What If We Didn’t Teach What A Calculator Can Do?

Sometimes we do something just because that’s the way it’s always been done. This happens in sports just like in education. For example, consider the high jump. You’re probably familiar with the basic idea of seeing how high someone can jump over a bar.

 
What you may not know though is that athletes have not always participated in the high jump in the same way. It used to be that people would jump over the bar like a hurdle by using a scissor kick method. People always did it this way and people continued to do it this way. At least it was that way until 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

 
There, American Dick Fosbury introduced the world to a new technique by going over backwards. He utilized what would eventually be called the “Fosbury flop.”

 
Now it’s important to understand how strange this first appeared. His method was laughed by the fans. They would even chant, “Ole!” as he ran towards his jump.

His fellow athletes and coaches looked down on him like he disrespected the sport. The judges were even unsure if he was breaking the rules because they had not seen it done this way before. Ultimately, they agreed that it was ok and Fosbury used the technique to win the gold medal and set a new Olympic record. Today, virtually everyone uses this technique.

I share this story as an example of something called status quo bias. This happens when we do something in a particular way, not because it’s the best way but because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Dick Fosbury challenged the status quo with his new technique. It made people uncomfortable because it violated their expectations. However, once they got past that, they realized that his method was truly better and necessitated change.

I believe the same thing is happening in education, and specifically in regards to the mathematics standards we teach. Are our mathematics standards chosen because they are still the most important ones for students to learn or because that’s what we’ve always taught in math class?

I think that we need to take a step back and realize that so much of what we teach students is instantly useless because of technology. I’ll say it again to be clear, we spend days and weeks teaching students content that they’ll likely never use again because of the pervasive existence of technology like calculators.

Obviously, I’m not the first person to think of this. I love how Conrad Wolfram articulates it in his TED Talk. Just watch the first 30 seconds of the clip below (from 4:10 to 4:40).

Here’s what he said in those 30 seconds:

Now here’s the crazy thing right now. In math education, we’re spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do [computation] by hand. Yet, that’s the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. Instead, we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one, two and four — conceptualizing problems, applying them, getting the teacher to run them through how to do that.

 
The first time I heard that part of the clip, it blew my mind. I had never thought of it that way.

So here are my thoughts:

• When I surveyed 383 K-12 mathematics teachers in the United States, 85% of them stated that they did not have enough time to teach one year of grade level standards in one year.
• Many of the math standards we teach students are computation based and can be done with technology.
• Many of the non-computation based math standards are ones that computers (currently) cannot do such as complex mathematical modeling. For example, computers alone still can’t tell if you’re pregnant, but people with computers can.
• As of 2015, 92% of American adults own cell phones they have with them constantly and most of those phones have calculators.

Based on this information, I reach the conclusion that we are spending too much time teaching procedures that will likely be replaced by technology. For example, how often are you multiplying multi-digit numbers, dividing decimals, or figuring out sales tax by hand?

I wonder what would happen if we greatly deemphasized teaching these procedures or cut them out entirely. What could we do with that time we freed up? Like with Dick Fosbury challenging the status quo with his new technique, I’m sure the idea of changing how these standards are prioritized will certainly make people uncomfortable because it violates their expectations.

What do you think? Please let me know in the comments.