Tuesday, September 23, 2014

"If you create a machine to do the job of a man, you take something away from the man."

Don't get me wrong... I am not technology averse, nor do I entirely agree with the statement above.  It is, after all, only a quote from a mediocre STAR TREK movie.  A person's philosophy on life and existence should not be shaped and molded by a simple quote.  However, there is a fundamental danger in technology which gives this quote a small ring of truth.  Here's what I am getting at...

Technology comes into our lives a little bit at a time.  At first, it is novel, something to keep you ahead of the Joneses, then it becomes ubiquitous, then it becomes essential, then no one alive can remember a time without it.  Technology has allowed man (I use the term for convenience, not out of any misogynist tendencies) to do many wonderful things that he could never do otherwise.  Humans can't fly except through the use of technology, and the airplane has shrunk the world to only a day's travel from anywhere to anywhere else; Locomotives united east and west in the United States; the remote control fundamentally changed how we watch television, as did the VCR and the DVD player; computers, a thing of wonder relegated to classrooms and university labs merely 25 years ago, can now be worn on your wrist by anyone anywhere.  Can any of us imagine life without any of these technological advances?  Yet, for each one of these, there was a time when we did without them because they simply did not exist. 

When I was in high school, it seems like a foolish thing now, but calculators were hotly debated.  Were they a helpful tool to the math educator or an easy way out for the lazy math student?  There were specific rules that some of my math teachers had as to what qualified as an acceptable calculator problem.  This was usually when the math was long, ugly, complicated and prone to mistakes.  If you were caught walking into an SAT test with a calculator, including the wristwatches with the calculator built in, at the very least it would have been confiscated, and at worst you would have been asked to leave.  Yet now calculators are practically mandatory for an SAT test.  I have seen students pull out their calculators (including my own 11-year old daughter) to calculate things as simple as 35 divided by 5!  Or even easier, anything times ten!!  In greater and greater numbers our math students are relegating the basic skills to a machine, yet there is no great advancement in the complexity of the math being learned.  Students still graduate from high school having learned basic calculus, if they are the elite.  We have taken away part of the man, and replaced it with nothing greater.

The laptop and ipad are the contemporary equivalent of calculators of my generation.  We have certainly been privy to a parade of nifty things, such as Desmos and Geogebra and 101qs, that the computer allows us to utilize in teaching mathematics.  But are we as math educators on the slippery slope that allows the machine to do the job of a teacher?  One must never forget that behind every math game and math activity is the word "MATH".

What are we to do when the technology fails us?  Now, I am not referring to a doomsday apocalypse or global EMPs frying all electronics.  Learning disasters can be much simpler than that.  I have witnessed more basic problems, like network connectivity issues or forgotten passwords, that caused entire class periods of math instruction to be wasted not only because the teacher kept trying desperately to solve the issue, but because the teacher seemed unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to, for lack of a better term, teach math the old fashioned way.  This is eerily similar to the bright student who pulls out the calculator when they are perfectly capable of solving the problem themselves.  As technology becomes so integral to education that it becomes essential, a teacher must be vigilant to not become like his or her students and rely on technology exclusively to do all the educating for them.  Always the learning must show the mathematical truths that are at the foundation.  Otherwise we are only teaching how to play a game or use a program without critical thinking.  This is not the path to innovation and advancement; it is the path to indifference and apathy.

Computers in classrooms are here to stay.  Soon the day will arrive when no one alive will remember a time without computers and acers and ipads as an integral part of learning and teaching.  Let us all strive to make sure that they are a tool to open up doorways to rooms of knowledge and learning that we only dreamed of entering, that the next generation has a better grasp of math than we did, that they do not simply relegate math to the machines.  Because when that happens, we truly TRULY will not be able to do for ourselves, and something vital will have been taken away from us indeed!

2 comments:

  1. Brody L: I really, really, really, agree with you sir. I feel that we are attempting to integrate as much technology as we can into classrooms, but we aren't looking at the long term affects of this at all. I think a way to think about might be to differentiate between what makes things easier to do and what makes things easier to understand. In class on Monday I believe I remember you talking about how in high school you had to learn about binary code. Understanding binary code is essential to understanding how a computer truly works, at it's core. I'm fairly certain there are a lot of people whose live and livelihood rely on computers, and they don't even know what binary code is. This does sort of relate to math. What happens if we reach this point with calculators for example? People may not truly understand how math truly works. What if we get to a point where someone like an engineer can't work out a simple problem without a calculator? Something to think about. I'm glad someone is thinking about this, great post.

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  2. Good argument post. I'd like to see you propose some kind of litmus test in your conclusion. How might a teacher tell if this is a gratuitous use of tech - one that takes something away from the man? It also feels a bit like you assume that people will supply reasons in favor of tech, but can you be specific about a time when it is helpful for student understanding?
    clear, coherent, complete: +

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