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Even if you're pro-AI, there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point. It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hamme

Even if you're pro-AI, there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point. It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers before moving them to nailguns. I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote: "It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses."

rps93 1mo ago
Im for this as I use AI in my current college classes to learn things quickly. Also, save money aka not have to buy/read the textbook. Using AI allows me to take and feed my notes to it and have it create multiple choice quizzes. Same for assignments where my teacher asks us to define terms. So far doing this I am able to retain things quickly and speak intelligently during the next class. So dont read the textbook, just learn what is needed and graduate. Mandami is definitely right on this as my new way of learning will get me A(s) and B(s) but im thinking i will miss a lot of important pieces of information.
- voxl 1mo ago
  So you'd rather give money to the company that stole the copyrighted material of experts and academics instead of giving them money? Sure some textbooks are corporate greed schemes themselves, but many others are just the work of a group of professors
  - Sebguer 1mo ago
    they literally said that they think Mamdani is doing the right thing and that they understand they're hindering their education by using AI the way they are, did you even read the comment before making your response?
    - voxl 1mo ago
      Missing information is different from paying the person who steals information instead of paying the person that produces it. Did you bother to think critically before you replied, or is an AI doing all your thinking as well?
- iLoveOncall 1mo ago
  You're literally stealing from yourself by paying for tuition and not getting any benefit from it besides a piece of paper that won't hold to scrutiny once someone asks you to code something on an interview or in a company. Intern quality at my FAANG has been dreadful for the past year, and new grads aren't much better. Most don't pass probation nowadays.
  - adolfojp 1mo ago
    I figure this is quickly becoming an either use steroids for bodybuilding competitions even if you're against them or opt out of competing kind of situation.
    - iLoveOncall 1mo ago
      It's more like showing up to the gym with a fake muscle suit and then everyone can see you can't lift shit.
hombre_fatal 1mo ago
I can’t imagine how many shortcuts I would have taken as a kid/teen or stressed uni student if AI were an option. I can see even a well-meaning student stuck in this aspirational cycle of “I’ll do it myself next time, but right now I just want to catch up.”
- bugbull 1mo ago
  There were certainly integral solving validators online when I took calculus in high school. At some point I gave up and just used that, because “the money is in web application development, I don’t need that calculus stuff”. Big regret. Edit: For reference, the regret came when I tried to do some RF related projects on the side. Those projects would likely have gone somewhere if I put some effort into even the basic calculus from high school.
  - SoftTalker 1mo ago
    I have never needed calculus since leaving university, nearly 40 year ago. If you're not in hard engineering, you probably won't (and if you are, you'll get to use all the computer assisting tools you want).
    - daymanstep 1mo ago
      Math in general is something that you don't need to know until you need to know it, the problem with "just in time" learning is that if you don't already know it then you won't even be able to know when it's needed and which specific bits of math you need to learn for the specific situation you find yourself in. If you don't know math, you often won't be able to even realize when math is needed. There's a Steve Yegge quote about this: > You'll gradually realize that your math deficiencies aren't just something that you might need to beef up on if you ever "need to"; you'll see that virtually every problem space has a mathematical modeling component that you were blissfully unaware of until Done, and Gets Things Smart gal points it out to you and says, "There's an infinitely smarter approach, which by the way I implemented over the weekend." You stare slack-jawed for a little while, and then she says: "Here's a ball. Why don't you go bounce it?"
Avicebron 1mo ago
It's also not banning parents from using AI with their kids or showing their kids AI outside of school so I don't know the issue. Does anyone here actually have kids in school and can report on what kind of "AI" these kids are using, because I can almost guarantee they would be using it as a glorified wikipedia at the absolute top end. They aren't going to be doing the kind of stuff people on here are using it for..
charcircuit 1mo ago
It's like banning teachers or textbooks from school. LLMs are the single greatest learning technology ever created.
- anon7000 1mo ago
  If kids use them for learning and not just cheating. You have to learn how to learn and how to think for yourself before you can do that
  - charcircuit 1mo ago
    LLMs can teach you that too. You do not need to learn that first.
    - wyre 1mo ago
      They can, but I don't think we are there yet. No need to sending taxpayer dollars to silicon valley on educating the next generation using a new technology that hasn't proven itself in education yet.
    - wildzzz 1mo ago
      LLMs greatly remove the social aspect of the teacher-student relationship. They are probably fine for tutoring and replacing things like Khan Academy but they are no substitute for a human teacher.
- mushi_shi 1mo ago
  Are you sure that taking shortcuts to information isn't potentially doing more damage to learning?
  - baby_souffle 1mo ago
    Being able to access information faster is not really a problem. I don't know anybody that was super upset that the encyclopedia came on a bunch of CD roms instead of bound volumes. Not having the skills to assess the accuracy / validity of the information you accessed at breakneck speed however is going to be the downfall of us all. Ai just made it easier to generate misinformation faster. We were already suffering from the blight of misinformation spreading through various media channels. If AI can be used to better teach effective media and information literacy, we should be rolling that out in schools. But it sounds like AI in public schools is largely just being used for speed running homework.
pj_mukh 1mo ago
Just so we're clear, phones were already banned in classrooms. "Personal" use of AI within a classroom to help someone like a personal calculator or a personal "cheating aid" was already banned. This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.
- tw04 1mo ago
  Good? The amount of just flat out wrong information the average LLM spits out makes it unfit for education IMO. I can’t imagine asking teachers to have to personally vet every single lesson plan to ensure an AI wasn’t hallucinating when producing the content.
  - pj_mukh 1mo ago
    If they were using a two year old gpt-4o type model, I'd agree. But now I'm not sure this is a problem. Now digital tools in general are known to be harmful in learning. There's good teachers and bad teachers, there's good AI implementations and bad ones. This bans all of them. I'm not particularly worried, meaningful experimentation will continue in private schools. I just hope public schools can learn from that and open it back up when it's mature.
  - lukeschlather 1mo ago
    Frontier LLMs with Internet search are different beasts than what you're describing as an average LLM. In 5 years I don't think you're going to be able to get away from LLMs if you care about correctness, and we're already to the point where if a calculation matters I want an LLM to check my math.
    - JumpCrisscross 1mo ago
      > In 5 years I don't think you're going to be able to get away from LLMs if you care about correctness Okay. Let’s revisit this in five years. In the meantime, let’s not experiment on our kids.
      - 1mo ago
manquer 1mo ago
> calculators are banned from math classes Not all math classes yes, if your are learning basic arithmetic yes calculators should not be allowed, but if am learning say applied statistics I would be wasting time adding numbers by hand and not learning what I am actually supposed to be taking the course for. A tool is just a tool[1]. Even when it was not allowed, schools would still teach you how to use a calculator correctly and your peers that 80085 looks like BOOBS. Effective AI usage education specifically as an aid to learning is important for children today. There is no avoiding the fact that generative models will part of their whole lives . The instructor or the school board with inputs from professional experts in learning pedagogy should be taking this kind of call at individual course level. IMO it shouldn't be the mayor doing a blanket ban [1] There were time when instead of calculators, you would need to carry Clark's Tables booklets you weren't expected to learn numerical analysis to just use value of ln(n) , Clark's tables were a tool, so was the calculator, or a computer or now a machine learning model.
- OptionOfT 1mo ago
  You wouldn't be taking applied statistics if you didn't pass basic arithmetic.
  - manquer 26d ago
    Exactly why a blanket calculator ban for entire education system would be bad. It should be course specific decided by someone with pedagogical understanding of course contents ?
- BobaFloutist 1mo ago
  The comment you're responding to doesn't appear to have been edited, so you might benefit from rereading the sentence you quoted a snippet from.
skeptic_ai 1mo ago
So why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript? Or assembly code? I can cheat straight to JavaScript
- hackeraccount 1mo ago
  Imagine if you had! You might be the 100X JavaScript writer. More seriously everyone knows there are patterns that keep repeating themselves from low level on up. The more exposure you get the better you get at understanding them. I think there's a reasonable question about if the best methodology for understanding is to see the same thing repeatedly (that is just study JavaScript) or to see multiple variations on the same thing (that is learn the entire stack imperfectly). The counter to this in my mind is that learning for it's own sake is often imperfect. If I know I'm learning about semiconductors simply to get on to learning Assembly and then JavaScript (my actual goal) I'll retain less then if the initial steps are the goal itself. Pedagogy is a tricky thing.
- johnnyanmac 1mo ago
  >why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript? because you chose computer science/SWE instead of Computer Engineering. At least, those were in fact the differences in my programs at my alma mater. even then, introductory assembly was a 200 level course at my school. we did in fact learn how assembly code worked to help better prep us for advanced software courses where we manage memory and develop domain knowledge.
ytoawwhra92 1mo ago
> there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point Yeah, a bad reason. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-10/are-calculators-affecting-maths-skills/6684542 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-10/are-calculators-affec... > In a 1997 review of the extent to which calculators were being used in schools, numerous studies were examined that indicated the use of calculators at primary levels had no detrimental effects on students' arithmetic abilities. > Unfortunately, the research indicated that calculators were still being used for trivial things like checking answers and were making little difference in mathematics education. > Although teachers indicated their support for the use of calculators across all levels of primary school, there was little evidence that these ideas were being taken up and implemented. > Parental disapproval of the use of calculators was cited as a possible cause of the limited take-up.
- zzo38computer 1mo ago
  I seem to remember reading somewhere that Marilyn vos Savant had said that it is acceptable to use a calculator when learing arithmetic (I do not remember the reason given) but that clocks should not be used to learn time. (I might be mistaken, since I do not remember for sure.)
  - recursivecaveat 1mo ago
    I wasn't able to find anything about (analog I presume) clocks for education, but it sounds like she is against calculators for elementary arithmetic education: https://parade.com/345575/marilynvossavant/why-math-students-shouldnt-be-allowed-to-use-calculators/ https://parade.com/345575/marilynvossavant/why-math-students...
    - zzo38computer 1mo ago
      I might have misremembered then, or maybe it was someone else.
- johnnyanmac 1mo ago
  And you think a 9YO has the discipline to understand when a calculator is used for "checking work" compared to using it to answer their questions and get positive feedback? That's the part this study seems to handwave. We don't need a full calculator ban, but very controlled usage is necessary.
jjav 1mo ago
> It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers When I was young I attended a karate dojo. One interaction that always stayed with me was when someone asked why the guy with a black belt could do the katas differently. The sensei answered that when learning, your task is to learn to do the katas perfectly. As a black belt, you have amply demonstrated that, so now your task is to be creative and build on the foundations. I liked that answer, it applies to everything. Learn the basics before you are allowed to question them. After that, you must question them.
- andrekandre 29d ago
  thats an awesome example giving ai to children without limits is like giving them leg-braces or wheelchairs; they'll get used to it and never learn to walk or run by themselves much less karate... they'll be cripples from the start.
  - jjav 29d ago
    To anyone who has not read the short story 'The feeling of power' by Isaac Asimov, it is a treat predicting this trend from the 1950s. https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/The%20Feeling%20of%20Power.pdf https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/Th...
DonsDiscountGas 1mo ago
We typically leave decisions like that up to teachers though, not the mayor. So they can vary what's allowed on different assignments.

rps93 1mo ago

Im for this as I use AI in my current college classes to learn things quickly. Also, save money aka not have to buy/read the textbook. Using AI allows me to take and feed my notes to it and have it create multiple choice quizzes. Same for assignments where my teacher asks us to define terms. So far doing this I am able to retain things quickly and speak intelligently during the next class. So dont read the textbook, just learn what is needed and graduate. Mandami is definitely right on this as my new way of learning will get me A(s) and B(s) but im thinking i will miss a lot of important pieces of information.

voxl 1mo ago
So you'd rather give money to the company that stole the copyrighted material of experts and academics instead of giving them money? Sure some textbooks are corporate greed schemes themselves, but many others are just the work of a group of professors
- Sebguer 1mo ago
  they literally said that they think Mamdani is doing the right thing and that they understand they're hindering their education by using AI the way they are, did you even read the comment before making your response?
  - voxl 1mo ago
    Missing information is different from paying the person who steals information instead of paying the person that produces it. Did you bother to think critically before you replied, or is an AI doing all your thinking as well?
iLoveOncall 1mo ago
You're literally stealing from yourself by paying for tuition and not getting any benefit from it besides a piece of paper that won't hold to scrutiny once someone asks you to code something on an interview or in a company. Intern quality at my FAANG has been dreadful for the past year, and new grads aren't much better. Most don't pass probation nowadays.
- adolfojp 1mo ago
  I figure this is quickly becoming an either use steroids for bodybuilding competitions even if you're against them or opt out of competing kind of situation.
  - iLoveOncall 1mo ago
    It's more like showing up to the gym with a fake muscle suit and then everyone can see you can't lift shit.

hombre_fatal 1mo ago

I can’t imagine how many shortcuts I would have taken as a kid/teen or stressed uni student if AI were an option. I can see even a well-meaning student stuck in this aspirational cycle of “I’ll do it myself next time, but right now I just want to catch up.”

bugbull 1mo ago
There were certainly integral solving validators online when I took calculus in high school. At some point I gave up and just used that, because “the money is in web application development, I don’t need that calculus stuff”. Big regret. Edit: For reference, the regret came when I tried to do some RF related projects on the side. Those projects would likely have gone somewhere if I put some effort into even the basic calculus from high school.
- SoftTalker 1mo ago
  I have never needed calculus since leaving university, nearly 40 year ago. If you're not in hard engineering, you probably won't (and if you are, you'll get to use all the computer assisting tools you want).
  - daymanstep 1mo ago
    Math in general is something that you don't need to know until you need to know it, the problem with "just in time" learning is that if you don't already know it then you won't even be able to know when it's needed and which specific bits of math you need to learn for the specific situation you find yourself in. If you don't know math, you often won't be able to even realize when math is needed. There's a Steve Yegge quote about this: > You'll gradually realize that your math deficiencies aren't just something that you might need to beef up on if you ever "need to"; you'll see that virtually every problem space has a mathematical modeling component that you were blissfully unaware of until Done, and Gets Things Smart gal points it out to you and says, "There's an infinitely smarter approach, which by the way I implemented over the weekend." You stare slack-jawed for a little while, and then she says: "Here's a ball. Why don't you go bounce it?"

Avicebron 1mo ago

It's also not banning parents from using AI with their kids or showing their kids AI outside of school so I don't know the issue. Does anyone here actually have kids in school and can report on what kind of "AI" these kids are using, because I can almost guarantee they would be using it as a glorified wikipedia at the absolute top end. They aren't going to be doing the kind of stuff people on here are using it for..

charcircuit 1mo ago

It's like banning teachers or textbooks from school. LLMs are the single greatest learning technology ever created.

anon7000 1mo ago
If kids use them for learning and not just cheating. You have to learn how to learn and how to think for yourself before you can do that
- charcircuit 1mo ago
  LLMs can teach you that too. You do not need to learn that first.
  - wyre 1mo ago
    They can, but I don't think we are there yet. No need to sending taxpayer dollars to silicon valley on educating the next generation using a new technology that hasn't proven itself in education yet.
  - wildzzz 1mo ago
    LLMs greatly remove the social aspect of the teacher-student relationship. They are probably fine for tutoring and replacing things like Khan Academy but they are no substitute for a human teacher.
mushi_shi 1mo ago
Are you sure that taking shortcuts to information isn't potentially doing more damage to learning?
- baby_souffle 1mo ago
  Being able to access information faster is not really a problem. I don't know anybody that was super upset that the encyclopedia came on a bunch of CD roms instead of bound volumes. Not having the skills to assess the accuracy / validity of the information you accessed at breakneck speed however is going to be the downfall of us all. Ai just made it easier to generate misinformation faster. We were already suffering from the blight of misinformation spreading through various media channels. If AI can be used to better teach effective media and information literacy, we should be rolling that out in schools. But it sounds like AI in public schools is largely just being used for speed running homework.

pj_mukh 1mo ago

Just so we're clear, phones were already banned in classrooms. "Personal" use of AI within a classroom to help someone like a personal calculator or a personal "cheating aid" was already banned. This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.

tw04 1mo ago
Good? The amount of just flat out wrong information the average LLM spits out makes it unfit for education IMO. I can’t imagine asking teachers to have to personally vet every single lesson plan to ensure an AI wasn’t hallucinating when producing the content.
- pj_mukh 1mo ago
  If they were using a two year old gpt-4o type model, I'd agree. But now I'm not sure this is a problem. Now digital tools in general are known to be harmful in learning. There's good teachers and bad teachers, there's good AI implementations and bad ones. This bans all of them. I'm not particularly worried, meaningful experimentation will continue in private schools. I just hope public schools can learn from that and open it back up when it's mature.
- lukeschlather 1mo ago
  Frontier LLMs with Internet search are different beasts than what you're describing as an average LLM. In 5 years I don't think you're going to be able to get away from LLMs if you care about correctness, and we're already to the point where if a calculation matters I want an LLM to check my math.
  - JumpCrisscross 1mo ago
    > In 5 years I don't think you're going to be able to get away from LLMs if you care about correctness Okay. Let’s revisit this in five years. In the meantime, let’s not experiment on our kids.
    - 1mo ago

manquer 1mo ago

> calculators are banned from math classes Not all math classes yes, if your are learning basic arithmetic yes calculators should not be allowed, but if am learning say applied statistics I would be wasting time adding numbers by hand and not learning what I am actually supposed to be taking the course for. A tool is just a tool[1]. Even when it was not allowed, schools would still teach you how to use a calculator correctly and your peers that 80085 looks like BOOBS. Effective AI usage education specifically as an aid to learning is important for children today. There is no avoiding the fact that generative models will part of their whole lives . The instructor or the school board with inputs from professional experts in learning pedagogy should be taking this kind of call at individual course level. IMO it shouldn't be the mayor doing a blanket ban [1] There were time when instead of calculators, you would need to carry Clark's Tables booklets you weren't expected to learn numerical analysis to just use value of ln(n) , Clark's tables were a tool, so was the calculator, or a computer or now a machine learning model.

OptionOfT 1mo ago
You wouldn't be taking applied statistics if you didn't pass basic arithmetic.
- manquer 26d ago
  Exactly why a blanket calculator ban for entire education system would be bad. It should be course specific decided by someone with pedagogical understanding of course contents ?
BobaFloutist 1mo ago
The comment you're responding to doesn't appear to have been edited, so you might benefit from rereading the sentence you quoted a snippet from.

skeptic_ai 1mo ago

So why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript? Or assembly code? I can cheat straight to JavaScript

hackeraccount 1mo ago
Imagine if you had! You might be the 100X JavaScript writer. More seriously everyone knows there are patterns that keep repeating themselves from low level on up. The more exposure you get the better you get at understanding them. I think there's a reasonable question about if the best methodology for understanding is to see the same thing repeatedly (that is just study JavaScript) or to see multiple variations on the same thing (that is learn the entire stack imperfectly). The counter to this in my mind is that learning for it's own sake is often imperfect. If I know I'm learning about semiconductors simply to get on to learning Assembly and then JavaScript (my actual goal) I'll retain less then if the initial steps are the goal itself. Pedagogy is a tricky thing.
johnnyanmac 1mo ago
>why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript? because you chose computer science/SWE instead of Computer Engineering. At least, those were in fact the differences in my programs at my alma mater. even then, introductory assembly was a 200 level course at my school. we did in fact learn how assembly code worked to help better prep us for advanced software courses where we manage memory and develop domain knowledge.

ytoawwhra92 1mo ago

> there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point Yeah, a bad reason. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-10/are-calculators-affecting-maths-skills/6684542 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-10/are-calculators-affec... > In a 1997 review of the extent to which calculators were being used in schools, numerous studies were examined that indicated the use of calculators at primary levels had no detrimental effects on students' arithmetic abilities. > Unfortunately, the research indicated that calculators were still being used for trivial things like checking answers and were making little difference in mathematics education. > Although teachers indicated their support for the use of calculators across all levels of primary school, there was little evidence that these ideas were being taken up and implemented. > Parental disapproval of the use of calculators was cited as a possible cause of the limited take-up.

zzo38computer 1mo ago
I seem to remember reading somewhere that Marilyn vos Savant had said that it is acceptable to use a calculator when learing arithmetic (I do not remember the reason given) but that clocks should not be used to learn time. (I might be mistaken, since I do not remember for sure.)
- recursivecaveat 1mo ago
  I wasn't able to find anything about (analog I presume) clocks for education, but it sounds like she is against calculators for elementary arithmetic education: https://parade.com/345575/marilynvossavant/why-math-students-shouldnt-be-allowed-to-use-calculators/ https://parade.com/345575/marilynvossavant/why-math-students...
  - zzo38computer 1mo ago
    I might have misremembered then, or maybe it was someone else.
johnnyanmac 1mo ago
And you think a 9YO has the discipline to understand when a calculator is used for "checking work" compared to using it to answer their questions and get positive feedback? That's the part this study seems to handwave. We don't need a full calculator ban, but very controlled usage is necessary.

jjav 1mo ago

> It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers When I was young I attended a karate dojo. One interaction that always stayed with me was when someone asked why the guy with a black belt could do the katas differently. The sensei answered that when learning, your task is to learn to do the katas perfectly. As a black belt, you have amply demonstrated that, so now your task is to be creative and build on the foundations. I liked that answer, it applies to everything. Learn the basics before you are allowed to question them. After that, you must question them.

andrekandre 29d ago
thats an awesome example giving ai to children without limits is like giving them leg-braces or wheelchairs; they'll get used to it and never learn to walk or run by themselves much less karate... they'll be cripples from the start.
- jjav 29d ago
  To anyone who has not read the short story 'The feeling of power' by Isaac Asimov, it is a treat predicting this trend from the 1950s. https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/The%20Feeling%20of%20Power.pdf https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/Th...

DonsDiscountGas 1mo ago

We typically leave decisions like that up to teachers though, not the mayor. So they can vary what's allowed on different assignments.