Note from Dave: I'm currently taking inquiries for PD visits to schools for the spring, summer, and fall. Schools tend to use me for issues around student motivation and engagement, recovering teacher morale, or returning to the fundamentals of teaching. All my visits come with resources that enable schools to keep the learning going after I leave. To get an idea of the topics I cover, head here. If you're a PD decision-maker or on a team that decides PD, use this form to be in touch. I'd love to explore coming to your school.
I was talking to a math teacher in North Dakota awhile ago, and he shared about how he teaches his high school math students to use the calculator. He puts his calculator on the document camera and shows them how to use the tool. This, he said, was one way in which he Woodenizes learning in his classroom. (I discuss Woodenization in this article, this video, and on pp. 175-193 of The Will to Learn.)
Teaching high schoolers how to use calculators — this is smart. It sounds absurd, but it's not.
But from a learning standpoint, why is it smart?
Because it removes some avoidable difficulties in the math classroom:
- Not all students understand how to use a calculator like the teacher understands using a calculator. Showing students how he uses the calculator and explaining why he uses it this way takes little time but has large benefits for students who are unclear.
- It signals to students that the teacher assumes nothing about their level of knowledge (this helps with Credibility, pp. 33-100 of The Will to Learn).
- It signals to students who don't understand how to use a calculator that they belong in this class (this helps with Belonging, pp. 219-242 of The Will to Learn).
So, here's a principle: any time we can remove difficulties from the classroom, we should. And this is because learning is already hard enough. The work of getting knowledge into long-term memory and then using that knowledge successfully is hard.
Why? Here a few of the unavoidable difficulties of learning:
- Concentration and effort are limited resources. No human being can concentrate indefinitely. Some of us have developed our powers of concentration further than others — some are like me and some are like Chris Hemsworth — but none of us can do it forever.
- Attention is narrow. We can only point our attention at so many things. And in a world like ours and classrooms like ours, that's a tall order because distractions abound.
- Working memory — the part of our mind that we consciously think with, the “work space” of cognition — is limited. Whether you're an Albert Einstein of the world or a person like me, we've got something in common: there are only about four slots in our working memory. If a thought about my dog comes to mind while I'm working on a problem at work, something about the problem I was working on is going to slip away.
Thankfully, there are things we can do about these difficulties, such as building student stamina, overlearning core material, reducing unneeded distractions, and expanding background knowledge on a topic that we're studying. (We study these and many more practical applications of learning science in the Principles of Learning Course.) But no matter what we do about these things, they don't take away the fact that learning new material and solving new problems — in other words, learning — is difficult enough as it is.
Wherever there's a difficulty we can remove or ameliorate, we ought to.
So teach kids how to use calculators, even in high school.
Best,
DSJR
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