Stand by.

Hi everyone, welcome to the Daily Homeroom live stream.

Sorry we're running a little bit late.

As you can see, I am in a different location.

I think I finally got the WiFi fixed in the house.

So we're gonna try this,

you might hear some screaming kids every now and then,

but that just'll add a little bit

of flavor to the experience.

Exciting show today, but before we get into the thick of it,

I will explain for those of you all who might

just be showing up for the first time what this thing is.

Khan Academy, we're not for profit,

and our mission is to provide a free,

world-class education for anyone, anywhere,

and when we saw, it seems like a lifetime ago,

but now five, six, seven weeks ago,

that we had these mass school closures,

not just in the US but around the world,

we saw given our mission,

given that we've been creating content and tools

to support parents, teachers, students

for the last 10 years,

that's it's really our duty to step up even more

during this crisis,

and so above and beyond all the learning materials

that'll hopefully keep folks learning,

we've been trying to do parent webinars, teacher webinars,

this live stream, just as a way to stay in touch.

As we go through the very exciting conversation today,

I encourage you put questions

for either myself or our guest,

who's a super teacher, on either Facebook or YouTube.

We have team members who are looking at those.

I do like to remind folks Khan Academy,

as I said, is a not-for-profit.

We exist because of philanthropic donations.

If you're in a position to do so,

please think about donating to Khan Academy.

I do want to give special thanks

to the several corporate partners who've stepped up

in the last few weeks to allow us to do this work.

We've been running at a deficit even before the crisis,

and you can imagine our costs have gone up.

We're seeing three times the server load

that we typically see,

and we're trying to accelerate a lot of programs,

so special thanks to Bank of America,

Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis,

and we need more help,

so anyone out there who wants to help us out more,

either as an individual donor or as a corporation,

please reach out.

So with that,

would love to get into the core of the program,

I'd love to introduce Conor Corey,

who's an incredible teacher

from the Centennial School District in Pennsylvania.

Conor, great to have you here.

- Thanks, Sal, I'm excited to be here.

- And first of all,

this is the launch of Teacher Appreciation Week,

so let me just tell you,

I think we all appreciated teachers before this,

or hopefully we should be,

and you're a super teacher

who we've been appreciating for many years,

and I think for many of us parents who now

have to handle our own kids in our house,

the level of teacher appreciation has gone up (laughs).

- (laughs) I agree--

- Thank you so much.

- I've been getting many positive emails from parents

that appreciate the help as they're confused

and stressed out as many of us are during this time.

- Yeah, so maybe a good place to start,

you're what's known as a Khan Academy Teacher Ambassador.

Tell us a little bit about what you teach,

tell us about your kids,

tell us about how you've been using Khan Academy

and what this means to be an ambassador.

- So this is my 17th year teaching,

and I spent the majority of my career teaching

with the Centennial Public School District,

and that's where I really discovered Khan Academy.

We were pretty under-funded and many of our students,

they didn't have a learning disability,

but they were maybe a year or a few years behind,

and Khan Academy always gave me the ability

to remediate content without having to fill out paperwork

or go find a different book,

but it was always free academic content,

and from there I continued making it

a larger and larger part of the curriculum,

and when the Ambassador Program came out a few years ago,

I applied to that and it's been fantastic.

There's, right now we have a thousand,

over a thousand people that donate their time

to help other teachers,

to show them just different ways to access

a variety of education.

When I first started, it was just math,

but it has become so much more and just,

I know parents that are using it in high school, college,

it's really been a huge help

for not only the education system, but for the world,

so I mean I've always fully supported this program,

maybe not financially but with my time (laughs).

- The way that you're supporting it

is as essential as anything,

and we really consider you a close part

of this Khan Academy team.

I think one of the things that is really,

you know you stood out as an ambassador for Khan Academy.

Obviously we've put those resources out there,

and we have efficacy studies that if students

are able to put in the time

they're able to accelerate their learning,

but the key question that we've been trying to answer this,

many people have been asking this

in this live stream and other places is,

"Well, how do we motivate kids to do it?"

Especially they're at home now,

it's not the same as being in a classroom,

what were your techniques before COVID

and then what tips do you have for parents and teachers

and even students themselves

to stay motivated during this crisis?

- Motivation's always been fun for me while I was teaching,

I always looked at it as,

our students are so drastically different

and come from different backgrounds.

I could buy an Xbox and put that as a prize

but then there's a kid in the class that has two Xboxes,

that doesn't motivate him,

so I always found that embarrassing yourself

as an adult for a child

or a reward they can't purchase

is something that will motivate all of them,

so over the years during LearnStorm

we've had kids throw water balloons at us,

we did something called the Wheel of Doom,

where we had 26 teachers sign up and the winning class,

each kid spun this wheel and whatever it landed on,

ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise,

we had a whole assembly,

they were able to squirt that in the teacher's face.

All for kind of laughs.

We had even one teacher and our vice principal

let us wax their leg with wax strips as a reward.

- Wow.

- We were running out of ideas as you could tell (laughs).

- You are a dedicated teacher.

- In school it's always,

I have the sense of humor of a middle school kid, so--

- Or maybe waxing your legs would not be quite as painful

as mine, I am, anyway (laughs).

- I don't know, it's pretty bad (laughs).

- Just extrapolate from my beard,

and you know what my legs look like, sorry TMI.

No that's fascinating, keep going.

- It's just all about finding out how we're just trying

to do the same things and trying to keep it,

that interaction with the students.

Yesterday they finished,

we timed how many,

many of the parents were nervous

they weren't prepared for 7th grade math.

I teach 6th grade math.

So they're very nervous with everything that's happened,

so I spent a week and only assigned them growth mindset

activities that we did earlier in the year

during LearnStorm.

I wanted to reinforce that, especially at this time,

and then last week I gave them some

7th grade assignments without much teaching.

I was like, "You have the background knowledge,

"I want you to try these things a few times,

"remember you're going to get them wrong,

"remember to practice what we did last week

"with growth mindset."

If you have--

(garbled audio drowns out speaker)

I would do the Blender Challenge,

and I would blend up seven things in my fridge

and drink it on camera for them,

and we had parents sign up also,

'cause I told them to sign their parents up,

but today I've watched eight different videos

of parents laughing with their kids,

blend up disgusting things in the fridge, all for math,

just to kind of get them laughing again

instead of just sitting around.

We've been trying to do stupid stuff like that

and I had a student now giving me requests.

I have two rules.

It has to be free and legal,

those are my only two rules and I'll do it (laughs).

- That's very, I love that,

because we always talk about motivation,

we usually think it has to be some deep,

psychological mind trick that you play with kids,

or maybe we do defer to the not-as-healthy of rewards,

like here's some sugar, here's some not-so-good screen time,

but what you're saying, this is really fun,

it's these memorable, quirky,

you just have to have a little bit of a willingness

to subject yourself to the whim of a child.

You accomplish this,

I as you parent or as your teacher am willing

to do what you want, something fun, quirky,

as long as it's legal and no one gets hurt, so to speak.

- Yeah, that a pretty tough (garbled speech).

- And related to that, this first question from Facebook,

Scott Yang asks, "Hi, Conor.

"How does it feel to teach from home?"

So you described what you were doing pre-COVID.

I am curious,

I think a lot of teachers and parents are curious,

so how are you keeping that same,

or can you keep that same level of energy

or connectedness with your students right now,

how are you trying to do that?

- I'm trying to,

I don't believe it's possible to do the same way,

because I can't see my student's face live as I'm,

I'm kind of recording my lessons and sending them

and answering questions when they record something back,

but I know when I'm in class

when Jacob's nodding and I'm talking,

he has no idea what I'm talking about,

and I just have to step in there.

But I can see when one student doesn't sit

with the friends they usually sit with

that maybe they're having a bad day

and something's going on,

and as teachers we're aware of those things,

and we really try to focus

on that social piece just as much.

It's very difficult this way, nowadays.

I'm fortunate enough to still have my employment,

but many of our parents have lost that,

and there's kids,

I have four children of my own throughout the house,

I can't believe they haven't interrupted us yet,

but they are usually,