Raymond Jiang was scrolling through Instagram this past June – a way to pass time during a summer of no camps or social gatherings, after a high school freshman year that ended early – when he came across a post from education innovator Sal Khan.
For this 16-year-old son of Chinese immigrants living in the suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mr. Khan was something of a rock star. Mr. Jiang had used Khan Academy, Mr. Khan’s nonprofit offering free online classes, to pass trigonometry and pre-calculus the summer prior. Now, he saw, Mr. Khan was looking for people to join his newest enterprise: schoolhouse.world, a free, global, online tutoring network.
Mr. Jiang loved calculus. He was thrilled by the idea of working with Mr. Khan himself. So he applied to be one of the organization’s first math teachers.