I have been helping my son do his multiplication problems. You know, homework stuff like 483 x 8 = 3,864. The pathetic thing is I've forgotten how to do basic multiplication on pencil and paper. After decades of relying upon calculators, I became rusty. True story: I had to Google it up for a refresher. It took me just a few minutes to get back to speed.
My boss is a Ph.D. He's at the top of the electronic engineering field. We were formulating a new price list for our widgets last week. I can't remember the exact numbers, but they were something like subtract $1100.00 from $3995.00. Both of us reached for our calculators. After we did the numbers I paused to consider what just happened. I said, "Don't you think it's funny that an engineer with a Ph.D. would reach for a calculator when either one of us should be able to perform the subtraction in our head?" He has a good sense of humor. He says when it comes to money he always relies upon a calculator.
Calculators have made our lives easier, but I think we are overly reliant upon them. I also think that penmanship is suffering because most of us now type instead of writing things out by hand. I can only speak for myself, but my handwriting has suffered.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
I lost my caclulator the other day and now I'm lost! It's remarkable how we've come to rely on them. Fortunately I can still do long multiplication and division, I haven't lost those skills yet, but I do use a calculator to check my own maths whenever I end up putting pencil to paper. And yes, my handwriting is awful these days.
In my field I've found it useful to have excellent mental arithmetic skills. It makes it easier to tell when people are just pulling numbers out of their a$$es during meeetings. So I've kept that part of my brain active.
My spelling ability has gone down the tubes though. I just type down a rough guess and let MS Office take care of the rest for me. The funny thing I notice is that I will keep misspelling the same words over and over again instead of just committing the correct spelling to memory.
I agree with tesla. I was good at mental math in college, and still practice. Flummoxes the bosses when I tell them what they did wrong using their calculator.
I'd also agree my spelling reeks (as does my typing). However, unlike many of my coworkers, I understand the difference between "there" and "their".
Handwriting is an issue, but who ever really wrote longhand except thank-yous to your grandparents or love letters? I do a rapid job of printing to take notes in hard bound note books. With a fountain pen. That gets noticed.
From Los Alamos From Below: Reminiscences 1943-1945, by Richard Feynman
(here Feynman talks about Hans Bethe, future Nobel laureate):
I had a lot of interesting experiences with Bethe. The first day when he came in, we had a calculator, or glorified adding machine, a Marchant that you work by hand. And so he said, Let's see." The formula he'd been working out, he says, involves the pressure squared; the pressure is 48; so the square of 48 is --
I reach for the machine.
He says, It's about 2300. So I plug it out just to find out.
He says, You want to know exactly? It's 2304." And it came out 2304.
So I said, How do you do that?"
He says, Don't you know how to take squares of numbers near 50? If it's near 50, say 3 below (47), then the answer is 3 below 25 - like 47 squared is 2200, and how much is left over is the square of what's residual. For instance, it's 3 less and the square of that is 9, so you get 2209 from 47 squared."
So he knew all his arithmetic, and he was very good at it, and that was a challenge to me. I kept practicing. We used to have a little contest. Every time we'd have to calculate anything we'd race to the answer, he and I, and I would lose. After several years I began to get in there once in a while, maybe one out of four. You have to notice the numbers, you see - and each of us would notice a different way. We had lots of fun.
I always make a point of adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing two numbers in my head to keep my mind fresh. I doublecheck with a calculator when it's going into a report to avoid potential embarrassment. It's sometimes helpful in meetings.
I understand the difference between "there" and "their".
Ugh. That bugs the crap out of me when I see it.
I'm homeschooling my 8 year old son in Math, and I decided early on that his studies would go much more smoothly if he had basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division down *cold* before he went any further. I started giving him quizzes of 10-30 problems every day. Just making the quizzes took up so much time, I wound up writing a program to generate them, and eventually started selling it to teachers and other parents. Last year, my son was probably behind the public school kids, but this year he's shot way ahead, because basic math is now a non-issue. More advanced concepts are a lot easier to teach if you don't have to go back and do a refresher on the multiplication tables.
Amen. I hear students say "why can't we just do it on a calculator" or "well we'll just have a computer that figures it out for us anyway." They also bemoan that instead of teaching kitschy but workable mnemonic devices to do math, I force them to truly understand the underlying operations.
It's the 8th grade that you really have to be careful in and watch your kids. 65% of the SAT math section is based on 8th grade math. Around 40% of what they cover is brand new and not covered before. So a large number of GT kids skip it and go to pre-algebra. Ironically, they end up missing a lot of very important stuff.
Plus, the "nicer" districts really push computers and calculators on kids in the 8th to "enhance" their learning. What really happens is they miss a real understanding of the essential operations.
Post a Comment