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Comment by agiacalone | Hacker News Reader

When I was in high school, graphing calculators were pretty new. New enough that most teachers had not yet encountered them.

I was a pretty nerdy kid even then, and I saw graphing calculator as 'portable computer' in 1993! So, of course I wanted one.

When our teachers found about them, they banned the use of graphing calculators, some teachers going so far as to only allowing 'four-bangers' (a basic one) for classes lower than Trig (I never got to Calc in high school).

Funny, but your statement reminded me of what one of math teachers used to say: "If you use a graphing calculator, you aren't doing math." It seems really quaint today.

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The smart reason graphing calculators are banned is because students are meant to be learning a concept. You don't learn how to graph to pass a test you take a test so you're pressured to learn how to graph.

Same with AI. Having AI generate a for loop doesn't mean you understand the concept of a for loop. You can argue that it's a waste of time to learn about for loops because an AI can write one for you but that's a separate matter.

That's why we use different tools when teaching/learning something vs. doing real work.

Another example is computer algebra systems like Mathematica. It would be self-sabotage to use them on your calculus homework, but they're indispensable to the working mathematician, physicist, or engineer, whose time is wasted doing routine calculations by hand.

If I hand you a math problem, and you point your camera at it and write down ChatGPT’s answer, you are definitely not doing math.

"If I hand you a equation to solve, and you type in the numbers, hit enter on your programmatic calculator, and write down Texas Instruments' answer, you are definitely not dong math." <-- would have been my teachers' attitude too.

Throw in "and when the batteries in your calculator die, you'll need to know how to do it by hand!" for good measure. :-)

I jest...

I think the difference with the calculator analogies is a calculator just speeds up calculations you could do yourself (granted some very slowly). I can’t type in “sally has 35 apples, and wants to give an equal number to each of her 7 friends. how many apples does each get?” I have to know to do 35/7. But an ai will do that problem solving for me, with zero understanding on my part.

Dude, maybe stop holding up your high school math teacher as some kind of arbiter of truth ...

If the math teacher is unaware of the difference between "math" and "arithmetic", what are you even talking about?

I took calc at around the same time. The teacher had us learn to sketch function graphs by hand the old fashioned way, by finding the derivative and looking for critical points, etc.

Then he brought the graphing calculators in and had us plot graphs on those, compare them to our hand sketches, and set domain and range on the graph based on the critical points we found. He emphasized that doing the math beforehand let us use the graphing calculator effectively, and without knowing the math the calculator was useless.

Which sounds like the most sensible voices w.r.t. AI. At least for now. Six months ago I would not trust AI for any but rather menial tasks, but frontier models are able to do more and more of what I do every time I turn around. The TI-83 has been a fixed quantity in terms of capability since the 90s, and it never computed derivatives itself.

I remember a homework where I had to graph some function. I decided use the plotting function of Lotus 1-2-3 for that. The plot worked fine, but didn’t make sense.

I then spent way more time than what I would have spent without the plotter to figure out that a pole and a zero were located right next to eachother.

I had no idea if the teacher had done that on purpose, but it made enough of an impression on me that I still remember it.

The point of math exercises is usually not to get to solution as quickly as possible.

It’s more like cheating off your neighbor’s math test than using a calculator

Imagine if year 2 kids get a calculator instead of learning to add. They'll never learn to add.

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