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.
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.