In an effort to support Abigail in her quest to be able to take Calculus BC by the time she’s a senior (she’s taking Geometry and Algebra II this fall as a freshman under special dispensation from the guidance office… I love Tammy Lizotte!), I am taking Sal Khan’s course in geometry with her over the summer. We had a bumpy start with her wanting to just skip over the tutorials and go straight to the exercises. I like to understand things before I take tests, so I was watching every tutorial all the way through. “No way am I going at this pace all summer!” We compromised with the idea of her explaining what she was doing as she was taking the exercises. (It’s been 38 years since I took geometry, but she’s been getting basic geometry concepts in math at school long ago. Thank you Guilford school system!)
We just jumped in and started from the top. After a few of these, I decided I really wanted to know what I was in for. (Can you say, “Leap before you look”?) How many of these tutorials would we have to do? Abigail didn’t know. I went and found a table of contents, and, to my delight, I found that we had already completed four out of the eight units. WOW! This was easy! Here is the table of contents:
Upon explaining this to Abigail with joy, she said, “MOM! What I’m going to have to do in school next year is going to be MUCH HARDER! I already know most of this stuff.” I was crest-fallen. So we went back to the course descriptions and found that Khan Academy had TWO geometry courses: Basic Geometry and Geometry. We were only taking Basic Geometry. I opened the table of contents for Geometry and gasped:
S%#$!!! I guess there’s no going back now.
So now we are in the midst of trying to do three units a day. Fortunately, Sal Khan is a delightful instructor and really loves the subject matter. We came across this unit description today which had us in stitches:
Thank you, Sal Khan, for all your hard work toward making this kind of learning accessible for all!