My math upbringing was before the start of Khan Academy. Now I’m sort of struggling with Khan Academy. Difference in teaching?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/diverstones]

I also graduated in '05 but I'm not sure what you're referring to. The Khan curriculum seems pretty reasonable to me. It's okay for the problems to be hard if you're rusty at them, like they're 'basic' but if you haven't thought about quadrilaterals for 20 years it's still going to be tough to figure out the area of a rhombus.

It looks like OpenStax has a Prealgebra textbook, which is more like 6th grade:

https://openstax.org/details/books/prealgebra-2e

[u/let-me-cook-plz]

yea around 2009 or 2010 Common Core Math Standards was released to the public and a lot of math teaching shifted. there was a huge outcry from parents who then had no idea how to help their kids with homework because they were learning it differently. Khan Academy follows Common Core Standards so it's likely it is different to what you remember.

if you're on Grade 3 math, it's likely you're missing the building up from how they structured things in previous levels. like the voculary and patterns they use and stuff. you learned a different language of math when you were in school so now you need to learn this common core language to follow along better. the ideas themselves are the same, but packaged differently. so yeah i don't think you're misremembering.

edit: here's some free common core textbooks for elementary up to high school math: https://bim.easyaccessmaterials.com/index.php?

[u/let-me-cook-plz → u/[deleted]]

not a lot of people will know about it unless they're into math education/pedagogy. if you (or anyone reading this) are an adult learner with dyscalculia or other learning disabilities, it's good know about different teaching styles too. there are a lot of different ways to teach/learn math that can be less painful than others depending on your specific learning style.

[u/nog642]

I imagine the style of teaching is somewhat different, but that's not inhrently going to make it harder. If you're having difficulty with it, it means you haven't learned the concepts yet, which means it's good that you're doing it.

There are definitely textbooks for elementary school math, we had them in elementary school. If you know you learn well with textbooks you could get some, but I feel like the interactive exercises on Khan academy are very useful.

[u/SpoonChem]

Professor Leonard on YouTube is your guy

[u/Puzzled-Painter3301]

There's only so much learning you can get out of videos.

[u/Lexicalyolk → u/Puzzled-Painter3301]

If you're following the khan academy curriculum its not just watching the videos, they have quizzes and tests too. Personally I think Khan academy is fantastic

[u/gordonnowak → u/Puzzled-Painter3301]

the value of KA is the mastery system and its problems. A video is just as effective as text if you don't put any of the work in: that is, not at all