A Knewton critique: Why computers shouldn’t teach calculus (or anything else)

A Knewton critique: Why computers shouldn’t teach calculus (or anything else)

Isi, my teenager, is a college student taking calculus. The teacher is assigning homework from Knewton, an online learning system. I’ve been helping with the homework. Now I can see why computers can’t teach college courses — and why tools like Knewton are not just destructive, they’re evil. The old way of teaching calculus worked…

Unfair

Unfair

I was a math prodigy. But everything changed when I encountered an unfair problem more like the real world than mathematics. Math had always come easily to me. I majored in math at Penn State, and everyone in the department knew I was a student with special abilities. Math sort of shifts on you. In…