Response to: 
Stop Chasing High-Tech Cheaters
Inside Higher Education
May 25
By Ira Socol

(1) I was trying to explain to a student in my office why the graph of y = 1/x looks the way it does. I asked him, "What is one over one half?" He went for his calculator. Indeed, he could not compute 1/(1/2) on his own. Because he was allowed free use of his calculator all through high school he lost not merely a computation skill, but he lost the concept of what a fraction is and what a reciprocal is. He may memorize the graph of y = 1/x for my test, but he will never understand the concept of a singularity. The damage done to this young man's education is, practically speaking, permanent. Careers in science, medicine and engineering are closed to him.

I am not against the effective use of calculators and have developed a worksheet for my students to practice their calculator skills. I tell my classes that a chainsaw is a powerful tool, but you cannot use it to pick flowers. My colleagues refuse to use my calculator worksheet -- it is beneath them. They err in one extreme, while Ira errs in the other.

(2) I will teach trigonometry next fall. I will make my students memorize facts like sin(2x) = 2sin(x)cos(x). Why? So, that years from now, if they stay within a high tech field, they will remember that there is a formula for sin(2x), and then go and look it up. In teaching calculus I have often had students get stuck on a homework problem because they didn't recognize an opportunity to simplify an expression by using a trig identity. This is because they did not have to memorize these before and so now don.t even member that they exist. I have worked in industry and had to use trigonometry often. I even made a formula sheet for myself. But, you have to remember at least enough to know what to look up. "Over training" is critical.

(3) Many of my calculus students never had to memorize basic volume and area formulas. Because of this they do not understand the concepts of area and volume. I had a student who thought the volume of a cube was Pi times the radius squared. A cube does not have a radius. People don't Google facts they have wrong, because they do not know they are wrong. Many students do remember that Pi times the radius squared gives the area of a circle. But then they cannot remember the formula for the volume of a cylinder. If they had once memorized it, not merely by rote but in terms of this formula being a natural extension of the formula for the area of a circle, they would now be able to reconstruct it. Few can. Memorization does not have to be exclusively a rote experience, but rather can help students see larger patterns: at first these patterns seem to just be mnemonic devices, but later in the students. education they will see that they really learned more than they were aware of.

(4) I was talking to a student about politics -- he brought it up. He was against affirmative action programs. He has a right to his views of course. But, one of his reasons was that "the Civil War was hundreds of years ago"! Knowledge of basic facts does matter. They provide the bases for more abstract thinking, and indeed the boundary between the two is not as sharp as Ira imagines.

(5) My spelling sticks. Yes, spell checkers help, but they can only do so much. (Mine did not change "sticks" to "stinks".) I have to spend a great deal of time checking over my writing. I agree with Ira that having spelling tests in college is a bit extreme. However, I wish some teacher had gotten me into a program to help overcome this problem. Would we block a child with dyslexia from getting help with reading because soon all books will be available in verbal form on the internet? (Kudos to the education researchers who discovered dyslexia and developed ways for children to cope with it.)

Why do Ira and many other sincere researchers in education get the technology issue so wrong? I think it is because they lack specific discipline based knowledge and teaching experience. It is likely true that we in the disciplines would benefit from some of the new findings in education if we were aware of them -- I have found Sheila Tobias' work to be helpful. But the research in college education is done in almost complete isolation from the potential users of that information. Ira, did you send drafts of your article to colleagues in specific disciplines? Do you or could you know so much about mathematics, history, chemistry, journalism, etc., that this step was not necessary?