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A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

(www.theatlantic.com)
222 points dougb5 | 2 comments | 04 Sep 25 02:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.424s | source
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greenspam ◴[04 Sep 25 22:50 UTC] No.45133130[source]▶
Imagine back in the days when calculators were just invented. An 8 year old kid might have the similar complain: “my classmate finished a 4 digits number multiplication problem in 5 seconds which generally took 1mins.” People might say, in the long term, the kid who cheated would be less proficient in arithmetic, which turned out to be true. But when you think about it, it seems not the end of the world when most high schooler in US cannot do complicated arithmetic quickly and accurately without a calculator.
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1. makeitdouble ◴[04 Sep 25 23:13 UTC] No.45133296[source]▶
To my knowledge, even before HP-48 level calculators came in the classroom nobody cared about arithmetic past middle school. The core of the teaching was proofs and a lot more theory, and that went on into CS for me.

I'd compare it to the ability to write and run basic assembly. We did it, and got checked on it, but that was not what we were there for.

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2. dehrmann ◴[05 Sep 25 01:07 UTC] No.45134014[source]▶
At the same time, I remember most of high school math barely needing calculators outside chemistry and physics.

Look at some of the SAT math questions:

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/digital-sat-samp...

The questions are all designed to have a tidy, closed-form answer. A calculator is either marginally helpful or outright cheating.