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“Teaching is successful only as it causes people to think for themselves. What the teacher thinks matters little; what he makes the child thinks matters much.”
What Middle School Math and AI Have In Common
The shortcut was an arm’s length away.
It was calling out from the bottom of my JanSport backpack.
I resisted. Barely.
The year was 2009. Sitting still in my desk was its own task, which made it that much more tempting to reach down for some relief. But I couldn’t.
“It’s important for you to exercise your mind, and to know how things work,” my teacher always said.
The aforementioned “shortcut” was my new TI-84 calculator. A fantastic piece of technology that could do everything from graphing functions to logic games (anyone remember Block Dude?).
We often used that calculator in class, but not this particular lesson. Today, it was prohibited. We were working on problems by hand.
“Do we really need to know how to do this when calculators exist?”
Unfortunately for my teachers, I usually [annoyingly] sought explanations for their decisions. They never owed me one, to be sure, but they graciously obliged.
“You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket, Peyton,” she would say.
Thanks to the smartphone, she was wrong about that. I’ve had a calculator in my pocket for over a decade.
But ironically, being wrong about that part made the rest of her explanation far more compelling.
Beyond learning how to solve complex algebraic equations, middle school math was training my mind on a useful way of thinking.
I was learning important things that would serve me whether or not I ever opened another math textbook:
How to deconstruct a large problem down to its component parts
The value of stretching my brain like a muscle
The confidence and capability to figure things out with prolonged focus
It’s hard to convince a 7th grader that all of this is happening. In hindsight, I believe my teacher thought the “you won’t always have a calculator with you” explanation would be more compelling to a 13 year old than “your mind needs this deliberate practice.”
But she knew. She knew that even if I did end up having a calculator on me at all times, it wouldn’t have changed her decision to have us work on that lesson without one.
On November 30, 2022, the world permanently changed.
ChatGPT was released to the public and accrued 100 million users in two months. In that moment, the number of “instantly doable” things ballooned incomprehensively—prompts became like spells: accomplishing tasks previously thought impossible by machines.
Suddenly, we have TI-84 calculators for everything.
Writing essays. Fixing appliances. Research. Parenting advice. Making music. Making movies. Pictures, power points, poems. Everything.
The shortcut is an arms’ length away.
And guess what happened?
As everyone is getting vertigo from the breakneck speed of AI advancement, many wise voices are urging caution on rapid adoption. Why?
Well, the logic sounds a lot like my middle school math teacher.
“It’s important for you to exercise your mind, and to know how things work.”
Beware of the shortcuts. There’s more to life than finding the correct answer.
I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about what eloquent advice I might share around AI usage, but I’ve yet to come up with anything better than what my seventh grade math teacher shared with me that day.
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See you next week.
PW