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Just got a card from a student who has been having a rough year. She was having a great deal of trouble until I started showing her how to really USE a calculator. (It's algebra and geometry not arithmetic, and she knows the algorithms just makes SO MANY little mistakes)
Since then she's really taken off. I find very few people who could benefit from calculators know how to use them effectively, and there is a lot of snootiness and stigma in the way of this happening.
1/
I generally agree that up to around grade 7 there isn't much use for calculators. But from there out if you understand place value and can estimate being consistent and accurate doing long hand calculations is kind of overrated-- I'm always a little shocked that once I tell the grade 9 students they can use calculators they somehow keep making arithmetic errors... (HOW) not this student, though!
She might even like math now. Imagine that.
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@futurebird
Loving all of this post!
You have planted a seed. You have increased the chances of her liking math. And if she likes math, she increases the number of career paths she can take.
It is one of things I sort of get bummed out about is that schools (in general) do not teach how to use tools. Tools that are widely used in industry.
You rock!
I've heard teachers complain "my students put things like 6*8 in the calculator"
I always think "so?" I mean if they know it's around 50 and are worried they've mixed it up with some other fact why does it matter?
You are teaching calculus who cares?
(It's 4 ... 12s which is helpful if you know the 12s but if you didn't learn them young... anyway it's kind of a distraction from the problem at hand. Get the correct result. Use the tool. )
@futurebird @snacktraces
Yes! Normalize redundancy, verification, and checking external sources, instead of encouraging the arrogant practice of refusing help to demonstrate knowledge! It’s a fragile ego that refuses “measure twice, cut once.”
@inthehands @futurebird @snacktraces this is a thing I had to learn the hard way in undergrad computer science
I'd come from a liberal arts background where looking up the answers was cheating
I still feel bad using other people's code, even though I hate programming, because everybody's going to know I don't understand what I'm doing.
When the truth is that being able to synthesize other people's code to do what you want is how you prove you do know what you're doing.
@WizardOfDocs @inthehands @snacktraces
It's a solved problem! Don't solve it again!
@futurebird @WizardOfDocs @snacktraces Yup! And there’s a second very pernicious consequence, one that materializes later, of not having practice looking up existing solutions and working with other people’s code: sometimes it’s a solved problem and the existing solution is •wrong•, or right but not for your problem, or could use improvement. You’ll only see that clearly if you’re used to engaging with code as •conversation• instead of some kind of intelligence test.
@futurebird @WizardOfDocs @snacktraces I tend to think this way of engaging with code — “Does this existing code work? What does it do? What problem is it solving? Is that •my• problem?” — is already crucial, and on a trajectory to become 10x more so. We CS educators need to get better at teaching it. Now. Yesterday.
It’s already a problem finding answers on Stack Overflow. And in the coming onslaught of plausible-looking LLM-generated bullshit code? Well…
@inthehands @futurebird @WizardOfDocs @snacktraces One of my favorite sci-fi concepts of all-time is the Qeng Ho programmer-archaeologists from Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky
@jepyang @futurebird @WizardOfDocs @snacktraces Hardly even fiction!