Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes. Then only four function calculators, then graphing calculators. But still today, programmable calculators are prohibited in many academic contexts.
A first grader probably would be prohibited from using any kind of calculator on arithmetic tests, 4-fn or not. But 8th graders are usually permitted scientific (non-programmable) calculators.
As you go up in grade level, you "get access to" calculators capable of functionality at the level below you. Because the point is that when we're educating students we want them to actually learn the subject matter, but once we've deemed them to have understood it and we have them move onto the next goal, we give them the tools to make that prior goal easier. We lessen the burden of the little mechanical concepts they already know so that they have an easier time becoming familiar with the next more advanced concepts.
AI systems are so much more advanced than what's capable on a TI programmable calculator. It's hard to draw clean boundaries around the tiers and enforce them by telling the model "help the user with tasks of tier 1-4 but not 5+". That's the issue, that it's really infeasible to strictly use them strictly as learning tools. You can almost do it with a lot of self-discipline and self-reflection to analyze your own workflow, but it's not generalizable across domains.
Realistically, the answers the students gave the teacher were probably motivated by the practical benefits that come with giving teachers the answers they want to hear…bullshit questions are likely to produce bullshit answers. It’s not like first year college students haven’t had twelve years of academic standards moralizing talked at them.
Like I said to you in another comment, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the article.
At least one of the polls was anonymous, too. There were no punishments in the class for using AI, in fact at least a couple of the students later revealed they had been using AI for everything.
This wasn't a "bullshit inducing poll", it was an experiment in perception vs reality, and how they modified those perceptions after the experiment had run its course.
But reliably restricting output at the semantic level is very much an open problem.
It didn't.
I was in math class when calculators were introduced. At least for high school level and beyond, the curricula were designed to make problems solvable without calculators, and they weren't of much use. This was still the case when I taught an undergrad college math class in 1997. Graphing calculators were allowed, and the kids who tried to use them just screwed themselves up.
I would have gladly changed the curriculum to use calculators and computers from the very beginning. As tools, and not just to administer the same old exercises and quizzes. Give them Jupyter Notebook. Math education has never been a success story.
Education faces a dilemma, which is that it has always used heuristics to guide study and assess performance. Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world, even long before AI could generate them on demand. When one of those heuristics is broken, another one has to be found. Even word processing forced teachers to grade papers on content, rather than mechanics.
The rigid formatting imposed by graded assignments may not have any use. But on the other hand, having completed a liberal arts/"soft" science degree before my CS degree I've greatly benefited in the workplace from the writing experience it provided. I had to write so many papers that it became more or less effortless to produce long form, well structured writing and those written communication skills have helped me distinguish myself far more than my technical ability at work.
The generic ChatGPT overly formal corporate tone has no nuance or subtlety and is a poor substitute for well crafted, deliberate communication. I am always conscious of how my exact words and phrasing would be perceived by the intended audience, frequently requiring a balancing act between competing interests while maintaining clarity. Due to that I manage to avoid stepping on toes or sabotaging relationships due to inartful phrasing. It's frustrating to receive emails consisting of LLM boilerplate because it has such low information density and is so much more difficult to infer tone and emotion from the other side .
I'm very grateful I completed my education without the temptation to just churn out low effort writing or code and depriving myself of that experience. I'm not confident at all I would have been able to maintain that self-discipline.
I hadn’t yet learned to program back when I was still using a feature phone, but I have a lot of fond memories of J2ME applications that I installed on my phones. Mostly games, of course.
I encourage anyone that wrote J2ME games and utilities, no matter how small or big, to upload the source to GitHub :)
But normally it depends on the subject and if the automation/machine solves the primary skill being teached or if its just a "secondary/tertiary" skill. Are you in a Calculus 101 class? Calculators like TI-89 are likely to be prohibited when examining for deriving analytical solutions for derivatives and integrals.
Statistics, Physics or any other subjects that needs applied maths? Such a calculator is probably a minimum requirement to take the course.
The other thing it was awesome for was solving systems of linear equations. I could do the nodal or loop analysis just fine, I'd write down the matrix that represented the system of equations and then just punch that matrix in and invert it.
The day when the relationship between s in a Laplace transform and d/dt finally clicked was also a really excellent day :D
I vaguely remember thinking that one likely reason shortcuts like mine were not prohibited was because no one in charge suspected that such things were even possible with current technology, or if they were, that a child would be able to exploit it. But as long as I kept to the letter of the rules, I considered myself ethically in the clear.
Yeah, totally, just to be clear I'm not judging.
In fact, if you programmed it to handle those operations, one could argue you had already learned a big chunk of what was going to be measured in the exams.
Kind of similar to the paradox of creating and using cheat sheets, is highly likely you're accidentally learning about the subject matter in the process of writing the sheet, sometimes up to a point where the cheat sheet is not necessary anymore.
The problem is (example from mathematics): even if you are capable of deriving some formula (you thus understood the topic well), it takes a lot of time in the exam. Looking at the cheat sheet is much faster - in particular when the time is somewhat precious in the exam.
Edit: Automate in the sense of coding it myself, not in the sense of downloading some software.
The equivalent in maths would be if you handed students a theorem prover or have Wolfram Alpha give you step-by-step solutions and obviously nobody to this day allows this, because like ChatGPT for writing it'd defeat the point, that students think.
When I was in uni we were allowed basic but not programmable calculators during exams and a lot of CS classes even were pen&paper, if the prof was a bit hardcore
"When will I use this in real life" is a declaration that you have no expectations of learning the next lesson that builds upon this one.
> Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes.
The author of TFA means specifically for his cohort of students, not in general. He polled his students, and the result was that they thought calculators weren't seen as unethical but they were more skeptical/uncertain about AI. By his current students, now, not in general.
Five years into the availability of a calculator with an arbitrary advanced feature, it was controversial in academic contexts. Some of the author’s students could be grand-children of students from the early days of consumer calculators.
The author is comparing a new technology with an old one. And ignoring programable calculators which are still sometimes banned after fifty years…and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author.
Among other things, he's analyzing his students attitudes' re: AI and cheating with AI, and also comparing what they claim to feel vs what they actually do! It's mostly a reflection of what his students feel about the use of AI in English writing, not about calculators vs AI.
It seems as if you're responding to the line you quoted (out of context) through your preconceptions of what the article is about instead of actually reading the article!
> and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author.
"Probably have used LLM's"!? Don't take this the wrong way, but it seems you didn't read past the line you quoted, am I right? Because this is explicitly addressed multiple times, and the answer may surprise you.
am I right?
Of course not...and did-you-read-the-article comments are contrary to HN community standards. Such comments wallow in lameness.
Of course yes. My comment was rhetorical!
> The teacher is asking a rhetorical question and getting an et cum spiritu tuo response.
He wasn't asking a rhetorical question! It was two polls, at least one of which was anonymous! Followed by several experiments!
I mean, you completely missed the point of the article and are making comments that are immediately refuted by simply reading it. You are making factually incorrect statements about the article, what am I to think? That you read it, but decided to ignore its contents to make some irrelevant remark about calculators vs LLMs?
The article is all about the tension of what his students initially believe (or claimed to believe, anyway) about AI-assisted writing, and what they come to realize at the end of the class. They also discuss authenticity vs formulaic writing, and are surprised by the results as well! They also discuss the tropes that show up in AI-writing, speculate on what may cause it, and are surprised about some of the results they get. They also discuss AI-assisted teaching. At the end, they revisit whether to be pro or anti AI, and the future of English classes, with or without AI.
All of it has very little to do with how recent LLMs vs calculators are. You focused on an out of context comment which doesn't inform the bulk of the article, and doesn't say what you claimed it said.
In grade 2 i had a teacher who would say "I don't believe in erasers", you know, the things that "undo" pencil. As a ~6 yr old i actually didn't understand this phrase: "Well I have one, they're real!"
Yes, they are uncontroversially bad. Schools that don't use them have higher scores.
Unfortunately, even SAT/ACT have calculator slop now.