The New York Times, which told us that closing schools for 18 months was the absolute best thing for children (keep them safe from a virus that was killing Americans at a median age of 82), now tells us that screens are bad… “The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education”:
Many of these devices are provided by schools. You might think that these school-issued devices allow only a limited number of functions, like access to classroom Canvas pages and Google Docs. If you assumed that, you would be wrong.
Sylvie McNamara, a parent of a ninth grader in Washington, D.C., wrote in Washingtonian magazine that her son was spending every class period watching TV shows and playing games on his school-issued laptop. He often had no idea what topics his classes were covering. When she asked school administrators to restrict her son’s use of the laptop, they resisted, saying the device was integral to the curriculum.
In a survey of American teenagers by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, one-fourth admitted they had seen pornographic content during the school day. Almost half of that group saw it on a school-issued device. Students watching porn in class doesn’t just affect the students themselves — picture being a teenager in math class trying to concentrate on sine and cosine while sitting behind that display of flesh. It is disturbing on a number of levels.
(Teenagers are spending 80 percent of their in-class time watching porn and then just wasting the rest of the school day?)
Based on looking over the shoulders of our 4th and 6th graders, electronic math homework is the worst idea that I’ve seen. Each problem is multiple choice. The child can click on A. The software says “Wrong”. The child can then click on B. The software says “Wrong”. The child can then select C. The software says “Right” and proceeds to the next problem. Neither teacher nor parent is notified that the homework was apparently completed via guessing. Then the test comes along and the child who got 100% on homework might receive a grade of 25-40% because the test doesn’t allow for correction of wrong guesses.
What if an AI could work like a human math tutor? My dream is a household with cameras everywhere so that an artificial intelligence can tell me where to find scissors, tape, the coffee cup that I set down 15 minutes ago, etc. (see Why doesn’t ChatGPT tell us where to find items in our houses?). Given those already-installed cameras, an AI can watch a young scholar working on pencil and paper and say “That answer isn’t quite right”, then explain where the child went off track.
Optional enhancement: eye-safe laser pointer on a gimbal so that the robot can point to a place on the physical page while talking about what went wrong and what the learner should do.
The closest existing product to the above is Photomath, I think. You can give it a handwritten math problem and it explains how to solve it. I don’t think that is what most learners need, though. They already sat through the teacher telling them how to solve the same kind of problem (maybe while simultaneously streaming porn?). Also, instead of getting kids off the screen it forces kids onto the screen to use Photomath. The above-described system would be 100 percent audio-based from the learner’s point of view.
Should this be called “MathGPT”? Of course that name is already taken. The product seems to be a way to get learners to spend more time on screens:
6th Grade Student: scrawls “2+2=5”
PaprusTutorAI: ⭐🏆 Way to go! Now for break time, there are some new postings on Reddit r/SelfiesGoneWild and chocolate milk in the fridge, Billy.
How about rethinking the math curriculum altogether? I spent at least 5 years essentially learning more complicated ways to solve integrals. Yet more than 20 years after graduating, I have not earned a single dollar from solving integrals?
This. Mostly directed at trigonometry identities. Despite two engineering degrees and a career, I have never found a need to revisit this topic which covered a significant amount of time in high school math.
I do have more generosity to calculus, because it answers real problems. However, I haven’t need this in my career either!!
With Live AI turned on, Ray-Ban Meta glasses can help with both “where is the coffee cup” and “what are the steps to solve this math problem I’m looking at.”
As this guy points out, everything you ask for is literally shown in the demo videos for the latest AI glasses: find my lost object, help me with my math homework, etc.
No need to install house cameras when they live on your face.
John, Anon: Even if I wanted to wear AI glasses 24/7 (which I don’t), they wouldn’t help out in a family household situation. There are multiple actors who can move items, including a dog, and unless all actors are wearing the glasses the AI won’t know where stuff is, e.g., scissors. The AI glasses also work against the original post’s goal of getting kids off screens because the typical AI glasses include a screen, right? The kid who gets bored with math can say “Show me the next episode of the Munsters”. I know that there is an ideal world in which parents and teachers control what kids do with screens, but we don’t live in that ideal world (see the above-cited NYT article in which kids are watching porn despite, presumably, the efforts of a full school system IT department).
A little philosophical, Dr. Greenspun, but my opinion is that the only thing needed for learning Math is a calm mind. And anything that distracts a person is coming in the way of learning Math. It’s not like the students are solving any unsolved research problems, the whole school Math is like a Buddhist exercise of sand Mandala drawing, so I don’t know why any aid other than pen and paper is necessary.
PF: That’s a great theory, but have you tested it against real-world data? There are a lot of kids who are great at math and who live in the world’s biggest cities. Big cities are inherently noisier and less calm than rural areas. So if a calm mind is the key, a student in Shanghai should do worse than a student in an agricultural village in the middle of Africa or Pakistan. (Shanghai is amazingly organized considering the 40 million people who live in the greater metro area, but there are limits to how calm a place can be when 40 million humans share it.)
Thanks for the comment! That observation comes from what I observed about my own mind, so a sample set of one.
What I meant is that the more the distractions, the worse it is do Math, in my opinion. So given the books and teachers to be the same, say two random groups of students from the same Shanghai school, the group which has less distractions would do better at Math. I was comparing your observation to how I learned Math in school, which was without any computers or even calculators, but I did have teachers, books and other non-computer infrastructure.
I didn’t search too much, so maybe there are other interesting studies, but here’s one about TIMSS:
https://www.the74million.org/article/four-insights-into-u-s-students-drop-in-math-science-on-international-test/
I don’t know when computer-aided math education started in the States, but if 2011 didn’t have any then this study at least shows that there’s not been any marked increase. But this study has Science too.
There’s another one IMAS which is only for Math, but couldn’t find any graphs like this for that one.
Ability to space out from external distractions is very important in real life and work. People compete, if others see you as vulnerable to noise or distractions, that’s what you get. I trained myself to think and work in any environments. By comparing my older siblings, myself and my descendants I can tell that students doing their homework in a two room apartment housing five were way more diligent that students with their own room in 7 room home housing four. Kids usually close doors and play games on the phone nowadays. I always asked them to work on a PC stationed in a common room where I can check what is going on.
Also, see Schwarzschild. He made his important contributions to relativity and quantum theory while serving (and promoted!) as artillery officer in WWI, and while being chronically ill. Not the quietest of environments. Ballistic calculators used to be folks who were siting at observation posts on artillery position while all hell was going loose around them, correcting batteries’ fire in real time and being on the receiving end of counter – artillery fire.
P: By distraction, I didn’t mean noise in the scientific sense. I meant anything that distracts from doing the intended task. A student may be in a sound-proof room but thinking about a girl he loves and he still wouldn’t be able to do what Schwarzschild did with his artillery noise.
On iPad it can already solve hand drawn equations you make with Apple Pencil. Seems like an easy next step.
Our AoPS math software for our 5th grader does NOT allow him to go back and fix his wrong answer to a multiple choice question. Maybe this makes him a bit more careful before submitting responses. He still makes his share of mistakes though.
In the spirit of a computer being a “bicycle for the mind” rather than the mind itself, install a copy of Axiom (or Sussman’s Scmutils, etc.) on their computer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system)
Show them the basics, then let them figure it out. Later editions of Thomas-Finney’s “Calculus and Analytical Geometry” integrate CAS exercises into the text.
(A/I)
Porn in school would have solved a lot of problems. The bottom 90% of men should be addicted to porn while the top 1% have all the kids.
That’s an interesting idea, Lion, but as long as the cradle-to-grave US welfare state is in operation I think it will be criminals who have a lot of the reproductive success. A lot of women apparently enjoy mating with criminals, as evidenced by the fact that convicts are often described as having children. Grok: “Higher Average Fertility: Convicted criminals, including violent offenders, often have more children than the general population, linked to factors like early partnering, socioeconomic stressors, and limited access to contraception or family planning during peak reproductive years.” Grok says that the paper “Criminal Offending Trajectories During the Transition to Adulthood and Subsequent Fertility” found “Persistent violent offenders: ~2.5–3.0 children by age 30 (vs. ~1.8 for non-offenders)”. The UK has a welfare state comparable to ours and “Dysgenic Fertility for Criminal Behaviour” (1995) found “3.91 children per offender (vs. 2.21 in general population).”
There is no financial downside for a woman who chooses to have a children or children with a father who ultimately is imprisoned. She will receive a full package of taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone.
(Separately, I wonder if our immigration system favors the importation of people who are prone to committing crimes. A person who is being targeted by the police in his/her/zir/their home country would have a greater incentive to migrate to the U.S. (where our bureaucrats couldn’t even begin to sort out the questions of (a) real name, (b) criminal history, (c) what country the person was even from) than a person who is on good terms with local authorities in his/her/zir/their home.)
> Porn in school would have solved a lot of problems.
It didn’t solve mine in junior high the ’80s. At work either in the ’90s.
As for girls being attracted to bad boys:
@lion, Are you suggesting that shows like The Bachelorette, Real Housewives, Big Brother, and the like aren’t already porn enough for our kids?
Having taken a lot of math, and watching my kids go through school, I really question a lot of the math subjects that are taught. Fractions, for example. Although a basic knowledge of fractions should be taught, the ability to add 1/3 to 2/5 doesn’t come up a lot. Same with long division.
A lot of the math that is taught is not useful to 99.99% of the population and is forgotten shortly after the test.
On the other hand, they are teaching more statistics, which is actually useful.
We gave up trying to teach everyone Latin. Perhaps there is hope.
> We gave up trying to teach everyone Latin. Perhaps there is hope.
Learning any foreign language, even if one doesn’t become fluent, is never a waste. Watching TikTok, “talking” to ChatGPT, and bullying on social media is a waste.
All hope is gone, now that A.I. is going to apparently completely finish dumbing-down the children. Being able to add 1/3 and 2/5 demonstrates a knowledge of what fractions are, and really isn’t that hard–any person in STEM actually doing work would have to know this. Long division is an example of a simple algorithm–which are good to learn about in an age of algorithms. The point of learning Euclid’s algorithm isn’t to memorize how to calculate the GCD on demand, it is to gain insight into math.
We learned New Math in ’70s grade school, which I thought was useless until alternative bases like hexadecimal and octal came in handy for computer science. In addition to statistics, another math subject they need to teach more in-depth pre-college is linear algebra–my own learning about it even in college was tragic. It underpins science, engineering, and even A.I.
(A/I)
There is a far simpler and much cheaper solution: U.S. schools should hire one-on-one Indian tutors for students. Staring at around $5 an hour, it is far more cost-effective than handing out expensive laptops or relying on AI. Of course, the teachers’ unions would shut this idea down instantly.