Xref: utzoo comp.ai:1339 comp.edu:881 comp.cog-eng:470 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!homxb!mtuxo!mtune!codas!killer!elg From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.edu,comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: Becoming CAI literate Message-ID: <3340@killer.UUCP> Date: 17 Feb 88 06:56:56 GMT References: <26@dogie.edu> Organization: Bayou Telecommunications Lines: 39 in article <26@dogie.edu>, edwards@dogie.edu ( Mark Edwards) says: > In article <3316@killer.UUCP> elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) writes: >>>>In this regard, they surpass classroom teachers. >>> didn't have computers. Why train humans to emulate machines if >>> you have adequate machines? >> Hair-brained things such as >>multiplication drills in an age of $5 calculators are just plain silly.... I >>know that in grade school, I, at least, would have been FASCINATED to know WHY >>the multiplication algorithm worked. > > I for one am certainly glad that I was drilled in multiplication tables and > so on. I use them everytime I go to the SuperMarket. Wow. What an old argument. I grew up before the era of cheap calculators, and I STILL heard that argument from 90 year old math teachers (most of whom are still teaching the same thing that they taught 50 years ago, despite that the world has changed an aweful lot since then!). I, too, go shopping. Estimation skills are more useful than multiplication skills (gee, is 16oz at $1.73 a better bargan than 12oz at $1.34?). Can you say "straw man argument"? Spending hours and hours improving your speed of computing numbers was worthwhile before the advent of $5 calculators. But I would much rather that our school children be taught MATHEMATICS for those multitude of hours. Sure, teach them computation skills. But don't make mere arithmetic computation the only thing taught to our students, like it is today (at least in this state... from grades 1 through 6, adding, subtraction, multiplication, and division, day after day... blech!). Is it any wonder that the majority of the students in the local "gifted and talented" program despise "math" class, calling it boring and repetitive? Hey, has anybody read Heinlein's novel "Tunnel in the Sky" anytime in the last 30 years? Gosh, if only the future of math education had been so sparkling! Instead, we're still stuck in the 19th century.... -- Eric Lee Green elg@usl.CSNET Asimov Cocktail,n., A verbal bomb {cbosgd,ihnp4}!killer!elg detonated by the mention of any Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 subject, resulting in an explosion Lafayette, LA 70509 of at least 5,000 words.