In Conrad Wolfram’s TED talk he considers a whole new way to teach math – use computers. He explains that outside of education almost all computing is done with computers, not by hand like it is in schools.
Wolfram has some very valid points in his TED Talk. At its most central theme, the talk is about modernizing education. Education is supposed to prepare students for the outside world and to teach skills and concepts that people actually use. In many grade-schools these days however, subjects and content based upon what is traditionally taught is the only thing that is taught. There are precedents for what should be taught in school, especially in math, such as manual calculation, which are not important skills in the real world. I agree with Wolfram that many schools need to reconsider their purpose – to teach practical and conceptual skills to students that help them succeed, not computational math that is only done on computers in the real-world workplace. Grade-school education is about giving baseline, practical knowledge to students, not computational, paper-and-pencil math that is no longer used.
I disagree, however, on how this new style of teaching math should be implemented. It is impossible to leap to a computer style class all of the sudden because computational math is tested on collage entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT. Computers and practical, conceptual math should be implemented slowly into the class room: maybe starting with a portion of a lesson being “computer math”. No one can accept radically new ideas quickly. It is important to implement these concepts that Conrad Wolfram considers, but doing it slowly is the only way it will be accepted.
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