Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

If you use a crutch you won’t learn anything is an age old truism. I don’t know why we would think a new tool somehow changes that dynamic.

My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch.

She’s also learning to write essays. She writes her essays then puts them into ChatGPT and asks for analysis, feedback, explanatory revisions. Then she revises the essay on her own without being able to refer back to the advice. This is using AI as a complement to learning and it’s been remarkably powerful. She can get feedback immediately, it’s high quality and impartial, and she can do it as many time as she finds useful. So, the fundamentals of learning don’t change no matter how powerful or different the tools become. But ignoring the tools because they can be used in place of learning if used in place of learning is dumb.

It wouldn't be shocking to me that in 30 years, your daughter would be tasked with writing a whole book and not just an essay. Part of the learning process is learning to leverage technology. Something I think we do a really bad job at teaching kids.

Of course, leveraging technology to do the exact same thing you would do without the technology is a terrible lesson on many levels.

> My daughter is 10 and she is learning factoring, long division, and other things that a calculator does very well with. But she’s not allowed to use it at this stage because she can’t learn while using a crutch.

Which seems silly to me, but what do I know, I'm not a teacher. Nobody does long division in real life after K-12 school. It is not a useful skill to have, and it is not a useful concept to know. If I have to divide two numbers I just use a calculator like 99% of the humans on the planet.

Knowing what division is, and what it means to divide one number by another is valuable, but can you just teach that without teaching the mechanics of "divide the partial dividend by the divisor, then multiply the partial quotient by the divisor, and subtract from the partial dividend, extending to the next blah blah blah blah"? Are we really training the next generation for a world without electricity?

> Nobody does long division in real life after K-12 school. It is not a useful skill to have, and it is not a useful concept to know.

To my surprise, when I did pure maths at A level I found the same ideas applied to dividing one polynomial by another.

Of course as a mere memorisable algorithm a computer can also do this, so I'm not sure how useful it is even to pure mathematics, but there is (or was, 20 years ago) some use to the idea.

Maybe learning to follow a simple algorithm helps some children to structure their thinking. Divisions are not hard to do. Doing a lot of them has little benefit though.

Intuitively knowing how it works means being able to immediately catch 110 is wrong when you tried to enter 55 / 2 (and mis-typed / as *), instead of blindly trusting it.

This was a problem even 20 years ago. I remember one instance from my physics class in highschool, one student's result had gravity going in the wrong direction. The teacher used it as an example for why should understand what we're doing and not to blindly trust our calculators.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com