A @khanacademy SmartHistory video just came up in my YouTube recommended. I watched EVERY single one of those back in 2013 so now I’m rewatching them and reliving childhood memories. Half of my personality came from these vids so thanks to Beth Harris and Steven Zucker

Ahh @drszucker actually liked this so I’ll elaborate: I was homeschooled and one afternoon in 6th grade my mom mentioned loving Mary Cassatt. I hadn’t the faintest clue what she was talking about so she sent me to Khan Academy to watch a few videos on Impressionism...

I was totally hooked. I had always really enjoyed art museum field trips growing up, but I had never before dug so deep into the fine arts world. I watched every video on impressionism, and then started spending HOURS binge watching SmartHistory. I learned about different types

of Roman columns, the construction of basilicas, I even had one of the profs answer my question about linear perspective at one point. Around this time, my dad got a new job and was sent to the UK for work. My family found some cheap tickets to visit a few other places along the

way, and I finally had the privilege to explore bits of Italy and France for a week. I insisted that my family spend our few moments in Venice in the Academia so that I could spout off facts about Giorgione’s Tempest. In every city there was a museum with a masterpiece.

I ended up signing up for art history classes for free at my local community college. We used Gardner’s and wrote essays about the Futurist Manifesto and about the Arnolfini Portrait. When that was done, I started volunteering at local art museums. I even got an internship

With the Mexic-Arte museum. I was an education intern, and assigned to deliver bilingual tours to diverse audiences from school groups to senior centers to prisoners to art students at The University of Texas. It was a BLAST, and though every tour I remembered and imitated the

voices I had first learned from on Khan Academy. I grew really into online art accessibility, which is more important now than ever. Learned about social media based art historians lkke Hans Ulrich Obrist and devoured content on Google Arts and Culture. Started sharing everything

that I saw at an art gallery and adored on Instagram, complete with an informative caption. Once I did my language study abroad scholarship in Morocco, I started working on a research project, interviewing Moroccan artists about their work and the general sociopolitical

atmosphere for contemporary arts in Morocco. It was LOVELY.

The point is, educational resources for kids online really do change lives. I know a lot of kids in STEM fields who were inspired by Khan Academy, and even though I’m starting college as a linguistics major, I’m hoping to further pursue a museum career, all thanks to one video

about impressionism that I saw on the internet once. This stuff matters and the world needs more content like this.