mkprc

It's going to be tough to assess the efficacy of these schools, mostly because we can only wait-and-see how these kids turn out. But also, how do you correct for the fact that many (most?) of these students have savvy, affluent, involve parents and would probably be doing comparatively as well in any other school?

Selecting trig, "A right triangle has tanθ= ¾. If the side adjacent to θ is 30, what is the length of the opposite side?" The language/grammar is imprecise. What's it mean for a triangle to "have" tanθ= ¾? Should be that the triangle has an angle θ such that has tanθ= ¾. Also, "If the side adjacent to θ is 30 …" should refer to the "leg" adjacent θ; the hypotenuse is also a side adjacent to θ.

Taking the diagnostic, I just got the question "What is the opposite of -2?" Is it +2? Is it -½?

Edit: I restarted, selecting just Abstract Algebra as my diagnostic topic, and was shocked to get this question again! In Abstract Algebra! So far none of the questions in Abstract Algebra have anything to do with Abstract Algebra …

I wonder who would install this onto their calculator in earnest. Like, who’s the segment of folks with the savvy to learn about this and install this on their TI calculator, but who aren’t savvy enough to just learn to do the computations in curricular calculus class?

Snap judgment, but it appears to be a vibe coded interface added to an existing CAS for a TI-84 Plus CE calculator.

> Systems like OpenAI’s GPT-5 are accelerating research in …

Lesson plan is already behind the times.

This article features a few students, kids, who seem cognizant of what AI is doing to their thinking. They're aware of the temptation of cognitive surrender and the risk of cognitive. I worry about the kids who have no idea what their reliance on AI as a crutch has done to their ability to think, like I worry about the kids who have no idea how "scrolling" has nerfed their attention. (There's a big overlap between these two groups too). Like, some kids have no frame of reference for "normal" or "average" cognitive performance since so many of their peers are affected too, and pretty often too so are their parents.

> True to its name, OpenAI’s new group will mostly serve in an advisory capacity, assessing the significance of new results and coordinating their release. While members won’t be paid, they can offer unsolicited advice, go public with their views, and control their own membership, giving them a measure of independence from the company. However, the group won’t be given leeway to slow down or redirect OpenAI’s ongoing mathematical research.

Incredible

This is an interesting post.

Teachers are often asked "why do I have to learn [this] when my calculator can do it?" or "why should I memorize [this] when I can just look it up online?" and now "why should I learn to reason through [this] if an LLM can just do it?". To respond to these questions some math teachers think quite hard about the purpose of learning mathematics (some just have a canned response). The consensus answer is something like: the topics themselves don't matter too much, but they serve as an instrument of becoming better at thinking logically, and becoming quantitatively savvy. Most students are not savvy. The author of this post appears to be an exception, probably becoming savvy as a child from all the unstructured activities they did while being home-schooled.

> What did I do with my time instead? … I took apart old computers and pieced them together to try and build something strong enough to emulate Super Smash Bros on the PC, and voraciously read vintage young adult fiction like Tom Swift or G.A. Henty novels.

> … if I ask my calculator the square root of 231, I also have no easy way to evaluate the output. I can sort of guess (10×10 is 100, 20×20 is 400, 15×15 is somewhere in the middle, so if the answer is 15-ish it's probably right), but I can also sort of guess at LLM outputs.

The standard mathematics education machine has no idea what to do with a student who is already savvy, capable of critically interpreting what the calculator/internet/LLM reports to them.

For the author, and for any other savvy folks, LLMs are a great new tool. I worry about everyone else who because they are not savvy, when they ask "why should I learn to reason through [this] if an LLM can just do it?" are quite happy to cognitively surrender to the tool, deferring their critical thought to the LLM, making it a crutch they now happily rely on.