I’ve been using the khan academy app for a couple months now. Just signed in the website for the first time today. It’s the best and easiest learning app I’ve used. I struggled a lot in skool when I was younger and it made my self esteem worse. I would go home not feeling good and already worrying about the next day because I knew I wasn’t going to do well and just wanted to get it over with. I felt like time stopped for me while all my friends passed me and made advances and they did. I even got held back a grade and had to redo the 4th grade again because my teacher wasn’t sure I was ready for 5th and that messed with my self esteem even more. Having to walk past peers I used to hang out with personally and then wondering why I’m not in the same grade as them. As I got older I just figured that’s who I would just be and to accept that I would be someone, at least in the academic sense, never amount to anything really productive. I did other things though and still worked. Fast forward to the digital age and smartphones being a thing. The information on the net is overwhelming. It’s nice when you want something specific but for me it was hard to start somewhere and learn something. That’s where khan academy helped. Everything is just organized and efficient. When I was younger there was a lot of pressure to learn and not a lot of time but as an adult I have some more time and can relax and take it at my own pace. I always loved learning even back when I struggled in skool. One of my favorite things to watch on the tv back then was astronomy documentaries, I could understand the things being broken down conceptually but I had no idea the mathematics behind it. I wanted to be an astronomer when I was younger the thing holding me back though was my lack of knowledge and unwillingness to plant some roots and grow. So using khan academy now. I’m 28 years old almost 29 and I started to relearn the hardest subject that gave me trouble in skool, math. Because I wanted to and I knew could. The way I understood it, I already know how to do some things so why would this be any different. With that I had all the confidence in the world and started at the kindergarten level and started working my way up. As an adult I’m making mental connections I never could with the subjects before. When I was young subtraction was one of the hardest things for me and to make matters worse I couldn’t do mental math of any kind. I can’t see my mental abstractions, condition called aphantasia. I can only think with sound and speech. Or use papers and my fingers if I need a visual reference. But now after practicing so much I’m able to do subtraction reasonably well, still a work in progress but the fact I even notice a difference made me feel wonderful. My brain is able to know how to subtract digits that require regrouping all in my head. That’s something I could never do before, I would have to use the paper. If I could go back in time, I would try even harder to do the things i can do now but I’m grateful to be able to be doing this at all. I’m still working my way up through the math subjects. Khan academy has taken me out of my mental stasis and now I feel like I’m moving again after a little more than a decade.