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I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or
by kleiba2 5mo ago
I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time.
For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!
I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and never looked back.
- collabs 5mo agoI am thinking why not use the iPad simply as a letter pad with infinite pages? the new iPad with the new iPad pencil can do that and I am sure with the right software you can write, erase, rewrite as much as you want? What am I missing?
- kleiba2 5mo agoThat's being done, but it would not be sufficient to satisfy the powers that be.
- irishcoffee 5mo agoYou can just use a pencil and paper, and it's a lot cheaper?
- ptek 5mo agoYes it is cheaper and who will steal or rob a student of pencil and paper compared to a iPad also pencil and paper doesn’t require age verification.
- throwway120385 5mo agoIt's also probably good to make sure students know how to figure using a pencil and paper because pulling a calculator out on a job site is pretty impractical.
- tracker1 5mo agoNot sure I agree with that last point... you probably have one in your pocket already (phone app). Though I'm strongly against electronic devices as core education materials in K-6 especially.
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoThe point is that it's foolish to require inserting an iPad into the classroom purely for the sake of using an iPad. The goal (or proposed benefit) should be identified first, and then decide what the best tools to achieve that are.
- Danox 5mo agoThose students that have the discipline and have an iPad and can use Goodnotes or Notability they are just gonna be ahead of the rest, like typing the earlier you learn the better off you’re going to be, and there are no shortcuts if you are a student.
- snazz 5mo agoNo matter how you restrict it with MDM profiles, it’s distracting compared to pencil/paper.
- layer8 5mo agoCan’t it run restricted to a single application in kiosk mode? Unless the application itself provides distraction, what would be distracting?
- sparqlittlestar 5mo agoThe very light it emits, the liquid glass lensing animations, etc
- econ 5mo agoI recall some research in the TV age. They observed, if the subject is looking into a light source, (be it a camp fire, a screen or a bulb) they go into a kind of sleepwalking mode. They also mentioned the phenomenon was already well documented by hypnotists. In the early internet days I couldn't help but notice people who read zero books now spend the whole day reading. I think it means the tool is used the wrong way? Interactive should be e-paper or real paper. Dull cramming or basic reading skills would be a good fit for glowing displays. Perhaps we even need a device that can do both.
- tracker1 5mo agoYou also don't get the physicality as part of recall with eInk over real books. When reading technical books, as an example, I often would look back when going to review something based on where it was physically in the book... I completely lose that with ebooks.. I still mostly use ebooks and online docs these days all the same because moving hundreds of pounds of books when you move sucks.
- layer8 5mo agoAt least with OLED, the light output can be auto-adjusted to match the reflecting light of the environment. This can be quite convincing, looking like a purely reflective surface. And a dedicated app doesn’t need to use any distracting animations or highlights.
- ncr100 5mo agoHuman biology likely makes it harder to write on a glass screen with a perceptible Gap in time, latency between where the pen is and where the pixels appear as well as the physical colocation Of the pencil tip and the written line differs more so on a tablet screen than on direct application of matter to paper. This confuses us, a little tiny teeny tidbit. And that is not helpful! Plus because glass is slippery you must rely on your visual system nearly entirely for part of the handwriting performance. Because it's not paper you can't measure distances using tension that your nervous system picks up inside your hand, nearly as easily as you can when there's a high friction surface like a piece of paper to rest your hand on. Also there is visual fatigue of staring into a light, the LED or OLED backlight, which does flicker imperceptibly but it does tend to flicker. This is more of a strain. Plus there is disorientation... Your tablet can infinitely scroll long past the point at which your body physically dies, whereas if you run out of paper you got to go get some more paper. You write to the end of a sheet and there's no complex thinking involved around virtual viewframes and scrolling and using the scrolling UI.
- stonogo 5mo agoThat isn't a matter of human biology. You learned to expect a specific experience when you took pencil to paper at a young age. Other people can learn to expect different experiences. Your acquired habits are not a genetic imperative. All of this post seems like ex post facto justifications for an implicit claim that the tech you grew up with is natural and good and the tech that came later is somehow inimical to life.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nathan_compton 5mo agoFor awhile I tried all sorts of digital notetaking devices. Eventually I realized that pen + paper notebook was vastly superior to all of them for retention, ease of use, and cost. I am sure that, for some people, the calculation is different (for example, I have a pretty good memory and thus writing something down once is sufficient for me to recall it later) but for me, the idea of a digital letter pad eventually seemed utterly wasteful and absurd to me.
- mlsu 5mo agoIt’s definitely actively bad to involve a device in the vast majority of education. And, it’s a purely selfish thing by tech companies to insert themselves into education. A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.
- s5300 5mo ago[dead]
- account42 5mo agoNow that's just needlessly extreme in the other direction. Students will be seeing devices much earlier than that just because their peers will use them so it makes sense to educate them on their proper use and dangers much earlier than college. It just doesn't make sense to cram them into every subject because not using one is outdated.
- skydhash 5mo agoStudents also see power drills and cars, and schools don’t use them as part of the curriculum. I have a lot of computing device and still believes in real books and pen or paper for learning anything. The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials. Even those TI calculators can be overkill. I’ve only used one in college, and it was for a few exams about polar coordinates and transmission lines, IIRC. For everything else, the simpler scientific calculators were enough. Multiplying matrices and graphing functions doesn’t take that much time at high school and undergraduate level.
- koolba 5mo agoThey got rid of paper because teachers are lazy and do not want to spend time grading things by hand. I’ve spoken to the head of curriculum at a school asking why when given the choice of paper or digital format of a math exam, they picked the digital. I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions. The response I got was, “we encourage students to redraw the entire picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpful”. It’s strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.
- nathan_compton 5mo agoI don't think anyone with a lazy disposition would get into teaching. There are so many other jobs that pay better and involve less work.
- watwut 5mo ago> I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions. All digital tests I have seen allowed paper and pen. You would draw and calculate on paper and submit the result.
- koolba 5mo agoYes you’re allowed paper. But it’s strictly worse than pure paper as the student is forced to copy the entire problem, possibly with errors. It’s much easier to cross out a 4 and 8 to divide the latter (replacing it with a 2) then it is to copy the whole problem from scratch. Even more so for filling in angles or areas in a geometry problem.
- sonofhans 5mo ago> teachers are lazy Teachers don’t make those decisions, school boards do. School boards are elected or appointed political entities. Teachers are humans just like you, and like or dislike work for the same reasons you do, including your unoriginal display of classic American anti-intellectualism.
- DonutATX 5mo agoI suggest you glance at the novel Ananthem by Neal Stephenson. The core plot device is about "universities" stripping all worldly items away from the students, so they are left with simple clothes and chalkboards. Fascinating topic, well executed by Neal. One of my favorite books.
- xg15 5mo agoThat sounds like the other extreme.
- bix6 5mo agoThis reminded me of Kvothe from Name of the Wind.
- __rito__ 5mo agoThis is nothing new. It is ancient. Ancient Hindus divided life into four parts, the earliest was called "Brahmacharya" - core tenet of it was celibacy, but sons of kings and rich merchants lived ascetic lives in the teacher's house who was also an ascetic and a sage - no rich clothes, no luxury foods or comfort. This was supposed to last till the age of 16, going as high as 21 for some. The Buddhist monastery-universities of India also kept students under similar conditions - celibate, ascetic, and far from luxury.
- __rito__ 5mo agoThe maths in the book where these students and scholars stayed in Anathem, were directly inspired by matths in India. I visited one last month.
- mos_basik 5mo agoGod, what a great book, imo. My favorite Stephenson novel.
- __rito__ 5mo agoMine, too. Cryptonomicon was the gateway drug. But I loved 'Anathem'.
- bearjaws 5mo agoI'm always torn on this, I learned a lot of algebra, stats and calc from actually writing TI-Basic programs in my calculator. I was deeply interested in programming since the age of 11, so it felt very natural to translate the formulas and concepts to code. Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.
- make3 5mo agoblackboards in uni where you can't do anything but just rewrite everything the prof is writing is a nightmarish waste of time, especially for anyone with any kind of attention difficulties please remove the devices from the students but provide slides
- SoftTalker 5mo agoIf you have attention difficulties perhaps uni isn't the place for you.
- mos_basik 5mo agoAs someone with attention difficulties who eventually decided to leave uni and pursue another path: I'm saddened that my culture has formed me into a person whose first reaction to your comment was "wow, that's harsh" - because I mentally (and unwarrantedly) translated your comment into something like "if you have attention difficulties perhaps you should just accept that you are a low-value human who is hard class-locked out of many of life's joys and you should (quickly) figure out how to live in the way that least inconveniences your betters." And my brain does this even though I'm gainfully employed and comfortable and happy (happy modulo general anxiety re climate, politics, war, and future generations) My second reaction to your comment was more like "bingo, but it sure would be nice to have more clear directions about where one's actual place is." And it sure seems like there might be more such places and they'd be easier to find in a culture whose incentives were slightly (or significantly) different than those of mine (USA).
- DaSHacka 5mo agoTruer then you know, however it's essentially a requirement in this day and age.
- onjectic 5mo agoThis is awful advice… Academia, specifically STEM, is already oversaturated with people on the opposite side of the spectrum from “attention difficulties” but are otherwise only above-average people intellectually. They were able to follow the beaten path to the letter all their lives, but are not really capable of making meaningful contributions to their field. We should be filtering these people out more not less.
- jazzpush2 5mo agoI had the opposite experience, as it were, teaching in the UC system. The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those post-COVID, were the problem. Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile. And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination. I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for students. 0: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-accomodation-gen-z-phenomenon-find-success-in-competitive-job-market-stanford-university-skills-based-hiring/ https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
- jobs_throwaway 5mo agoGive teachers authority again. It shouldn't be their problem if a student wants to fail the class.
- borski 5mo agoThe problem is that just like students, teachers are not all created equal. My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years. I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me. Activist teachers are also a thing.
- thot_experiment 5mo agoCrazy that such a load bearing job isn't better funded and more respected. Arguably the most important job in society and the level of respect, pay and to some extent training (at least a lot of places require a masters for what that's worth) is absolutely not commensurate with it's importance. I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable people are with the education system here. Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non controversial.
- mtrifonov 5mo agoI wouldn't even say it's the devices, exactly. The way I see it, this is all downstream of kids spending more time online than in real life (because all THEIR friends are online, rather than in real life). Device time-out doesn't exactly remediate that structural issue. And the whole testing debate kind of sails right past it. My take is that the test won't make kids better at math. At best, it'll drift towards investment in reward-hacking the exam (like it always was). I think it was idiotic to make it optional to begin with. The stats they're talking about, though, can't be a primarily admissions-signal problem. Whatever they're using these days in lieu of exams are imperfect proxies for math skill, sure, but it's not like they're admitting kids off their CoD K:D. Kids taking APs and stacking extracurriculars are generally motivated. So, if even the motivated ones show up unable to do middle school math, the cause is more systemic than "we stopped testing." My vote: TikTok brain rot. I build LLM products and I see how the parasocial pull shows up even when the products have nothing to do with companionship. I watched one user obsessively spin up 44 separate chats around a K-Pop vampire character over a week. The product is NOT designed for that. The pull toward frictionless digital reward is just that strong, and that's what kids' attention is up against now. Math is the most effortful, least immediately rewarding thing they do. Doesn't stand a chance against an infinite feed, and I guess infinite vampires either. Which is why the ask from the faculty is kind of arrogant. The article, at least, doesn't even float a hypothesis for WHY math skills collapsed, simply assuming standardized testing fixes it. I wholly believe in standardized testing — but it measures the problem, it doesn't fix it.
- tracker1 5mo agoNot just for math, but the shift to electronics based learning in language skills is way behind classic approaches from a century or more ago. A lot of common core reasoning is based at a level most younger children cannot yet grasp, and it's no surprise they fail to adopt at sufficient levels in reality. Then schools systems circle the wagons to cover up their own failures.
- moi2388 5mo agoSorry, but I’m calling absolute bullshit. Blackboards are fine for teaching maths according to mathematicians. For students, just look at stuff like 3blue1brown and summer of math and how many people finally get it because of animations and playing with the maths instead of some old dude drawing a formula on a blackboard. This is like the pi vs tau debate. I seriously do not understand why maths teachers are so unable to relate to their non-mathematically inclined students
- yodsanklai 5mo ago> how many people finally get it because of animations and playing with the maths instead of some old dude drawing a formula on a blackboard Visualisation helps of course, but if you want to be good at maths, you need to put the work and try to solve tons of problems. Most of what 3blue1brown shows in his fancy videos are things you can drawn on your own on a paper, and if you've never done it yourself, chances are you don't understand. The problem with digital tools is that it's easy to get distracted. If you watch 5 minutes of 3blue1brown and then 20 random videos, it's not going to help.
- moi2388 5mo agoOf course you need to put the work in. But visualisation and directed play really does wonders. I don’t understand why maths teachers generally take a math perspective and not a “bored kid with no math inclination and who doesn’t see the beauty in it yet” perspective, since that’s the target group he’s supposed to be reaching..
- andrepd 5mo agoAgree with technology being over-used for the sake of it. A visualisation/exploration of some math concept in Desmos can be invaluable, infinitely better than fiddling with diagrams on paper. Solving a calculus exercise on an ipad instead of paper adds exactly zero value. A smart teacher will know to use the first but not the second. I will just say whiteboard > blackboard. I get allergies just thinking about it x)
- seanhunter 5mo agoI strongly agree with your basic idea but I am currently studying maths part-time and for me personally, I love using an iPad for writing maths because of cut/paste and the ability to drag things around to make space on the page. It really helps me to do things in a way that’s clear. When I do things with pencil and paper I spend a huge amount of time erasing things, crossing out, adding little caret and then squeezing little extra bits that I forgot earlier between two lines “…and f is continuous on [-1,1]…” etc. I used to hate writing on the ipad but the thing that was transformational for me was a “paperlike”[1] screen protector, which makes the surface feel a lot nicer to write on. [1] https://paperlike.com/ https://paperlike.com/