Because it’s easy to test and grade?
Why do we still teach people to calculate?
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#12"because you live in a country where the primary purpose for you as a citizen is to go into debt, so you better know how to, at the very least, do financial planning"
Arguably, being able to do financial planing will keep you out of debt. At the same time the number of people who understand compound interest is shockingly low - a great boon for credit issuers hoping to exploit you.
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#13I have rarely skimmed over such a long interview with virtually no content.
Ok, we get it. Wolfram Research has fantastic and somewhat underappreciated products (Wolfram Alpha is far more impressive than LLMs!) and you want to cash in on the AI hype. But please don't take it out on innocent students.
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#14Yes we should start my six year old with group theory. When we go to the farmer's market I can ask him under what transformations is an apple invariant, and then pay for it by having him solve a Rubiks cube.
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#15If we get hit by an EMP blast and get blown into the 19th century those calculation skills would make some rich.
As would a stack of paper books of logarithms
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#16It's interesting to discuss mathematical literacy with primary school teachers, mathematicians, statisticians, data scientists. I do periodically. Primary school teachers respect core fundamentals as kids acquire "mental muscle memory" and realize they have to both create some axiomatic knowledge (axiomatic in as much as you know 9x9 is 81 from rote recall, not because of a belief in inductive reasoning) as well as t…
> Mathematicians are very much in davis/hersh "what is mathematics anyway"
This reminds me of getting my CS degree in the early 2000s, then slowly realizing that my comp-sci program had taught me lots of interesting things about how computers and programs work, and essentially nothing about how to write code for a living.
Also reminds me of playing Dominion (the card game) with another student, me saying "Okay, I've got 1 and 2 and 2 and 3, that's 8..." and him gasping "Wow! How did you do that so fast?"
Dude was a math grad student. I narrowly restrained myself from saying "Well, you see, I finished the 3rd grade..."
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#17"because you live in a country where the primary purpose for you as a citizen is to go into debt, so you better know how to, at the very least, do financial planning"
When interest rates were 2.5% guaranteed for 30 years and the govt was running a 3.1 trillion deficit on 3.6 trillion of revenue, hell yeah we went into debt! 2020 was a good time to be able to calculate.
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#18Because you need to be able to run numbers in your head for a lot of practical tasks, and inability to do napkin math can cost you very dearly
This isn't just folk wisdom either. There's an active subfield of cognitive science that focuses on working memory/cognitive load and math instruction. Broadly speaking, it's hard for students to successfully transition to even basic algebra if they don't have basic calculations down.
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#19Because a computer isn’t embedded in our heads yet, wait we have one, why not use it.
Re: Why do we still teach people to calculate?
#20Because you need to be able to run numbers in your head for a lot of practical tasks, and inability to do napkin math can cost you very dearly
And calculators get broken very quickly on construction sites. And you must be capable of adding and subtracting and finding the LCD and GCD of fractions to read a tape measure in US customary units.
There must be ruggedized calculators out there, so that argument doesn't seem very compelling. People use their phones at construction sites, and you can run whatever type of calculator you want on a cell phone.