Different tools in different years as expectations have changed. The TI-89 is incredibly powerful, but has to give way to MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha. It used to be productive to “google” your problems. Going further, there’s now LLMs writing python code to do calculations. Hard to say what’s next, but I’m sure what is considered ethically questionable today will be acceptable and the new thing will be the new questionable tool.
To be clear; there are plenty of contexts where having a TI-89 is 100% unambiguously cheating. There are even more places where MATLAB and Wolfram Alpha are cheating.
A times table test like we all took in grade school. A test applying Newton's method. Any test where the calculator can do the work instead of you, and a TI-89 can do quite a bit of work.
And more trivially/procedurally, the numerous tests I had to take in high school and university which explicitly said "no graphing calculators" (and the occasional test that said "no calculators" outright).
I was thinking of exams rather than day to day learning of basics, seeing tests as teaching rather than assessing. Point being you can't cheat at learning.
The calculator can't fake that you understand e.g. how to differentiate. The working is the bulk of available exam marks but the calculator only gives answers.
The working is the bulk of available exam marks but the calculator only gives answers
Knowing what the answer is supposed to be makes it much easier to reverse engineer the workings, and it lets you double check that your workings are correct. Also many of the more advanced graphing calculators (don't know the TI-89 specifically) have build in CAS systems and can do symbolic differentiation and as such help with showing your workings as well.
Plus the fact that these calculators let you store arbitrary data, so you can have your entire textbook stored in memory if you wanted.
I want to say something like "who learns advanced calculator functions solo but not the taught subject?" but of course shortcuts-by-rote spread like lice. I suppose that's the thrust of the problem with AI in schools
From memory it (and the 83/84) was banned from all math and physics exams during first year or two of our uni. There was a list of approved less powerful models. Nothing that could store programs.
All forms/structures in society that think that a TI-89 is cheating deserve to have as many people as possible use TI-89 and similar CAS's.
Ludditism is the human death drive externalized for the modern age. Reject it in all of its incarnations.
There's objectively no value with learning how to perform calculations by hand that CAS's can perform better automatically.
We have well over the number of human beings on earth amounts of calculator capable calculating devices. I will not "be in a situation where I don't have a calculator".
Time spent not teaching folks how to use computational aids of math and teaching them to do it the "hard way" is time robbed from them.
Those who invent systems which subvert or short circuit the attempts to enslave individuals into doing hard work for hard works sake are ontologically good. Those who try to defend work for works sake are ontologically evil and I hope that they reincarnate into a durian fruit in the next life.
> I will not "be in a situation where I don't have a calculator". [...] Those who invent systems which subvert or short circuit the attempts to enslave individuals into doing hard work for hard works sake are ontologically good. Those who try to defend work for works sake are ontologically evil and I hope that they reincarnate into a durian fruit in the next life.
By that logic, you must also permit students another extremely well-established labor-saving technique: Hiring someone else do the homework/exams on their behalf!
After all, for students from certain families, forcing them to use the calculator personally would likewise be "robbing time from them", denying them valuable experience honing their skills in managing and subcontracting. They'll never be in a situation where they don't have a calc^H^H^H^H lackey.
I trust we can agree that (A) permitting outsourcing is absurd, (B) that cheating is not "ontologically good" even when reduces the total human labor, and (C) prohibiting the practice should not put a teacher into a state of stinky-fruit damnation.
I submit that we do care about how students do it and which skills they use, even if we disagree on what those are. It is not as simple as saying that good education means spurring them to supply Valid Answers By Any Contemporary Efficient Means.
You take these classes in order to internalize the intuition for the subject. That's the point of the class. Getting the right answers is only important insofar as it serves that goal.
Your attitude makes sense in engineering but not in a math class for example.
We were not permitted to use a TI-89 in math courses since we were expected to learn the underlying concepts, which is much more than learning how to use a tool.
The reasoning was similar in physics. The instructors couldn't care less whether we used the CAS functionality of the TI-89 because that wasn't a part of their curriculum, but they were concerned about students downloading solver programs. (Most of the instructors would agree that creating our own programs to solve problems would be a valuable learning tool, but they had no way to determine whether we created those programs or someone else.)
Academic courses tend to be biased towards laying the foundations so that we can build upon our own knowledge. There are other types of courses that are purely concerned about applications and the use of tools.
> There's objectively no value with learning how to perform calculations by hand that CAS's can perform better automatically.
You're not learning how to perform calculations in most calculus courses. Perhaps not even most algebra courses.
A given expression can be simplified/factored in multiple ways. That TI-89 is going to do it only one way. When working with a typical physics/engineering problem, the way you decide to arrange the terms can help tremendously in understanding the physics of the situation.
I hear this take only from people who've not gone ahead and done advanced (graduate) level work.
Frankly, I'm quite glad to be able to do basic arithmetic in my head -- having to pick up a calculator every time I need to multiply two numbers would burn through far more time over the course of my life than what I spent in Kindergarten (or whenever) learning to do it myself.
All you want is for people to be better slaves for your capitalist machine. Never learning how to do things themselves: only consuming, buying what could otherwise have been achieved by the simple (but non-GDP-increasing) exercise of their own mind. Your rhetoric betrays your own class.
Try reading more than one leftist book: Fischer is great, but he doesn't try to talk praxis. So I'm talking about pragmatics here: just pretending that "we can abolish work by automating it" is pure ideology, totally ignorant of the centuries of historical examples to the contrary. Any time you get back will immediately be seized. What matters are your personal capabilities, what the working class is capable of doing with their own hands. You advocate waiting on the bourgeoisie to hand over control (what, out of good will?), but Fischer could tell you that only by seizing power for themselves can the working class ever become free.
> Any time you get back will immediately be seized.
I imagine some guy several thousand years ago: "Once we finish teaching this animal to pull the plough for us, descendants of The Tribe Between The Two Rivers shall have lives of pure leisure!"
I feel like you're glossing over the contexts of "acceptable" and "questionable".
The tool itself is not questionable or acceptable, it becomes questionable or acceptable depending on the usage. A pencil and paper can be questionable if the test is designed and expected to be completed without it.
You can design tests where an LLM spitting out python is an expected tool, but what are you testing for then? I doubt there are classes that teach whatever that test would be for yet.
