This is a brilliant piece, Tom. It reminds me somewhat of Conrad Wolfram’s TED talk in 2010 where he reminds us that we focus on teaching Calculating in school and not Math, and that needs to be improved.

In a world where my watch can run complex calculations just by me speaking the right words to it, the ability to inherently know what the words I need to say are becomes infinitely more important than if I can accurately work out the details.

In fact, in the analytical work many people do today, you would be fired if you spent time manually calculating out the things your spreadsheets churn in milliseconds. Even the thought of it sounds ludicrous! Yet, we push and push our students to work out the problems. Work out the problems. Work out the problems.

Never, unless you major in Math in University, do you get to wonder why this is the way to solve this problem and get underneath the way it all works (which is actually an incredible launch pad for why we should all learn programming, if you think about it).

Yet, #2 pencils still reign in the classroom, teaching a skill you should never use in actual life.