I didn't learn how to prove addition until advanced math in late high school, so obviously there's a point at which we're comfortable glossing over the underlying concepts with young students and skipping to the parts that are actually meaningful to the learning outcomes that we've decided are appropriate for their age.
> Like, yes, we allow calculators for highschoolers. But we'd never give a calculator to a 3rd grader learning their times tables. Because then they'd never learn that 9 * 9 is 49, and now they're permanently handicapped in math. And now, when they are in high school, the calculator doesn't even matter, because they can't do math at a basic level.
Research doesn't support this.
> Or, consider reading. Certainly high schoolers can use audio books. But imagine if we didn't teach reading at all, and just used audio books, from kindergarten. Would anyone know how to read? I doubt it.
Right, so if the learning outcome is "the student knows how to read" we'd judge that teaching method a failure.
I'm saying that our focus should be on helping students achieve learning outcomes, not on the tools we use to evaluate whether or not they've reached those learning outcomes.
The point of education is the learning, not the evaluation, so when the tools used to complete the evaluations become useless due to technology we should be replacing those tools rather than clinging to them desperately.
