A Wired article, How Khan Academy is Changing Education, begins with:

“This,” says Matthew Carpenter, “is my favorite exercise.” I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It’s an inverse trigonometric function: cos^-1(1) = ?

Carpenter, a serious-faced 10-year-old wearing a gray T-shirt and an impressive black digital watch, pauses for a second, fidgets, then clicks on “0 degrees.” Presto: The computer tells him that he’s correct. The software then generates another problem, followed by another, and yet another, until he’s nailed 10 in a row in just a few minutes. All told, he’s done an insane 642 inverse trig problems. “It took a while for me to get it,” he admits sheepishly.

Carpenter, who attends Santa Rita Elementary, a public school in Los Altos, California, shouldn’t be doing work anywhere near this advanced. In fact, when I visited his class this spring—in a sun-drenched room festooned with a papercraft X-wing fighter and student paintings of trees—the kids were supposed to be learning basic fractions, decimals, and percentages. As his teacher, Kami Thordarson, explains, students don’t normally tackle inverse trig until high school, and sometimes not even then.

The software package this 5th grader was using wasn’t some expensive, highly researched package. It was a free website, KhanAcademy.org, that one man developed in his free time. Sal Khan has a knack for presenting challenging concepts in a clear manner. Take a few moments to watch the video on Simple Equations below to get a sense of how Sal teaches.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ek61w1LxSc&feature=player_embedded#!

Then go to the KhanAcademy.org website and look at the 2,400 lessons Khan has already created. Bill Gates was so impressed with his teaching that he funded him to continue. With almost 72,000,000 lessons delivered around the world, he must be doing something right.

I challenge you (and me) to get in the habit of watching lessons. Brush up on some things you did know and learn some new things. Exercise that brain.

And spread the word to young folks entering this great construction business that don’t have a good educational background. Here’s a way for them to level that field.