Four hundred years ago, William Oughtred created the world's first slide rule, with numbered concentric wooden circles that were manually manipulated to calculate figures. His invention led the way for other designs that would eventually open the world of higher mathematical calculation to scientists for the rest of history. The gap in time between Oughtred’s wooden device and our own modern computers is filled with button-operated machines with gears and pulleys, electric machines with vacuum tubes, then transistors, and eventually the electric-powered calculation machines which quickly became the world's first handheld calculator in 1971.
Oughtred couldn’t have imagined what he would end up kickstarting. At the time of its invention, the wooden slide rule allowed the most brilliant mathematical minds to access higher math with speed and efficiency unheard of to that point. But it was only that tiny sliver of society who would benefit from its use. Come forward 300 years to the pocket calculator and the field has changed completely. The pocket calculator takes Oughtred’s principle of machine calculation to a level of simplicity that suddenly allows every 13-year-old in classrooms around the world to access all the higher math the world has to offer.
The calculator took the world by storm and math teachers across the globe fell into two camps (a caricature):
You can maybe see the stark difference in outlook. It is the difference between gatekeeping and empowering.
Now, 60 years on, every math teacher knows that a foundation in the fundamentals of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division - a solid foundation - are the launchpad for success in a world of mathematics which opens endless possibilities for student learning and for career path engagement. If students know their basic math, they can access the full range of mathematics concepts by investing in learning each next step of the world of mathematics.
Now, of course, this is not a world that every 13-year-old taps into. But the gates lie open. There is no such thing as a two-camp mathematics debate anymore. It has faded and become a quaint part of a dynamic history. Calculators have allowed the world to move far beyond the historical practice of hand calculation - an impressive and commendable skill - to a world where every mathematics student has the tools to move into the highest field of study in mathematics, given the aptitude and drive to pursue it, with the ease and speed of a magic machine returning values at light speed.
And we've far surpassed the graphing calculator at this point. There is now software that allows you to simulate any moment in the past or the future in the solar system and visualize the position of every known planet, moon, and constellation at any given time. There is software that allows you to display intersecting waves of variable amplitude, wavelength, and frequency to visualize the effects of one wave on another on the surface of a liquid and to manipulate the inputs and see their effects on objects, man-made or naturally occurring.
These same types of software, of course, can be used to create hyper-realistic computer-generated imagery of the inside of the fire-stricken Notre Dame Cathedral, for example, thanks to a video game company that happened to perform a 3D scan before the fire destroyed it. And no list would be complete without mention of the James Webb Space Telescope which sends data back to Earth in millions of bits of information stored in unending strings of digital sequences which are interpreted by computers to give us composite imagery that is mind-blowingly beautiful and leaps beyond the Hubble images we have grown accustomed to seeing of massive nebulae and thousands of galaxies in the far-off corners of the universe.
All this is thanks to the now commonplace machines that have cleared the obstacles for mathematicians to get stuck into the hard work of exploration and innovation free of the burden of manual calculation, hand cataloging, personally interpreting, and then hand animating the results for a readership to understand.
What if I suggested that Generative AI is the analog to the calculator, but for writing? A writing calculator! Any writing teacher would agree that a firm foundation in the fundamentals will always be necessary for a student to fully understand writing: spelling and vocabulary, grammar and punctuation, paragraph structure, and organization and planning.
But what if a young writing student, like a young mathematics student, could get to the tougher stuff at the higher levels by conquering necessary obstacles along the way with the help of a calculator - a writing calculator - and sail along into the highest fields of study of written communication, given the aptitude and drive to pursue it, with the ease and speed of a magic machine which operates at the speed of light?
Generative AI is taking the world by storm - and writing teachers across the globe are falling into two camps (a caricature):
You can maybe see the stark difference in outlook. It is the difference between gatekeeping and empowering.
What if the world moves through the history of generative AI as it did the history of the calculator? What can we see coming if the future looks like the past? What value has the calculator brought? It allows 13-year-old kids to be engaged in mathematics so advanced that only a handful of people could ever even have considered its complexities, literally, for thousands of years before that - and only the brightest and most famous minds at that. We take this for granted now, 13-year-old kids. It is relatively new in the yawning stretch of human history.
What if Generative AI can bring this same dynamic to writing? What if it can free up time and cognitive load for 13-year-old kids to be engaged in writing so advanced that only a handful of people could ever even have considered its complexities, literally, for thousands of years - and only the brightest and most famous minds at that? What if we can free up time and cognitive load for 13-year-old kids to focus on leading their generation into the future in areas that matter to them?
The hard questions for teachers and educational leaders then become these:
The Generative AI camps are already forming. People are falling naturally into either of two sides.
But what if we could bring the camps together before they calcify? What if we could avoid participating in a replay of a quaint part of a new and unfolding dynamic history? The three questions listed above are key to our cautiously feeling our way into the fog of the very near future - unfolding today, tomorrow, and next week. Generative AI is growing fast changing at a speed maybe never seen in other fields before. It showed up on the landscape - in practical terms for most of us - only six months ago. But we live in a world where students of all ages have access to it and in many cases are already miles ahead of where teachers are.
How do you guide the use of a writing calculator?
Great question. I will share thoughts that others have shared before: we teach them about how generative AI works, we teach them its limitations, and we teach them its biases. With a little background information, students can see it for what it is and be able to see areas where it can do the hard work, reliably. The key is to get it into the routines in the classroom and get students to see us using it and working with its limitations. These limitations will fade over time as generative AI spreads its wings and merges with general intelligence and quantum computing. The full potential of AI is only just unfolding.
What added value does your instruction bring to the student's ability to create as you walk alongside them in a world very different from the world you grew up in?
Added value of instruction is a pretty broad term and measuring this is pretty subjective. But you can ask yourself a few questions to help you get engaged. Am I in? Am I willing to learn so that I can teach? Am I willing to learn from students who may know more than me in this area? Am I willing to take risks with an area that is still emerging? What can I do to welcome this as an area of inquiry in my classroom? How can I use generative AI as part of a collaborative conversation in my classroom alongside my students as we all learn about it together?
A few thoughts others have shared: have students practice by feeding it prompts and asking it to shape the prompt in different ways, some goofy, some serious, some lower grade level, some college level. Ask it to provide a list of serious scientists in a given field and count how many are women or are from ethnic backgrounds other than European. Ask it to try again including women and other cultural backgrounds. Have students create three intro paragraphs for a given assignment and then pick one and shape it using generative AI. My own suggestion, start a group of early adopters who can share what they know so you can all learn together, maybe an after school club. Invite teachers and admin too.
But to me, the most important question is this:
What do you do with time freed up by the use of a writing calculator?
This is the big-picture-shift-in-the-landscape question. Calculators moved the highest levels of mathematics to a lower shelf where kids could reach the concepts, freeing up huge amounts of time formerly spent on the tedious but important tasks of hand calculation so they could spend that time accessing those new top-shelf concepts.
If writing calculators can move the highest levels of written communication to a lower shelf where kids can reach the concepts, then what goes on the upper shelves now? What are the new things that will fill the spaces on the top shelves formerly occupied by what used to be the top shelf concepts? This is the big question. I don’t have an answer, but I have a hunch it won’t be long before it becomes a matter of course and we all look at the landscape and say how significant a change came and went, and we were there to see it happen, and it was a very exciting and very recent thing in the yawning stretch of human history.
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Dr. Granger is Secondary Deputy Principal at Taejon Christian International School in Daejeon, South Korea.
