- #36
zgozvrm
- 754
- 1
Integral said:Calculators do arithmetic wonderfully, should we quit teaching that as well?
My wife was a grade school teacher for many years (she's now an administrator), but when she was teaching math to 3rd graders in the early 90's, the curriculum was pretty much designed to teach kids how to use calculators to do math, basically neglecting to teach them how the operations really worked.
About 6 years later, when one of her students (the daughter of a friend) was in high school, she needed help with Algebra. My wife asked if I would tutor her. I recall going through a word problem with her and making sure that she could set up the problem, based on the information given. At one point, I asked something like, "what's 3X times 4?" and she immediately went to her calculator. I said, "You should be able to do that in your head." She just gave me a blank stare and I thought, "Wow, she's in Algebra, but can't multiply 3 by 4 in her head!?" My wife told me they don't make students memorize multiplication tables any more. Unbelievable!
So, while calculators are handy and can solve complicated calculations faster than we can by hand, they are ultimately slowing us down because students are being taught to depend on them.
Another example was while we were dating before we were married: we went to a store and the power went out. We had a single item that was priced at an even dollar amount, say $2.00 (if I recall the tax then was 6.0%). The "kid" at the register wouldn't sell us the item because the register was down. I told him that he could charge us and write it down, then enter it into the register when the power came back on. He said something like, "Yeah, but how will I charge you the tax?" I told him to use the calculator next to the register if he had to (which he shouldn't have needed). Ultimately, we walked out without our item.