to do research. And then the other, which is one of the places where sometimes we get this wrong and sometimes we get this right. It enables more personalization and self direction so the computer can respond to what kids need to learn next. But it can also offer up opportunities for kids to choose to do things that are for whatever reason interesting to them at that moment.

We've seen a lot of schools actually use digital tools as they've shifted rapidly to remote learning. Most of them don't do anything like what you describe. What explains the variation and how do you think about sort of the range of digital tools out there and why some do that top five effectively and some don't.

You know, I think in some ways the preponderance of places that I've looked into either did very little because sometimes of ideas about equity. If we can't give it to everyone, we shouldn't give it to anyone sometimes because they just didn't have a plan and weren't good at reacting. In many cases though, schools did the move of let's try to replicate as closely as possible what we used to do over zoom. And I think that both is problematic because many of those things don't work very well over zoom. But I also wonder about a deeper problem in that, which is that there's A an implied lesson in that, which is when a crisis happens, pretend it didn't happen and try to go on with life as usual. And I think like the places where kids saw adults taking a deep breath and saying, oh, we have a problem here. I'm going to try to do one or two things right to keep the idea of school, and in many cases that one or two things right in the enlightened places, almost positive. Diane did this, even though I don't know, was like, we're just going to remind you that we're still connected, that we are still in touch with you. And we're not going to try to figure out how to do perfect teaching and learning tomorrow. And then we're going to start introducing something that is teaching and learning a few days later and we're going to modify that and then over, you know, not that much time in the places that really reacted well, we're going to have a working system and it's not going to look exactly like what we used to do. It's going to take elements from what we used to do and you're going to see grownups figuring out how to deal with the crisis, which might be the deepest lesson possible. A lot of places missed the chance to teach that lesson.

Can you describe how a tool like that gets in front of a sixth grader in a classroom? How does that sixth grader get, whether it be a worksheet or a textbook or a digital learning tool? How does that actually happen? Can you help us understand that process?

The process is enlightening and certainly like the families looking at that worksheet, often are unaware of the backstory to it. The state adopts a set of academic standards. Those academic standards are turned into very often a 1 or 2000 page proclamation about what it is that they are seeking to buy in curriculum. And it will be not just those standards, but a hundred other things and in general estates do that. There's no scarcity principle. Every special interest group gets to put stuff into that document. Sometimes it leads to a magnitude of things that you'd have to do that make it very hard for any small organization or innovative team to comply with all of that. So it tends to be the big publishers or sort of reasonably well capitalized upstarts like my company who can even try to do that. You submit it to the adoption. There's committees in that state that spend a summer usually reading through in every detail your program in each grade and deciding are you compliant 100%, meaning if you were amazing at 99.5% of the things, but you missed half a percent of what is on the list. You are not listed, not approved for that state. In states where there aren't that many districts, publishers are expected to go to each of the districts and present their materials again, making it really hard for smaller entities without a salesforce to even show up for that part of the process. Those committees will either go into a conference room, flip through the different materials that are on their finalist list, and just choose one, never having taught with it. That's the usual way in some places, like California, or in a few of the big urban districts, they will pilot their finalists. They'll have a committee of teachers spend sometimes 8 or 12 weeks trying it before they make a final decision. And what we are finding is, as a more digital player in this world, since that's the question that you were asking about, is in places that pilot right now, we tend to win about 90% of the time. In places that don't pilot, we only win, like, 25% of the time. And that's just because digital tools only make sense if you try them, and they make it easier to teach.

I've done this as a teacher before, and there's all these books. They're beautiful. They have, like, these pretty covers, and they have all these pretty pictures in them. But literally, I'm spending, like, a couple minutes flipping through hundreds of pages. As a human being, the best I can really do is look at the pretty pictures. I mean, what am I really judging on?

And that's why I say, like, when they pilot it, they're like, whoa, this is great. But if they don't. Yeah, the set of things. There's a famous saying in publishing which breaks my heart, which is an executive confessing. I don't make textbooks for children because children don't buy textbooks. I don't make textbooks for teachers because teachers don't buy textbooks. I make textbooks for committees because committees buy textbooks. And in that sense, what he's confessing is, I'm trying to be the sort of least common denominator that a large room of people would decide is the compromise position.

It's literally insane. Listening to you describe this, it occurs to me that there's another element of this, right, which is that textbook companies even, or certainly smaller shops can only make so many versions of their materials. And so there are, I assume, certain states, California, Texas, that have disproportionate impact on what is adopted across the rest of the country, I imagine, because you can only create so many Versions of these materials. How does that operate?

People will sometimes say, oh, that's a Florida program. I see that you've modified it for my state. But that's. You built that for Florida, didn't you? That was a, that was a thing that people would say. And it was either Florida, Texas or California because those were the big adoption states.

But Larry, it's starting to change, right? You've said that things are getting better and we're moving away from traditional textbooks. Are there things that make you feel optimistic about this moment?

The world got to the point where suddenly there was enough infrastructure that teachers who wanted to do it could get the devices they needed and could teach with them. If anything, that really to me is why suddenly it started tipping in the right direction. And then it's a self reinforcing circle. Once that's true, publishers start to invest in the idea that teachers are actually going to teach from these programs and that software has to work and, and then it starts self reinforcing.

We've talked a lot about the textbook publishers. Tell me how that relates to the worksheets my kid is getting right now in this time. And why is most of the work done on worksheets?

It's amazing how many different kinds of products end up as worksheets. And I think it's. Some of it is the familiarity. It's a format that, you know, you hand one out and seven minutes are taken care of while kids fill out the worksheet. You know, I have yet to meet the kid who comes home from school and says, I did the best worksheet today. Let me tell you about it. That sentence has never been uttered. So I'm pretty sure it's not the best thing we could be doing educationally. But it's familiar. And I think the two main exporters of worksheets at this point are when you sell a core curriculum, it is very often the case that there's a teacher edition, a student edition, and then there are workbooks. And the little secret of publishing is that they very often would lose money on the teacher's edition and the student edition, and then they would sell you a renewable set of workbooks. And the difference between the workbook and the textbook is kids would write in them and you couldn't use them the next year. And so suddenly the publishers saw a renewable source of revenue. That it wasn't just, I saw this every eight years, I get to sell one every year. And then the other thing has been the testing companies who are generating data and people are Saying, well, great, I can see that my kids are doing badly. What do I do about it? And instead of having an enlightened pedagogical response to that in general, they have said, we can get you worksheets that respond to the items that kids got wrong. And good news, the things on the worksheet will look just like assessment items so they'll do better on the assessments later. And then they do a research study and they say, look, our worksheets are really good. They work because kids who practice answering this assessment item over and over again, when you later give them this assessment item, they get it right. And no one stops to think, well, wait, have they actually gotten better? Or have we done what one assessment guy calls. I love this expression, torching the cake. And his thing is like, if you put a toothpick in a cake and you saw that it wasn't fully baked in this one place and you just took in a blowtorch to that one place, it would then when you tested it again, it would look like, okay, now the cake's done, but the whole rest of the cake is actually not any more baked than it was.

Everyone always talks about math and English, but we rarely talk about science and history. And parents care a lot about these things. As a parent, I care a lot about this stuff. My sister called me a couple weeks ago and said, no joke. She says, do you write your own science curriculum? And I said, yes. And she said, of course you do. And I said, why do you ask? She said, well, my district just piloted two science curriculums. To your point, Larry, they actually are piloting for 12 weeks each, and at the end they decided they didn't like any either of the curriculum. They don't, they don't meet their teaching standard. Not surprising. But can you help us understand, like, what's going on in science?

We test ELA every year, we test math every year, we test science every four years, and we test history not at all. And so that ends up being the structure of the market. I'm a bit self interested because we did invest a lot in a science curriculum that has these kind of rich simulations. And the exciting thing, and that's why I have some optimism, is we are really getting adopted with this quite digitally Forward program. About 40% of California districts are choosing to do amplify science, which I think a few years ago would have been seen as something that certain advanced districts would do that are ready to do something ambitious. And now I think lots of districts are feeling like we're ready to Take this on. In every unit of our curriculum, there is some science teaching and learning that you might recognize. You're reading about science. There are questions, there are answers, there are activities, there are discussions, but then there's a bunch of things that weren't possible to do before. So every kid is participating in what we call an engineering internship for each unit. So they are on a fictional team at a science and engineering company. And for whatever it is we're learning in the unit where we're learning about changing climate, we've been tasked with designing rooftops for a city. And we are trying to use the science we've learned, but in an applied way, working with our team designing rooftops, and we've set it up. So most of the time the really good idea that your team has fails for an interesting scientific reason and you got to go back to the drawing board like real engineers. It's also the case that in every unit there is the hands on experimentation that good science programs have been doing for a while. And then there's the moment where that transitions to a digital simulation that lets you do things that you can't do in a normal science classroom. So a great example would be natural selection is one of the really hard concepts to get. And the misconception that the population changes, like each animal wants to learn to swim because otherwise it can't survive, is like one of the hardest ones to unroot. But in our thing, we put you on a little island that has trees and carnivores and herbivores, and then we let you adjust the temperature of that island. And if you move it down towards freezing, you start to watch how over a thousand generations, the herbivores with fur survive and the ones that don't have it don't. But you also see that if there is no mutation that generates fur, they just die. Like it's only through the distribution of characteristics. And so kids have that ability to essentially accelerate time, to run thousands or millions of years of evolution in 10 seconds in their classroom to watch what happens to the population. And I think it's that ability to go from learning science by reading and writing about it, which is something that scientists spend a lot of time doing, to learning science by doing a hands on experiment, to extending that hands on experiment to things that you just could never do in a classroom, to then applying it in an engineering context. And then if you're in a school that does this too. We have a final component that is a computer science internship where you are actually using kids programming language to build scientific simulations of your own. So you're setting the parameters in that system, and you're letting your friends play an underwater ecosystem or something like that. So those are just some of the new things that digital makes possible that wasn't there before. But in all cases, it's that alchemy of digital print, social experiences in the classroom, and a teacher at the center of it. We for all that I just described, none of it works if there isn't a grown up that kids are engaged with driving it forward.

Diane, I love that conversation with Larry, and I confess he made me more hopeful by the end because, you know, if 40% of California districts are adopting a really interactive digital curriculum that actually makes sense for how people actually learn, that seems like a good sign that things are starting to change. And to be clear, things should change. It's nuts to me that a process developed several decades ago still governs all of this.

I mean, no joke, Michael. If it's a process I went through as a teacher, which is like 400 years ago, yes, it needs to change. And I got really excited, too, listening to Larry, especially when he was describing the science experience. I mean, I literally wanted to go back to the school.

I wanted to take the curriculum and start using it with my kids, like, tomorrow.

So true. But before we get too excited, let's not forget that the school adopting the curriculum is only the first step. And so now what has to happen is the community actually has to embrace it and use it, and that can be easier said than done. In. In my experience, a lot of parents are worried that if kids are learning on computers, they're going to be lonely and socially isolated, and they wonder, shouldn't they be learning together? And in my experience, what Larry was describing is far more social in terms of learning than the 30 kids sitting in a row of desks listening to lectures and taking notes and tests.

Totally. I mean, actually, what I think people have to step back and remember is that you actually get in trouble as a kid if you try to make school social. You get kicked out of class if you ask a friend for help in understanding something. I mean, I make the joke routinely that I'm pretty sure my middle school teachers thought my first book Disrupting Class was my autobiography. Right. So you literally don't socialize, and it literally doesn't make any sense. But the thing I think that's interesting is what Larry described is so new and unfamiliar, it can feel super uncomfortable as a parent. Right. It feels scary to do something different that we don't understand and we aren't sure is going to work.

Michael, I know this so well and so firsthand because I have been navigating these feelings with my husband for years. As the head of my child's school that is using digital tools, I regularly encounter how uncomfortable he is because what it comes down to is he's not sure what his role as a. As a parent is anymore. He's really familiar with, like, taking the textbook, flipping to the back, looking at the answers, really reading quickly, and then helping, you know, with the homework. And he gets really uncomfortable when he doesn't know how to help, you know, when it comes to digital tools. But the good news is, based on my experience I've had, is that we all want the same thing. We all believe that school should be a social experience, that our it should be joyful, that our kids should like it, and that they should actually be learning. And so, you know, we're going to cover the social part of this a lot more in future episodes. But the point here is that what parents are thinking of as social learning actually isn't.

Yeah, that's right. And then there's the second fear, right? Which is that digital tools will somehow put teachers out of a job. Now, we addressed this in a prior, in the last episode, but I think it's still worth hitting again and again and again, which is because I see articles all the time, Diane, that describe online learning as, quote, basically swapping teachers with computers. And it's. It's such a tired line, and it couldn't be further from the truth. It's not an either or situation. And obviously we've said this, but think about it this way. Can you imagine not giving an employee basic digital tools in this day and age? It would be insane.

I mean, I think it would be actual, probably worse than insane. I think it's a complaint that you're gonna get from your workers.

Totally. And no one thinks that just because, you know, the worker now, right, in the office has digital tools, that you don't need a mentor, Right? You don't need a mentor or manager. Technology elevates the role of teachers and allows them to make learning more effective, social, and meaningful.

You couldn't be more right. And in the last episode, we talked with Jill, a teacher, and one thing we talked about was her view of what makes a digital tool useful and what doesn't. And I actually think it's really. It would be helpful for us to go back and hear what she has to say about that. Can you sort of tell Us the difference between a high value technology tool and kind of a low value technology tool. From a teacher perspective, high value tools

are those tools that enhance, enrich and transform instruction. High value tools are more student driven while low value tools are more teacher driven. High value tech tools allow the students to choose which way of learning works best for them or where those students interests are that drive their learning. An example, some students prefer learning with videos and they work best with the the video while other students work best using a slide deck and creating note cards. So I would also include technology tools that allow me to provide that immediate feedback to the students. Tools that provide that real time data so the students learning is based on that real time data. The low value tech tools only substitute to and replace. They don't enhance or enrich a student's learning. For example, I would say text to speech, Google Docs, smart boards would be those low value tech tools. Another example would be using Overdrive or an E reader would be examples technology such as brain pop and YouTube. The value depends on how it's being used. If I'm standing up in front of the class doing a launch using a YouTube video, it would be low value. However, if a student is choosing to use a YouTube video out of the platform and as a resource to use because they are interested in the YouTube video, then it becomes high value.

What you're talking about implies that how you as a teacher are sort of constructing the learning environment and coaching and guiding kids to use those tools matters a lot.

It does, it does.

So here's the takeaway one more time. Not every digital tool is good, clearly, but all the really good ones out there, they do all these things that we've been talking about by incorporating the science of how we learn to help create sound learning environments that motivate students, that make them more productive, that are more engaging, that. Do you know what we actually want students? The experiences we actually want them to have in schools?

Michael, those are the places you and I want to send our kids. And it's the places most parents want to send their kids. And so this whole conversation might lead people to think that it's simple like a digital tool plus a teacher is all we need. And you know, that seems easy. And I think that's why we often hear the question of well, Khan Academy Khan has the most famous teacher in the world, Sal Khan. And it's a digital tool and oh by the way, it's free. So why can't Sal Khan just teach everybody everything?

Well, conveniently, Diane, we're going to get to explore that very question and more with Sal Khan himself in our next episode of Class Disrupted. Thanks for listening and thank you. Thanks to our awesome crew making this all work. Jenna Free, our writer, Steve Chigaris, our producer and Nathan James helping us with publicity and graphics. We'll see you next time on Class Disrupted.