AI in the Math Classroom
Phil Robson
On the face of it, math classes in the 1990s were pretty similar to today, given that almost all of high school math is based on work completed before 1900. The major differences between then and now owe to the evolution of teaching practices and advancements in technology. Has technology changed math? I would argue not, but it has changed attitudes towards and methods used in teaching and learning the discipline. When I was a student taking Statistics, for example, we spent much of our class time crunching numbers on calculators and working out standard deviations and p-values by hand. Now, high school statistics courses are much more about interpreting those values than calculating them.
Calculators changed the goals and activities in Math class, but not the mathematics itself. I might argue that “real” mathematics is what a calculator cannot do, just as a spell-checker cannot write for you.
And then came the internet. Technological change, in general, is exponential, meaning both the size of the change and the speed with which it occurs increases over time. Mathematically speaking, we’re dealing with an increasing function that is concave up. You could even say it is positively a jerk (Physics joke). The internet changed the game again: what it could do, how it affected humans, how it affected teaching and learning, and how it affected math specifically. Suddenly, anything was searchable, and here was a tool that couldn’t merely calculate things but manipulate algebra. Did that significantly change what math was learned, or how math was learned? Not really. The real change as a result of the internet had to do with integrity and authorship of work, the ability of teachers and students to visualize what is going on, and how we communicate with each other and stay organized.
As far as I am able to tell, the significance of the leap from calculator to internet pales in comparison to the current evolution of the internet to artificial intelligence. And, just as the changes brought about by the dot-com boom were not all immediately obvious, it still feels really unclear how far this revolution will go and what is coming. Am I concerned that my job as a teacher will soon become obsolete? No, I’m not. Maybe I’m naïve, but I think teaching is relational, both between the teacher and learner, and between the learners themselves, which is why we still learn together in schools rather than individually online. For all of the endless possibilities of AI, I think we need to protect our humanness, and because of that, I am not expecting schools to change beyond recognition in the coming years and generations.
If we revisit the timeless question, “Why do we go to school?” I think the answer now is largely the same as it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and the answer is unlikely to change anytime soon. But the question, “What skills do today’s citizens need to survive and succeed?” has a more complicated answer. And it is here that I focus my efforts, as I adjust and try to improve my teaching.
Way before the advent of AI, I surmised that the point of learning math has everything to do with thinking and very little to do with remembering algorithms. Perhaps AI highlights this thinking more than the internet or calculators did. How does AI challenge us to think about thinking? How can we use it to understand things that were previously incomprehensible? It behooves us to be open and curious, and healthily skeptical about AI. It’s not going anywhere, so why pretend it doesn’t exist? Rather, let us turn the tables and ask, “How can we use AI to evolve the way we learn math?”