[kleiba2]

I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time.

For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!

I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and never looked back.

[jazzpush2]

I had the opposite experience, as it were, teaching in the UC system. The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those post-COVID, were the problem.

Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile.

And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.

I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for students.

0: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...

[jobs_throwaway]

Give teachers authority again. It shouldn't be their problem if a student wants to fail the class.

[borski]

The problem is that just like students, teachers are not all created equal.

My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years.

I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me.

Activist teachers are also a thing.

[thot_experiment]

Crazy that such a load bearing job isn't better funded and more respected. Arguably the most important job in society and the level of respect, pay and to some extent training (at least a lot of places require a masters for what that's worth) is absolutely not commensurate with it's importance.

I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable people are with the education system here.

Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non controversial.

[andrepd]

I think the problem is people prefer to solve immediate problems affecting themselves (or their close kin) rather than long-term or indirect improvements, and education is the long-term project if there ever was one: magically improve things tomorrow, and you will only start to see the effects in 20 years.

I don't know how it is in your place, but where I'm from governments have — at least for the last 15 years — governed exclusively with a max horizon of 4 years (the time until the next elections). Everything is quick-fixes or patches that kick the can down the road. It's very hard to convince people to care and vote for you if you promise to show results over the next generations, vs if you bump up pensions next year or something.

Basically, to give a different example, that's in essence why you the response to "traffic is abysmal" is "we will widen the urban highways cutting through the city" rather than "we will implement a plan to actually redesign our city away from car-exclusiveness".

[ethbr1]

Multiple things can be true, because the goal is to optimize in aggregate.

- Some teachers are bad (and some students will have them)

- Overriding teachers with policies intended to control the bad ones impairs and burns out the others

Consequently, the reasonable path is somewhere in the middle. Create feedback systems designed to identify and weed out the worse teachers* and avoid overloading everyone else with outcome-less proscriptive policies.

* F.ex. it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees). "Well, people will give bad reviews if they get bad grades!" No shit, and somehow that's something we can't adjust for with a basic statistical analysis?

[bsder]

> it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees)

That completely ignores the social and political aspects.

You need to understand that the people who have the authority to do so do not want to document bad teachers, ever. Documenting bad teachers makes political waves and principals and superintendents never want to make waves because that impedes their ability to both do their job as well as get their next job.

Even if a teacher is very bad, they may be well-liked or be an important part of the community. If you attempt to remove that teacher, they may rally support from the community that can be extremely noisy and inconvenient.

[jrumbut]

> identify and weed out the worse teachers

By and large, everyone knows.

Data might be useful to tell you "hey that longtime great teacher approaching retirement has checked out early" or "the new hire who was struggling last semester has turned the corner" but it's no secret in a school building which teacher everyone hates and which one everyone loves.

If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were an elementary school principal, you would have the lay of the land by week two at the latest.

The problem is not separating the flowers from the weeds, it's what will happen if you pull the weeds. Who's gonna take care of that room full of 8 year olds tomorrow? And for the next several years? If a weed shows up every day and doesn't commit any crimes, the downside of replacing them is larger than the upside.

[tedd4u]

It is very respected in Finland. Having not many natural resources (trees / lumber aside) they made education their national resource. Teachers there are highly respected and have authority in the classroom. Masters degrees are required as well as multi-year in-classroom apprenticeships. Admission to education masters programs are highly competitive.

[brianwawok]

Always finland. Cool. Such a paradise.

[christkv]

It is very well funded but the money has gone to the new administrative layers of busybodies instead of the people in the classrooms.

[dnautics]

education is highly funded. teachers are not paid well because there is a perception that "anyone can be a teacher" (which is true in the sense that there is no particular enumerable qualification or credential that makes you a good teacher) so the market is full of people who decide that they should be a teacher (many should not, but there is no a priori way of knowing). supply high. a lot of education funding goes to things that are not teacher pay.

[Danox]

Education United States is not necessarily highly funded nor are all teachers necessarily good. Can you identify a good teacher? Yes you can. Will you get rid of the ones that are bad well not really.

I still remember all of the teachers that were really good and I remember some of the ones that were bad, the ones that were good. I wish that many of them could have lived long enough for me to say thank you.

[porridgeraisin]

Yep, and there is (rightfully) general distrust in giving teachers that much authority over students. Parents already have that authority, which is why a family environment conducive towards education is the most direct way to improve overall student outcomes. Trying to fix it in the school is bordering on pointless. In my country, boarding schools / boarding at another ...quieter... family member's house and attending a school near there was the most common solution among poorer people. Example: more-or-less sane mother sends off kid to uncles house during the school year to go to school and escape drunkard father. The kid visits on some weekends and most holidays.

Hard guidance is needed for kids. Hard guidance requires authority. So either you give teachers that authority which is very hard especially in diverse settings, or you make the family environment give better implicit and explicit guidance.

Now, the government will always attempt to solve it using the tools they have, which is the school, but it is destined to have vanishingly little success if at all.

[borski]

Which country? (Curious)

[porridgeraisin]

Urban poor of India

[tnecniv]

That happened to me in high school. I was in "advanced" freshman bio. Teacher gave me a B. When my parents inquired during a parent-teacher conference, she said I looked like I wasn't paying attention.

Fast forward ten years and the therapist I was seeing for seemingly unrelated reasons diagnoses me with ADHD...

[butvacuum]

I had a teacher the exact opposite. Completely ruthless about you doing the work, but patient and kind as long as it got done- And very pleasent.

[hodgesrm]

That was my 8th & 9th grade Latin teacher. Failure was not an option. I can still decline nouns and demonstratives 50 years later.

[conartist6]

I'm not completely convinced that "ADHD" isn't just the natural state of kids who are bored most of the time.

[kuboble]

Your observation could mean that overdiagnosis is a thing around you.

I have a close family member with actual attention deficit and extreme hyperactivity.

You cannot mistake it with normal bored kid.

It's like his brain works at 100% intensity all the time.

When you walk with him through the town, he has to touch every door knob, climb every tree, look into every single car, peep into every hole. In a room he finds new object so interesting that he absolutely has to investigate it, for like 30 seconds and then finds another thing and another and another. 24/7. You see his body is tired, almost falling asleep, but his brain won't stop, he keeps finding new distractions he can't ignore.

You would never mistake it for just a regular bored kid.

[DaSHacka]

As someone with ADHD I actually somewhat agree.

Not that all cases are simply the natural state of kids, but that it's overdiagnosed for that very reason.

"Oh your kid can't sit still and learn about some artificial topic by staring at whiteboards and pieces of paper all day? Better load 'em up with drugs, they clearly have ADHD!"

[borski]

Boredom and ADHD are comorbid (maybe obviously), but ADHD is a real thing.

[kbelder]

I voted you up, not because I think ADHD is a myth or doesn't exist, but because I think it's massively overdiagnosed, and what many people in popular culture call ADHD is often normal, even healthy, behavior.

[brailsafe]

> I'm not completely convinced that "ADHD" isn't just the natural state of kids who are bored most of the time.

Sounds like something my Gen X dad, who put zero effort into helping me succeed, would tell me as I failed my way through all school with zero direction or ambition and convinced I wasn't capable of anything useful.

I won't claim more people probably think they have ADHD than actually do, and being bored disproportionately more than most in most situations is absolutely one of the symptoms, but it's a wildly incomplete trivialization of a set of debilitating difficulties that can/do carry long into adulthood. and is heritable.

[Auracle]

I'm not sure if you have seen a kid with genuine bad ADHD then. Absolutely nothing will hold their attention.

[conartist6]

I'm not certain I have either, but I'm also skeptical of blanket statements. Nothing, really, nothing? Do they have no imagination then? No value, no curiosity? ...or are these just difficult kids to manage in a room full of kids...?

[wizzwizz4]

Approximately nothing externally imposed will hold their attention, but ADHD hyperfocus is absolutely a thing: it's just hard to identify from the outside.

[LtWorf]

I know people with ADHD who have graduated and are absolutely capable of having a job.

[plaguuuuuu]

No offense but if you haven't done enough research to actually have a studied opinion, maaaaybe you should avoid posting an inane comment about it.

[obscurette]

It's normal that such teachers exist. But management level should notice this kind of problems and react. I switched classes in age 8 exactly because of that – for some reason a teacher disliked me and/or my behavior and I was moved to another class. No big drama. It was in 1970, Soviet Union.

[gdsimoes]

That’s why the same person shouldn’t teach and evaluate the students learning.

[zahlman]

> The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those post-COVID, were the problem.

I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.

> And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.

Case in point. It's exactly because of the politics both that the students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture suppressing that questioning exists.

> I had a student claim...

Again, this is the student expressing the politics in question.

[projektfu]

I thought the politics refer to basically the office politics, not the general political environment. The previous comment was talking about the politics that made being a high school teacher not fun, which I took to mean the demands of administration and other faculty, possibly parents as well.

[zahlman]

Those demands are what they are because of the general political environment.

[jazzpush2]

Of course teaching pre/post-COVID is very different. Studies abound reveal this, as do plentiful anecdotes from both teachers and staff.

> I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.

Which distinction can't be made?

> It's exactly because of the politics...

Which politics, concretely?

I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.

Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?

[zahlman]

> Which distinction can't be made?

You said, and I quoted:

> The politics were mostly fine, but the students... were the problem.

The distinction, thus, is between "the politics" and "the students".

In the rest of my comment, I clearly exhibited that the thing that made "the students" problematic for you were "the politics" that they were expressing.

> Which politics, concretely?

The politics that underlie the false disability claims.

And also the politics that your student expressed by making the statement:

> I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory

Which are the same politics described in the post above yours:

> it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying.

Which are also "the politics" that everyone means when it comes to conflicts between students and teachers in the modern era, and the ones that form the basis of the conflict that TFA is about. Which is to say, the politics whereby educators can do no right, and everything is discriminatory. You described yourself being put in a double bind: first you were politically pressured to make an accommodation for a "high disability rate" that you didn't even believe to be legitimate (and I think you were probably correct in this), and then you were told that this, too, would be considered discriminatory.

In short: the politics whereby the term "discriminatory" (and "bigoted", and the family of related -isms and -phobias) is simply a political bludgeon, which need not be connected to any ordinary understanding of what it means to treat people fairly or equally.

It is all shell games because the goal is not actually to improve outcomes (there is not even agreement about how to measure outcomes), but to keep the system feeling constant shame for supposed "discrimination" when outcomes are disparate.

> I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.

I explained a very clear notion: that when you described "the students" causing problems in response to someone describing "the politics" causing problems, you were talking about substantively the same phenomena. The students play a key role in perpetuating the political games, either because they stand to benefit personally or because they have been indoctrinated in some form or another.

> Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?

You seem to be under the impression that I dispute your claims about false disability claims. I absolutely do not, and I was agreeing with you on this point.

What I am trying to explain to you is that these claims are part of a political expression: the fact that they might succeed is a show of political power, and the underlying theory of how to accommodate them is either not scientific or not actually aimed at optimizing per-student outcomes (or both). In particular, the metrics are not based in anything related to the described goals, but given purely in terms of identity-characteristic demographics of those who succeed.

[zahlman]

For those who downvoted without comment: how did I say anything disagreeable, untrue, or otherwise meriting a downvote?

[CamperBob2]

Challenging someone else's lived experience without providing any justification or alternative explanations, would be my guess.

[mvdtnz]

I downvoted you because you're very obviously one of these "disabled" zoomers who's arguing for the whole concept without bringing any actual arguments.

[zahlman]

Incorrect on every count, as a matter of fact. I do not treat my likely neurodivergence as a disability; I argued my point (which is absolutely not "for the concept" of those disability claims) very clearly; and I am in my mid 40s.

It seems that multiple people read:

> It's exactly because of the politics both that the students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture suppressing that questioning exists.

and somehow concluded that I am somehow legitimizing "those claims". I am genuinely unable to understand that.

[projektfu]

It's frustrating. If you gave me unlimited time to do everything, I wouldn't finish anything. But give that to a normal person who is able to procure a disability accommodation, and they have a leg up over everyone else, and never have to worry about time constraints and priorities.

[suzzer99]

The false disability claims are completely out of control.

[DonutATX]

I suggest you glance at the novel Ananthem by Neal Stephenson. The core plot device is about "universities" stripping all worldly items away from the students, so they are left with simple clothes and chalkboards. Fascinating topic, well executed by Neal. One of my favorite books.

[__rito__]

This is nothing new. It is ancient.

Ancient Hindus divided life into four parts, the earliest was called "Brahmacharya" - core tenet of it was celibacy, but sons of kings and rich merchants lived ascetic lives in the teacher's house who was also an ascetic and a sage - no rich clothes, no luxury foods or comfort.

This was supposed to last till the age of 16, going as high as 21 for some.

The Buddhist monastery-universities of India also kept students under similar conditions - celibate, ascetic, and far from luxury.

[__rito__]

The maths in the book where these students and scholars stayed in Anathem, were directly inspired by matths in India. I visited one last month.

[jobs_throwaway]

Anathem* for those like me who googled it

[mos_basik]

God, what a great book, imo. My favorite Stephenson novel.

[__rito__]

Mine, too. Cryptonomicon was the gateway drug. But I loved 'Anathem'.

[bix6]

This reminded me of Kvothe from Name of the Wind.

[xg15]

That sounds like the other extreme.

[mlsu]

It’s definitely actively bad to involve a device in the vast majority of education. And, it’s a purely selfish thing by tech companies to insert themselves into education.

A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.

[account42]

Now that's just needlessly extreme in the other direction. Students will be seeing devices much earlier than that just because their peers will use them so it makes sense to educate them on their proper use and dangers much earlier than college. It just doesn't make sense to cram them into every subject because not using one is outdated.

[skydhash]

Students also see power drills and cars, and schools don’t use them as part of the curriculum. I have a lot of computing device and still believes in real books and pen or paper for learning anything. The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials. Even those TI calculators can be overkill. I’ve only used one in college, and it was for a few exams about polar coordinates and transmission lines, IIRC. For everything else, the simpler scientific calculators were enough. Multiplying matrices and graphing functions doesn’t take that much time at high school and undergraduate level.

[VortexLain]

> The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials. Although this is the case for many people, I personally struggle to process information and write it on paper at the same time. Thus, I strongly prefer digital note-taking and use Obsidian or just vim instead of paper.

[tracker1]

I'm not trying to be offensive, but I don't see how typing it into a computer is significantly different than writing it on paper.

Is there something stopping you, or anyone from writing it down and taking notes in class and then reviewing it later as needed? Not just process it in lecture time, but regurgitate it to physical form for later review.

Also, I would definitely constrain this into educational groups, where K-6 are much different from college (post mandatory) education.

[dmbche]

If I may, people write (with pens) slower than than can speak, and thus to take good notes you need to synthesize the material you are being explained. You need to understand what you're writing.

Many people can type as fast/faster than they talk, and when typing it is possible to try and type verbatim what is being said. In this case, there is no understanding. (If you've ever taken a class not all that is said is pertinent and not all that is pertinent is said)

I personally don't revisit my written notes their purpose is uniquely for me to remember/understand what I've written.

[mos_basik]

>I don't see how typing it into a computer is significantly different...

I haven't read up on it much myself, but any discussion along the lines of this subthread re: "handwriting > typing" is probably discussing research that's starting to be talked about more and more in the past 5 years or so (maybe the pandemic and online learning accelerated interest?)

here's a 5m clip of a neuroscientist presenting to the US Senate this year on correlation between dropping academic performance and use of tech in classrooms in many countries over many years, and asking for more research into mechanisms and causation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U

and here's a paper from a couple years ago describing differences in observed brain activity between handwriting and typewriting and some discussion of how this could be a mechanism of the kind the video was talking about https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

>Is there something stopping you from...

No, but I feel like it's not hard to argue that default are important.

[smcg]

shop class and drivers ed used to be offered by schools...

[tracker1]

But you didn't include them in your English or Math classes. They were optional courses, and for older students, not K-6.

[bix6]

I learned typing in 3rd grade iirc. That seems reasonable for a fundamental skill.

[doubled112]

My kids are in grade 3 and 6 and nobody ever taught them to type. They just handed them a Chromebook and assumed they know what they're doing.

It is a skill, but everybody seems to think it will just happen on its own.

[toast0]

The problem is everyone knows you learn to type when you get on IRC, but you can't put elementary school kids on IRC.

[doubled112]

Why not? I was in elementary school on IRC. ASL ;-) ?

[toast0]

I'm sure you turned out fine. But the school district can't put a bunch of kids on IRC, it'll look bad.

[mftrhu]

You don't necessarily need a computer for that. They built more than a billion typewriters, IIRC.

[bix6]

Sure let’s buy a bunch of typewriters instead of multi purpose computers

[ethbr1]

When's the last time you played DOOM on a typewriter?

[swiftcoder]

> A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.

Are you really trying to put the genie back in the bottle to the extent of making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand? Or maybe we should bring back the typewriter for distraction-free essay writing...

[ekidd]

As someone who hates handwriting in bluebooks, and who types constantly, yes: I think we should bring back in-class writing by hand, we should lock up cellphones for the school day, and we should proctor exams. If you're not doing this, your students will be stuck to a screen all day, pay no attention to class, and use ChatGPT under the desk to cheat.

[ethbr1]

This is literally what most grade level school systems are doing, with good results.

The teenage brain is not prepared for addiction of digital magnitude.

[delta_p_delta_x]

> making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand

You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics for computer graphics, etc).

In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand, and the national exams are all still handwritten.

[vrighter]

I chose a hybrid method (I don't study anymore, this is just for personal stuff).

I bought a cheap graphics tablet, and still handwrite my math, but on a digital whiteboard on my PC so I can save and take backups of it, and waste less paper. But I still get the tactility, and its associated benefits (the act of handwriting something helps you remember it better)

[wink]

Writing it down by hand and then doing OCR on a high quality photo is a completely different ball game than writing it down and... not having it in digital form though.

I'm not disagreeing at all here, I tried live latexing my math courses and it was hard. I wish I had had access to a cellphone + good digitization back then. (just scanning it in was kinda pointless and I graduated about the time Android came out)

[delta_p_delta_x]

> I tried live latexing my math courses

This was by far the biggest time sink in my maths courses, and frankly, a giant waste of time. Sure, the end result looked beautiful but I think I understood less of it than if I'd just written it all down on A4 ruled paper in gel pen.

[curt15]

In the age of chatbots for outsourcing thinking at one's fingertips, absolutely!

The invasion of tech into the classroom has not produced more capable graduates. There's a lot of empirical evidence to the contrary.

The mind is a muscle, and developing that muscle is the education system's main purpose.

[mlsu]

Yes, I really am. For the purpose of learning, internalizing and organizing information, hand writing is superior to typing in every case. It's physiological.

[gizmo686]

Back when I was in middle school, we had "digital typewriters" that worked fine, and was brought out far more often than the laptop cart or computer lab.

[solumunus]

Genuinely, why not? Seems obvious to me that this would produce better outcomes.

[justsomehnguy]

This is how you get people who can't comperhend why they can't open Thesis.LNK from a thumbdrive.

[hgoel]

I can already tell that you would've been the equivalent of the adults that made life hell for me as a teen with their awful heavy handed opinions and interjections.

[nradov]

You've got to be kidding. Writing longhand was always a miserable experience for me no matter what technique or pen I used. Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.

[buellerbueller]

>Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.

...and studies show, inferior for recall:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

[joveian]

Interesting article, although it does raise a few questions for me. I can see handwriting being uniquely important when learning to read but beyond that it would seem to just be suggesting that directly translating the same note taking to using a direct-mapped keyboard is a bad idea. But what about more complex input methods like for Chinese or a chording stenograph? Is there a distinct point where brain activity pops to wider activity? Do other computer based activities like correcting typos or non-computer activities like wiggling your finger to draw the shape of the first letter of each word engage more activity similar to handwriting? If needing a summary is the main difference, that seems like an easy thing to incorporate into digital note taking.

Learning to read I can see that handwriting directly relates but beyond that it seems like there must be more effective ways to engage with the material than just making the writing method more complex. I'd say the same about lectures; interacting with someone who understands the material can be quite valuable but spending a lot of time listening to the same thing that could be read can't be the most effective way to learn even if the complexity of the transmission does help some with memory. I hope this type of research goes beyond basic handwriting vs typing and looks into the effectiveness of additional ways of engaging with information.

For example, I like "don't guess" as a major principle of learning (per B.F. Skinner) to cultivate awareness of how reliable your memory is and avoid remembering incorrect answers as much as possible. The process of determining and looking up things that you aren't fairly certain about seems like something that could also engage wider brain activity and do so in a way that is more directly relevant to what you are learning.

[matheusmoreira]

Same. Slowly writing things out by hand is excruciating for me. I would always refuse to do it, even as a kid. Rarely took notes.

[Danox]

I almost wish I could go back to school so I could use Goodnotes or Notability with my iPad to take notes awesome.

[bearjaws]

I'm always torn on this, I learned a lot of algebra, stats and calc from actually writing TI-Basic programs in my calculator. I was deeply interested in programming since the age of 11, so it felt very natural to translate the formulas and concepts to code.

Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.

[Ifkaluva]

I think TI calculators are not a source of distractions the way a phone or a laptop is

[ocschwar]

It didn't hurt that you can't play Fruit Merge on a TI 84

[tracker1]

Not just for math, but the shift to electronics based learning in language skills is way behind classic approaches from a century or more ago. A lot of common core reasoning is based at a level most younger children cannot yet grasp, and it's no surprise they fail to adopt at sufficient levels in reality. Then schools systems circle the wagons to cover up their own failures.

[collabs]

I am thinking why not use the iPad simply as a letter pad with infinite pages? the new iPad with the new iPad pencil can do that and I am sure with the right software you can write, erase, rewrite as much as you want? What am I missing?

[ncr100]

Human biology likely makes it harder to write on a glass screen with a perceptible Gap in time, latency between where the pen is and where the pixels appear as well as the physical colocation Of the pencil tip and the written line differs more so on a tablet screen than on direct application of matter to paper.

This confuses us, a little tiny teeny tidbit. And that is not helpful!

Plus because glass is slippery you must rely on your visual system nearly entirely for part of the handwriting performance. Because it's not paper you can't measure distances using tension that your nervous system picks up inside your hand, nearly as easily as you can when there's a high friction surface like a piece of paper to rest your hand on.

Also there is visual fatigue of staring into a light, the LED or OLED backlight, which does flicker imperceptibly but it does tend to flicker. This is more of a strain.

Plus there is disorientation... Your tablet can infinitely scroll long past the point at which your body physically dies, whereas if you run out of paper you got to go get some more paper. You write to the end of a sheet and there's no complex thinking involved around virtual viewframes and scrolling and using the scrolling UI.

[stonogo]

That isn't a matter of human biology. You learned to expect a specific experience when you took pencil to paper at a young age. Other people can learn to expect different experiences. Your acquired habits are not a genetic imperative. All of this post seems like ex post facto justifications for an implicit claim that the tech you grew up with is natural and good and the tech that came later is somehow inimical to life.

[bigstrat2003]

The point is that it's foolish to require inserting an iPad into the classroom purely for the sake of using an iPad. The goal (or proposed benefit) should be identified first, and then decide what the best tools to achieve that are.

[Danox]

Those students that have the discipline and have an iPad and can use Goodnotes or Notability they are just gonna be ahead of the rest, like typing the earlier you learn the better off you’re going to be, and there are no shortcuts if you are a student.

[snazz]

No matter how you restrict it with MDM profiles, it’s distracting compared to pencil/paper.

[layer8]

Can’t it run restricted to a single application in kiosk mode? Unless the application itself provides distraction, what would be distracting?

[shimman]

Why do we even want to pay $500 per device for something that is easily replicated by a $1 paper notebook? The only people that benefit from forcing classrooms to adopt these devices is big tech relying on corporate welfare to juice their books.

[sparqlittlestar]

The very light it emits, the liquid glass lensing animations, etc

[econ]

I recall some research in the TV age. They observed, if the subject is looking into a light source, (be it a camp fire, a screen or a bulb) they go into a kind of sleepwalking mode. They also mentioned the phenomenon was already well documented by hypnotists.

In the early internet days I couldn't help but notice people who read zero books now spend the whole day reading.

I think it means the tool is used the wrong way? Interactive should be e-paper or real paper. Dull cramming or basic reading skills would be a good fit for glowing displays.

Perhaps we even need a device that can do both.

[tracker1]

You also don't get the physicality as part of recall with eInk over real books. When reading technical books, as an example, I often would look back when going to review something based on where it was physically in the book... I completely lose that with ebooks.. I still mostly use ebooks and online docs these days all the same because moving hundreds of pounds of books when you move sucks.

[layer8]

At least with OLED, the light output can be auto-adjusted to match the reflecting light of the environment. This can be quite convincing, looking like a purely reflective surface. And a dedicated app doesn’t need to use any distracting animations or highlights.

[nathan_compton]

I friend of mine once made an observation that really stuck with me: a kindle is not a book: it is simultaneously all books at once. If you lock it to a single book, its still all books at once, but with a lock on all the others. Also, why not use paper?

[layer8]

I’m not an advocate of using tablets in class, I was just curious where the parent is seeing unavoidable distractions, compared to traditional tools like for example textbooks and calculators.

[shakna]

Blue light changes the way you think. Makes it easier to focus on the thing emitting the light, than the rest of the room. Just having a screen, with perfectly locked down control, can distract.

[nsxwolf]

It's just not as good as a notebook. I've tried to make it as good. It sleeps, there's too much fumbling around with it to get to what you want. You lose the muscle memory of where something is in the book, you can't quickly flip to anything. You notice you used to do certain things, like flip to two different pages at once. Everything is just immediate and tactile.

[irishcoffee]

You can just use a pencil and paper, and it's a lot cheaper?

[ptek]

Yes it is cheaper and who will steal or rob a student of pencil and paper compared to a iPad also pencil and paper doesn’t require age verification.

[throwway120385]

It's also probably good to make sure students know how to figure using a pencil and paper because pulling a calculator out on a job site is pretty impractical.

[tracker1]

Not sure I agree with that last point... you probably have one in your pocket already (phone app). Though I'm strongly against electronic devices as core education materials in K-6 especially.

[kleiba2]

That's being done, but it would not be sufficient to satisfy the powers that be.

[nathan_compton]

For awhile I tried all sorts of digital notetaking devices. Eventually I realized that pen + paper notebook was vastly superior to all of them for retention, ease of use, and cost. I am sure that, for some people, the calculation is different (for example, I have a pretty good memory and thus writing something down once is sufficient for me to recall it later) but for me, the idea of a digital letter pad eventually seemed utterly wasteful and absurd to me.

[andrepd]

Agree with technology being over-used for the sake of it. A visualisation/exploration of some math concept in Desmos can be invaluable, infinitely better than fiddling with diagrams on paper. Solving a calculus exercise on an ipad instead of paper adds exactly zero value. A smart teacher will know to use the first but not the second.

I will just say whiteboard > blackboard. I get allergies just thinking about it x)

[seanhunter]

I strongly agree with your basic idea but I am currently studying maths part-time and for me personally, I love using an iPad for writing maths because of cut/paste and the ability to drag things around to make space on the page. It really helps me to do things in a way that’s clear. When I do things with pencil and paper I spend a huge amount of time erasing things, crossing out, adding little caret and then squeezing little extra bits that I forgot earlier between two lines “…and f is continuous on [-1,1]…” etc.

I used to hate writing on the ipad but the thing that was transformational for me was a “paperlike”[1] screen protector, which makes the surface feel a lot nicer to write on.

[1] https://paperlike.com/

[moi2388]

Sorry, but I’m calling absolute bullshit. Blackboards are fine for teaching maths according to mathematicians. For students, just look at stuff like 3blue1brown and summer of math and how many people finally get it because of animations and playing with the maths instead of some old dude drawing a formula on a blackboard.

This is like the pi vs tau debate.

I seriously do not understand why maths teachers are so unable to relate to their non-mathematically inclined students

[yodsanklai]

> how many people finally get it because of animations and playing with the maths instead of some old dude drawing a formula on a blackboard

Visualisation helps of course, but if you want to be good at maths, you need to put the work and try to solve tons of problems. Most of what 3blue1brown shows in his fancy videos are things you can drawn on your own on a paper, and if you've never done it yourself, chances are you don't understand.

The problem with digital tools is that it's easy to get distracted. If you watch 5 minutes of 3blue1brown and then 20 random videos, it's not going to help.

[moi2388]

Of course you need to put the work in. But visualisation and directed play really does wonders. I don’t understand why maths teachers generally take a math perspective and not a “bored kid with no math inclination and who doesn’t see the beauty in it yet” perspective, since that’s the target group he’s supposed to be reaching..

[koolba]

They got rid of paper because teachers are lazy and do not want to spend time grading things by hand.

I’ve spoken to the head of curriculum at a school asking why when given the choice of paper or digital format of a math exam, they picked the digital. I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.

The response I got was, “we encourage students to redraw the entire picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpful”.

It’s strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.

[sonofhans]

> teachers are lazy

Teachers don’t make those decisions, school boards do. School boards are elected or appointed political entities.

Teachers are humans just like you, and like or dislike work for the same reasons you do, including your unoriginal display of classic American anti-intellectualism.

[koolba]

School boards to do not set curriculum or methods of instruction. At best they hire and fire the administration team. But even those positions usually have tenure.

So even a willing school board is unable to do more than rubber stamp the status quo.

[Danox]

The best english/writing teacher I ever had was a teacher who believed you should write and write and write some more and he wasn’t afraid to grade papers and critique what you had written. That teacher was a teacher at a junior college at a time when I went back to school in my late 20s. Mr. Kitchell

[watwut]

> I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.

All digital tests I have seen allowed paper and pen. You would draw and calculate on paper and submit the result.

[koolba]

Yes you’re allowed paper. But it’s strictly worse than pure paper as the student is forced to copy the entire problem, possibly with errors.

It’s much easier to cross out a 4 and 8 to divide the latter (replacing it with a 2) then it is to copy the whole problem from scratch. Even more so for filling in angles or areas in a geometry problem.

[nathan_compton]

I don't think anyone with a lazy disposition would get into teaching. There are so many other jobs that pay better and involve less work.

[humam_alhusaini]

Doesn't Scantron already solve that problem?

[mtrifonov]

I wouldn't even say it's the devices, exactly. The way I see it, this is all downstream of kids spending more time online than in real life (because all THEIR friends are online, rather than in real life). Device time-out doesn't exactly remediate that structural issue. And the whole testing debate kind of sails right past it.

My take is that the test won't make kids better at math. At best, it'll drift towards investment in reward-hacking the exam (like it always was).

I think it was idiotic to make it optional to begin with. The stats they're talking about, though, can't be a primarily admissions-signal problem. Whatever they're using these days in lieu of exams are imperfect proxies for math skill, sure, but it's not like they're admitting kids off their CoD K:D. Kids taking APs and stacking extracurriculars are generally motivated. So, if even the motivated ones show up unable to do middle school math, the cause is more systemic than "we stopped testing."

My vote: TikTok brain rot. I build LLM products and I see how the parasocial pull shows up even when the products have nothing to do with companionship. I watched one user obsessively spin up 44 separate chats around a K-Pop vampire character over a week. The product is NOT designed for that. The pull toward frictionless digital reward is just that strong, and that's what kids' attention is up against now. Math is the most effortful, least immediately rewarding thing they do. Doesn't stand a chance against an infinite feed, and I guess infinite vampires either.

Which is why the ask from the faculty is kind of arrogant. The article, at least, doesn't even float a hypothesis for WHY math skills collapsed, simply assuming standardized testing fixes it. I wholly believe in standardized testing — but it measures the problem, it doesn't fix it.

[make3]

blackboards in uni where you can't do anything but just rewrite everything the prof is writing is a nightmarish waste of time, especially for anyone with any kind of attention difficulties

please remove the devices from the students but provide slides

[magicalhippo]

Those lectures were the very best I had at uni. Because they were meant to be copied it allowed for two important effects: you process things very differently when writing with you hand, and just copying rather than transliteration from a slide say means you can focus on what is said and what's going on with the math.

For me this meant I recalled it way better. I hardly looked at the notes afterwards, but writing them down were crucial. I also could follow the process and ask questions where I didn't understand a step. When I did review the notes, they were very well structured and thus very informative.

The absolute worst lectures I had were slide-based. I either had to focus on transliteration to notes, but that meant I had to focus on that rather than what the professor was saying. And if I did the opposite I didn't write notes and thus could hardly recall the details if at all.

[SoftTalker]

If you have attention difficulties perhaps uni isn't the place for you.

[mos_basik]

As someone with attention difficulties who eventually decided to leave uni and pursue another path:

I'm saddened that my culture has formed me into a person whose first reaction to your comment was "wow, that's harsh" - because I mentally (and unwarrantedly) translated your comment into something like "if you have attention difficulties perhaps you should just accept that you are a low-value human who is hard class-locked out of many of life's joys and you should (quickly) figure out how to live in the way that least inconveniences your betters."

And my brain does this even though I'm gainfully employed and comfortable and happy (happy modulo general anxiety re climate, politics, war, and future generations)

My second reaction to your comment was more like "bingo, but it sure would be nice to have more clear directions about where one's actual place is." And it sure seems like there might be more such places and they'd be easier to find in a culture whose incentives were slightly (or significantly) different than those of mine (USA).

[onjectic]

This is awful advice… Academia, specifically STEM, is already oversaturated with people on the opposite side of the spectrum from “attention difficulties” but are otherwise only above-average people intellectually. They were able to follow the beaten path to the letter all their lives, but are not really capable of making meaningful contributions to their field. We should be filtering these people out more not less.

[Danox]

That can work both ways for every brilliant person there is also the completely antisocial brilliant person whom cannot work within groups. One of the best mathematician's I worked with just could not work with other people eventually, he was let go another just could not follow instructions he tried to do too much and he was also let go from our design department. Both did made it through school and we’re qualified.

[parpfish]

as somebody with attention difficulties... every college/gradschool lecture i've ever attended has been:

1. pay attention for the first 5-10 minutes. I'm really going to try this time!

2. hear something interesting, and your mind starts wandering

3. uhoh, i have no idea what the lecture is talking about now. i'll just keep daydreaming. don't even think about raisigin your hand to ask a question because it'll reveal that you haven't been listening.

4. go home and read the textbook to figure learn the content

[DaSHacka]

Truer then you know, however it's essentially a requirement in this day and age.

[kleiba2]

Uni and high-school are not the same.