🚀 go-pugleaf

--------
This article is from taylor@hplabs.HP.COM (Dave Taylor, the moderator)
--------

>Matthew Wiener comments on some of Gregorys' comments;

>First off, there's a lot of bad teaching out there, and you are kidding
>yourself if you are blaming it on the material.  Using calculators does
>not change this.  Indeed, I believe they encourage bad teachers to do
>worse.

I don't agree.  I think that the quality of teaching is completely 
independent from the tools available to the teacher.  It's all too common
to hear teachers lament that they don't have good enough textbooks, or
fast enough computers or whatever and so their teaching suffers.  Well,
from my experience as both a student and a teacher, the materials are
a MEANS to the END, NOT the END.  That is, if a person is a good teacher,
they can be given a nail and a slab of clay and can teach their students
MORE than the person next to them with their high-powered computing
environment.

Some of the best teachers I've ever had were forced to pay for Xeroxes 
for the class out of their own pockets, or requested that all the students
go and buy some (cheap) book for the class...

On the other hand, one of the worst teachers I've ever had, in College, had
at his disposal millions of dollars worth of computing equipment and assumed
that it could REPLACE his teaching.  Needless to say it didn't work real well.

Calculators are the same way ... 

>I do not believe understanding of anything difficult can come cheap and
>easy.  I do not believe that having a computer changes that.  

I disagree again.  I think that a teacher who is really excellent can
introduce extremely complex subjects in such a way that the students
intuitively grasp the basic fundamental concepts involved and then build
up from there.

Again, from my experiences, the way I help people learn Pascal is to
turn away from the computer and talk to them until THEY understand the
problem, THEN they can figure out the program.  Again, it's a question of
HOW you teach.

>These machines come with an aura of perfection.  Why?  I have no idea.

Because that's how teachers, and by inference, society, views them.  If
a teacher turned around to their students and said "here's a typical dumb
machine - let's figure out how to force it to do what we want" then it'd
be totally different to the current "here's the *hushed voice* computer
we'll be using this quarter..."

>Do the students learn to think now that the computer has "freed" them?
>No.  They learn how to run someone else's program.  They learn how to
>specify options on a command line.

Again, it's a function of the teaching.  Just like any other subject.

Let's look at writing, for a second...

  Most English teachers are of the 'grammar and rules' school of writing, and
  when students turn in papers they are immediately downgraded for typos, or
  grammatically awkward phrases.  No heed is paid to the CONTENT, just the
  FORM.

   By comparison, teachers who concentrate on the CONTENT and assume that
  the FORM will improve by virtue of the student caring more about their
  work help students LOTS MORE.  Peter Elbow wrote a very interesting book
  on this sort of topic called `Writing Without Teachers'...

I think that we've hit a signficant juncture in this conversation, actually.
The form versus content debate seems to be just the right one for this entire
discussion - should we be concerned with students learning to 'depend' on 
calculators for simple math, or should we be concerned with students being
able to solve more complex problems by virtue of being able to utilize a
calculator efficiently.

Like it or not, the days when we would spend years computing 'PI' to the
five-hundredth digit are long gone...

>When the task gets complicated, do they first approach the easy cases?
>No.  They have learned to jump right into the hardest messes, because
>of the unlimited power the computer gives them.

This is a function of the teaching style - having a more powerful problem
solver doesn't help anyone if they don't know how to approach solving
problems...I think that it wasn't as critical in the 'old days' since it
was so rare that people would try to solve substantial problems, of the
magnitude of, say, what NASA Ames does with their multiple Crays...

>They will wander in foggy Numberland forever if permitted.

Sounds like a mathematics graduate student to me!  *humour*

> It epitomized the "Why think? Let the computer do it" reaction that, 
> unchecked, quickly undermines any critical review of either the direction 
> or the value of an investigation.  The computer is a precision tool.  
> It should not be used as a bludgeon or a substitute for thought.

Agreed.  But it's not reasonable to place the blame on the students with
the pejorative "they should know better".  

As Bell Telephone system used to try to convince us; 

		"The System IS the Solution"

							-- Dave