School spies on kids through student laptops

[Kevin]

Much better in my opinion to ensure every student has one. Students somewhere in the world, competing for the same jobs or college slots, will have a laptop/calculator.

I have to comment on this. Calculators in math classes are stupid stupid stupid stupid. Calculators in physics, engineering, chemistry classes are a good idea.

What's the difference there? Math is the principal, it's the foundation and if teachers have competency they teach you how to do it without ever needing a calculator.

Now, when you are applying math to actual problems and the numbers matter, teach the person how to use the calculator/computer to do so and they should understand readily WHY they are doing what they are doing because they learned the math behind it. But for the concepts of math itself, all the way through differential equations and linear algebra (all the farther I got with it) you don't need a calculator to master it. In fact I firmly believe a calculator will hinder learning or if problems are crafted such that the numbers are brutal, then that's poor teaching.

But yes I wouldn't want someone doing physics problems that have any real application without one because that is the reality of solving those problems now and it's less valuable to have a contrived nice numbers problem than to have a real world problem that won't always have nice numbers, but they are there to learn physics, not math.

I think the distinction matters.

Now having the math class teach how to use the calculator/program I can deal with, to an extent. It would me that calculator is rarely ever out, and should never be allowed a test still. I still think that is better taught in the domain of whatever the application of the language of mathematics is for, but I understand the practicalities that would want it taught in the math class.