Despite being from a time before the internet, pocket calculators and smart phones, (my first “calculator” was a slide rule), I’m as quick to adopt and master tech as I find a need for it. I like shiny new tech.
But as someone who also spent a few years teaching math in a my local and very rural school, I was not very generous with the use of that super computer in your pocket in my classroom. The reason being I wanted you to get your fingers dirty and greasy playing and manipulating those numbers yourself. I wanted to you develop a personal relationship with them and have at least a basic idea of the how and why they work.
Modern tech is great if you already have an understanding of how things work and can simply view it as a tool. But modern tech pretty much prevents people from developing the basic understanding of the how and why things work. And we are all dumber for it.
Thank you for making your students do that. I’m sure it made them miserable at the time but I guarantee they are better for it.
In college I had a similar experience with statistics. I had to run a factor analysis by hand start to finish, calculating standard deviations, means, and all the other crap, showing work over 3 pages to get eigenvalues and all that. It sucked, but dammit if I dont have a WAY better appreciation for how it works now than I ever would have otherwise.
When I was growing up, programmable calculators were allowed in math class, but not required. Even so, I was the only kid in my class without one. (They were expensive then.) I failed every test, both because the work was difficult without all the formulas saved, and because the problems were complicated enough that I never had time to finish.
The school I taught in was rural and poor. Part of my budget was for calculators, so I had enough TR99’s and the school issued chromebooks for each student to use. My students would moan and groan about not getting to use a calculator, but they quickly understood why and when we would use them or not.
I wasn’t a tyrant about using them. Sometimes, those magic devices made complex tasks far more approachable and teachable. But you need a good basic foundation to get the best out of them.
Despite being from a time before the internet, pocket calculators and smart phones, (my first “calculator” was a slide rule), I’m as quick to adopt and master tech as I find a need for it. I like shiny new tech.
But as someone who also spent a few years teaching math in a my local and very rural school, I was not very generous with the use of that super computer in your pocket in my classroom. The reason being I wanted you to get your fingers dirty and greasy playing and manipulating those numbers yourself. I wanted to you develop a personal relationship with them and have at least a basic idea of the how and why they work.
Modern tech is great if you already have an understanding of how things work and can simply view it as a tool. But modern tech pretty much prevents people from developing the basic understanding of the how and why things work. And we are all dumber for it.
Thank you for making your students do that. I’m sure it made them miserable at the time but I guarantee they are better for it.
In college I had a similar experience with statistics. I had to run a factor analysis by hand start to finish, calculating standard deviations, means, and all the other crap, showing work over 3 pages to get eigenvalues and all that. It sucked, but dammit if I dont have a WAY better appreciation for how it works now than I ever would have otherwise.
When I was growing up, programmable calculators were allowed in math class, but not required. Even so, I was the only kid in my class without one. (They were expensive then.) I failed every test, both because the work was difficult without all the formulas saved, and because the problems were complicated enough that I never had time to finish.
The school I taught in was rural and poor. Part of my budget was for calculators, so I had enough TR99’s and the school issued chromebooks for each student to use. My students would moan and groan about not getting to use a calculator, but they quickly understood why and when we would use them or not.
I wasn’t a tyrant about using them. Sometimes, those magic devices made complex tasks far more approachable and teachable. But you need a good basic foundation to get the best out of them.