I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time.

For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!

I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and never looked back.

I had the opposite experience, as it were, teaching in the UC system. The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those post-COVID, were the problem.

Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile.

I'm always torn on this, I learned a lot of algebra, stats and calc from actually writing TI-Basic programs in my calculator. I was deeply interested in programming since the age of 11, so it felt very natural to translate the formulas and concepts to code.

Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.

It’s definitely actively bad to involve a device in the vast majority of education. And, it’s a purely selfish thing by tech companies to insert themselves into education.

A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.

I suggest you glance at the novel Ananthem by Neal Stephenson. The core plot device is about "universities" stripping all worldly items away from the students, so they are left with simple clothes and chalkboards. Fascinating topic, well executed by Neal. One of my favorite books.

I am thinking why not use the iPad simply as a letter pad with infinite pages? the new iPad with the new iPad pencil can do that and I am sure with the right software you can write, erase, rewrite as much as you want? What am I missing?

blackboards in uni where you can't do anything but just rewrite everything the prof is writing is a nightmarish waste of time, especially for anyone with any kind of attention difficulties

please remove the devices from the students but provide slides

They got rid of paper because teachers are lazy and do not want to spend time grading things by hand.

I’ve spoken to the head of curriculum at a school asking why when given the choice of paper or digital format of a math exam, they picked the digital. I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.

The response I got was, “we encourage students to redraw the entire picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpful”.

It’s strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.