That’s the thing. The parents don’t wanna teach the kids good manners, and the teachers aren’t allowed to because if they say more than two words outside of class everyone looks at them as a potential molester.
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It should be required around age 11 or 12, which seems to be when parents who can afford it think it’s appropriate to give a kid a mobile phone. Tech industry executives could provide the template since they make damned sure that their own kids don’t get high on their supply.
Unfortunately, such a class would be as unlikely in most American public K-12 schools as ones dedicated to modern media literacy or personal finance, both of which are also needed not to end up as a low-status sucker in this country.
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What about kids who do lots of after-school activities like sports and clubs, and need a phone around to call for their ride (or to receive a call to let them know that their ride is late)?
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My daughter is in high school, and has never seen her locker. She carries everything she needs for the day of school with her. Her locker is too far away from her classes. She would be late to class any time she went to switch materials from one class to another.
Also, her graphing calculator is an app.
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My stepson’s continuous glucose monitor works through a phone app. I realize this is an outlier.
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Here’s a piece of technology that actually helps you learn how to solve problems.
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There’s an app for that.
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So I teach mathematics, computer science, and (next semester) statistics at a pretty decent university. I’m going to tell you what the failure mode of computers-and-calculators-from-the-womb looks like:
- Students who can’t multiply by zero without a calculator.
- Students who can’t multiply by one without a calculator.
- Students who don’t think to change the window size on their graphing calculator. Why should the interesting region be x in [-10,10], anyway? or any pre-chosen interval?
- Students who are just as confused about how to use the computer/calculator as the subject itself. Youth != computer savvy
- Students who get texts from parents and friends in class. Not to mention their boss at work.
I could easily continue; there are definite downsides.
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I notice a lot of commenters here are stuck on the in-class cellphone drawbacks/benefits. Keep in mind that the devices are already forbidden in class and that Blanquer is declaring a total ban because
These days the children don’t play at break time anymore, they are just all in front of their smartphones and from an educational point of view that’s a problem
Now i’d like to invite you to study Children’s Games, a delightful image that illustrates what it is to be a child human.
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Are you under the impression that these kids are doing thesis research on their phones?
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When my kid is old enough to leave my house without us then she will get a dumb phone, that, you know, makes calls. No internet, no text, just voice. Human comunication.
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This, for sure.
All right: how do you know when you’ve really made it into the advanced math classes? The professors couldn’t care less if you brought a calculator to an exam. If anyone here has a story about how a calculator helped them write proofs during an exam please share.
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Honestly, even in lower level classes, I try to make the questions mostly about setting up the problem correctly.
I do have a little sympathy for part of @wsmcneil 's position, mostly the part about memorization not being that great. For example, I’m not going to make someone memorize a formula for the vertex of a parabola in an algebra class. The intersection of the sets of people who learn that and people who will ever use it are a strict subset of people who take calculus. Those people should be able to derive the formula for themselves.
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Forget multiplication. Cashiers often look at me like I’m some kind of wizard when I give them an amount that will get me back an even $0.25 or $0.50 in change.
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Uh… the same way they did for decades upon decades before commercial cell phones were a part of our reality, probably.
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When I was very young, starting in second grade, I was allowed to walk from school to my dad’s office, or from school to home, and then to go from either of those places to any number of other places within walking/biking distance that I wanted to visit. However, my parents made sure I knew our phone number at home and at the office, and knew how to use a payphone.
Payphones are nearly extinct. If I was raising a child in this modern era, I would make sure they had a mobile phone so they could call me in an emergency. That’s for young kids. For older kids, as @DukeTrout points out, a mobile phone is an essential communications device for scheduling, well, just about any kind of extracurricular activity.
And @Spamtasticus, to repeat myself, I am not necessarily talking about a smartphone. A talk and text dumbphone will do as well. But given the way the prices for bottom end smartphones has been dropping, why limit them to SMS when everyone else in the club is using Whatsapp?
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In a world where payphones are nearly extinct, and tons of households and even some businesses are cancelling their landline subscriptions? What century are you living in?
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21st, last that I checked.
There’s no need to be rude, yo.
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This is horribly wrong. Every level of mathematics is an abstraction from the one below; algebra is an abstraction from arithmetic. If you can’t do arithmetic really really well, the algebra will seem like magic. You might be able to kind-of master it, and there’s a fair amount of work going on that amounts to how to teach algebra to students who can’t do arithmetic, but that’s ass backwards.
The undergraduates I teach need to use the long division algorithm fairly regularly, eg when integrating rational functions, though they’re using it on objects other than numbers. Over my decades in the classroom this has morphed from one of the topics students master easily to one they have real problems with, and to a large extent it seems to be because they didn’t master the fundamental skill earlier in life when they could apply it to easier objects.
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That is the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
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