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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

> Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose.

Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.

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I still believe looking up the answer in the back of the book is completely fine. It creates a moment of tension. It invites you to justify in your own head that the answer is right before checking. The cognitive dissonance when you see your answer is wrong and really have to challenge yourself, or ask your neighbour, to see why - is all really valuable.

I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying, communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have benefits.

I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are the best tools (in my very personal opinion).

The problem with the back-of-the-book is that once you answer the same exercise few times, you remember what the result is and you work on memory not on skill. At least this is something i struggled with.

Digitalization should be able to provide you with drastically larger number of exercises to practice, and if possible should also provide you with the exercise that is at the right level for you

> With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.

Where is this rush for instant feedback coming from?

If you aren't sure your answer is correct then you're more likely to redo the problem or try to confirm it with fuzzier calculations. This is difficult and is great exercise.

Learning math isn't just about being correct. It's about doing the motions and learning how to problem solve.

Using the computer the way you suggest will make you lazy as you won't learn to do these hard things.

Tbh the same applies to a lot of subjects if you discuss them with a sufficiently good LLM. (Socratic method)

LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method. Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.

Is the instant feedback actually beneficial for learning though?

I always found that rumination, doubt, and consideration took time and space.

There are books with written solutions.

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