From my experience tutoring (especially young children but also teenagers) I have discovered what seems to be a human universal: the brain is always looking for shortcuts. I have witnessed kids attempt to develop strategies for cold-reading me, the tutor, instead of learning how to solve the problem directly. They’ll make these educated guesses and then try to see how I react. I’ve had to develop a poker face just to get them to give up on that nonsense and turn their attention to the problem at hand.

I suspect that many tutors, parents, and even teachers never realize that kids are doing this. Then they’re shocked when a kid who seemed to be doing so well bombs the exam.

I feel the calculator is part of this phenomenon. In addition to immediately providing the answers so kids don’t have to figure it out themselves, it also creates the expectation that there are shortcuts in math and that teachers are just giving them busywork because that’s what adults do to kids.

That’s the heart of the problem, to me. There are no shortcuts to understanding.