My Sal Khan Man Crush

I was trying to help my daughter with some long division last night. As long division is still in my zone of competence—albeit dangerously close, sadly, to the outer limit—I was feeling good about being able to help her. 

Except that we were working with some online practice website, which assumed she and I had learned a slightly different version of long division, one that brings the numbers down in a different way and is apparently trying to help drive home gain an insight that long division is a process of getting progressively more accurate estimates… 

Or something. I honestly couldn’t quite understand it, and was thus scouring YouTube for videos that would explain this variation of long division, but because we couldn’t find it, and I wanted be to be helpful, Daddy was fighting the urge to to teach the practice software his own lesson by bashing his daughter’s Chromebook into lots of flying little pieces. Bad Chromebook!

If only we, both parent and child, hadn’t recently signed the appropriate use of technology contract with the school, which presumably included a clause about not smashing school computers.

In the course of this frustration, and the related YouTube searching, I got a little philosophical with my daughter. We talked about how the classic version of long division is a tried and true method, but we also agreed that there is something odd and mysterious about the process—the dividing, then multiplying, then subtracting, then dividing again, and so on. 

I hadn’t stopped to think about it as a kid, but Just what exactly is going on with long division and why the hell does that sequence even work? For those readers gifted in math, this is presumably obvious, but for many of us parents, and I am guessing the majority of kids, this is a question that, though it might at first seem obvious, can be almost comically befuddling.

Happily, I now understand exactly how it works. Vividly. I totally get it. More importantly, my 11-year-old, the one who is actually in school and could benefit from such understanding, also experienced having the light bulb of understanding go off.

The fact that we were able to quickly get to the bottom of this little learning riddle is a great lesson in how kids and parents can best use the unlimited educational content that is out there in the endless, ever-growing digital cloud—a lesson that has ramifications for learning that go far beyond long division.

Answering the question was a mere matter of, you guessed it, entering it into a search field on the computer: why does long division actually work? 

While the first video to come up was just a description of the long division, the second was gold—a masterful illustration detailing exactly the concept we were looking for. Not surprisingly, it was a Khan Academy video, one that was narrated by the eponymous founder himself, Sal Khan.

I am providing the link here just so too can see it and bask in the glorious clarity of Khan’s explanation: Link to Visually Understanding Long Division Video. Watch that video, experience your own light bulb moment, along with a comment by the voice in your head: well, that would have been nice to know when I was a kid back in school.

And now we start getting into the meat of this post and why this is about more than long division, and how videos like Khan’s have potentially deep significance in the education of your children.

The fact that Sal Khan would be the one to save the day should not be that surprising, particularly to those of us who harbor crushes on the man that, while fully platonic, have an intensity that a Harry Styles groupie would appreciate (oh my god, it’s Sal!).

Khan Academy began with investment banker Sal Khan tutoring his nieces and nephews in math in his spare time. One of the many insights he had during this period was that one of the problems his young relations were having related to them not seeing the big picture of math as they learned.

Khan’s nieces and nephews were working on the individual math units that their schools were serving up, things like finding least common denominators with fractions, but they weren’t simultaneously understanding how the math concepts related to each other and were part of a whole.

For Khan, who as a kid excelled in math, among other subjects, part of the fun of math and what helped him succeed at a high level was precisely this thinking about math concepts as part of a bigger whole, a point he explained while speaking with Guy Raz on How I Built This. 

I was in graduate school for writing when I had a related insight about how my own mind worked. It was thanks in part to a couple of excellent teachers I had for classes in screenwriting and playwriting. In both cases, the teachers were able to help my understanding by explaining and illustrating the mechanics of writing drama in a way that helped me see the big picture—the way in which there are a range of interrelated mechanics that are necessary for drama to come alive.

This was one of those moments when the switch was flipped, the lightbulb going off, and suddenly it all made sense, providing me with an understanding that freed me up to work on the writing of drama.

In the process, I came away realizing: there’s something about the way my mind works that I need to start with that big picture, to know how the main parts relate and interact in that big picture. Once I get that, all of the learning that follows suddenly seems obvious.

Sadly, I was clueless to this quirk in my mental function all through K-12 and college. I remember in high school first taking Spanish with a teacher who began the study of Spanish by quickly diving into thick of verb conjugation. This granular approach brought on a fog of confusion for me that took years to shake.

It should be pointed out, too, that the educational standards that define the targets our schools aim to teach to are by their nature granular and specific; and there typically are no standards that are about students gaining understanding in how and why all of the standards relate to each other.

In hindsight, what I needed was a teacher who started out with the big picture, who said, “Class—and particularly you, Leif— before we get started, let’s talk about how Spanish similar and how it is different from English, particularly when it comes to Spanish’s system of verb conjugation.”

Or more importantly, what I needed back in the early 1980s was some magical system involving a typewriter’s keyboard paired with would have then been an unimaginably thin version of a TV screen, and all I would have had to do was to type in my learning issue into the keyboard and suddenly some of the world’s most gifted educational communicators would appear on the TV, illustrating just what I needed.

Miraculously, living in the 2020s, this is exactly what we and our children have access to. We call these things computers and smartphones. Because of them, kids are not dependent on always having the gifted teacher who is able to intuit the precise nugget that will make all the difference for the dozens of kids in their classrooms, including our children.

Instead, we can rely on teachers to mostly focus on the sufficiently challenging job of trying to lead and prod their classrooms toward proficiency in the specific state standards, while we parents, in collaboration with our kids, can be on the look out for opportunities for our kids to benefit from one of these Sal Khan-type big picture, dot connecting, light bulb lighting moments. 

I do have a man crush on Sal Khan, which should be no surprise, as I am responding to a similar siren song that has me heading down my own path aimed at disrupting and improving upon the status quo in education. But more than adoring Khan, I love what he and his why of long division video represents for us parents looking to soup up what and how our kids are learning.

It is a beautiful, lovable reality that we and our kids can pull up these revelatory moments at will and as necessary to help elevate their educations into something greater than the status quo.