Educators of the past managed to build the Hoover Dam, split the atom, and walk on the moon by doing EVERYTHING WRONG.
In a finding sure to inflame the math wars, a team of neuroscientists has revealed the crucial role played by rote memorization in the growing brains of young math students.
Memorizing the answers to simple math problems, such as basic addition or the multiplication tables, marks a key shift in a child’s cognitive development, because it helps bridge the gap from counting on fingers to complex calculation, according to the new brain scanning research. […]
In effect, as young math students memorize the basics, their brains reorganize to accommodate the greater demands of more complex math. It is a gradual process, like “overlapping waves,” the researchers write, but it clearly shows that, for the growing child’s brain, rote memorization is a key step along the way to efficient mathematical reasoning.
And learning how to make change.
But this isnt progressive? Can’t be right.
At the core this was about dumbing it down so that all kids were equally hampered (discovery learning). An appearance of individuality, different learning styles, that only fed the victimhood and excuses….I learn differently. Of course all fed by consultants and teaching establishment that fed ever changing and rising credentials and research.
The irony, it only feeds inequality as parents who can afford the tutoring or the time to reteach end up doing so. The other kids are left to wallow. As always money and parental attention drive the success. But trusting the school system to actually educate your kids in anything is dangerous.
In my schoold board they waste money on Social Equity and yet there are shortages of schoolbooks in math and science.
And you wonder why there were objections to common core….some were poltiical but most were because it was full of crap pedagogy, like discovery learning.
“In a finding sure to inflame the math wars….”
I betcha it’s not fair to girls.
Another skill my teachers developed was mental arithmetic. The teacher would call out a string of operations plus, minus, times, divide-y and we had to have the correct answer at the end. Now that certainly was mental gymnastics of the good kind. It is something parents can do today without school.
Well, well! Sisters Carol, Eunice, Augustinia, Louise, and Winifred had it right (not that it surprises me). FWIW, Google used to (and may still) test prospective employees on their ability to do arithmetic in their heads; they did it to me (and I passed).
http://www.khanacademy.org to help kids or adults with any math to learn.
While it may be too LATE FOR ME, the KHAN ACADEMY found on the internet, provides a whole new world for anyone interested in SELF HELP!
Memorizing the “TIMES TABLES” in youth is of course a lifelong asset, not to be by-passed…… EVER!
Home schooler parents on the internet ……. look it up…. KHAN ACADEMY!
Quick math skills also enable immediate calling-out of obvious errors and/or intentional bullshit numbers.
Waiting to drag out a calculator (or, these days, more likely a smartphone with distraction features built-in) gives time for the BS artist to quickly move on to the “Therefore, we must implement my numbskull plan…”.
As local favorite Mark Steyn said (paraphrased): eighth-grade-educated America built the most advanced civilization in history… until eighteenth-grade America drove it off the cliff.
He also said something else of immense value: the no-nonsense schoolmarm with her hair in a bun used to inoculate gifted students against much of the Marxist indoctrination found in University. Now, the schoolmarm with her hair in a bun is a nutcase too.
At this point, she’s more likely to be a crew-cut bulldyke wearing a collared shirt and cords.
It’s absolutely worth noting that these phenomena are in no way exclusive to public education, but are pervasive within the private sphere as well. I know this as a child of “privilege.” In fact, a selfsame bulldyke managed to graft her poisonous stalk onto the souls of at least three of my female co-classmates – we’re talking best and brightest – who themselves have become bare-headed but full-throated social justice warriors.
I argue that they ought to belong to a good white man, in a good home, having high-IQ white children. But at they very least they should have been guided into disciplines through which their immense intelligence might have been productively utilized: medicine, engineering, etc.
Instead, we have three more barren white wombs, and three white women whose perverted essence renders their fruitlessness a mercy.
I’m all for memorizing the “times” tables (the 15x table has gotten me out of many a jam at “divide the tip” time), but aren’t we conflating two separate issues here?
It seems to me that if this is an issue related to microphysiology – memorizing engenders a change in the brain that improves abstract functioning somehow – then memorizing _anything_ (say, the plots of the Carry On Gang movies, or the names of all the bones in the bovine skeleton) would do this. Sort of like how doing squats is supposed to engender a chemical change in the bloodstream that helps with your abs.
Or have I, as usual, missed the point?
Captcha: “ktedmw” – as in “Extinction Event,” “Impotence,” “Brand of Dictionary.” (Sorry. I can’t stop memorizing now.)
“…At this point, she’s more likely to be a crew-cut bulldyke wearing a collared shirt and cords.”
HEE, Heee, heeeeeeeeeee……….
And like, you know, like, what’s wrong with that? And like, math is sooooo, like hard!
(Just wish I could type it with the rising tone at the end of each sentence – a true sign of a modern no-mind – that makes every statement sound like a question.)
… And make change.
Yes and be able to determine the price of a bag of Starbucks beans comprised of 1/2 lb of A, 1/4 lb of B, and 1/4 lb of C each with different prices: a blend actually recommended to me by a Starbucks barista many years ago but which, forsooth, I had to abandon because each purchase turned into a 15 minute torture session.
Don’t forget gozintas.
That’s called ‘upspeak’ or ‘uptalk’. Very annoying.
Kate has a very interesting thought here.
“…managed to build the Hoover Dam, split the atom, and walk on the moon…”
All of these were achieved on slide-rule mathematics.
So somebody tell me, just what have computers done for science? Name one large scientific breakthrough that computers have achieved that slide rules could not and did not.
1. IBM Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator
Announced in May 1949 as a versatile general-purpose computer, the IBM Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator (CPC) was the first digital computer used in the US space program. It performed predetermined sequences of arithmetical operations coded on 80-column punched cards, adding figures at a rate of 2174 per minute. The CPC was instrumental in developing the US Army Redstone missile, which carried the first US satellite into orbit. A Redstone rocket also launched the first US astronauts and their Mercury capsule into sub-orbital flight in 1961.
www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/apollo/transform/
2. Breaking the Code
To decipher the enemy’s plans and movements during World War II, Britain assembled an extraordinary team of mathematicians and engineers at Bletchley Park, its Government Code and Cypher School.
Their assignment? Develop machines to crack German codes. Among their triumphs was Colossus, an electronic code-breaking computer that remained classified until the 1970s.
http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/birth-of-the-computer/4/82
Another reinvention of the wheel?
The times tables worked, which is why 50 years later I can spot the holes in progressive public investment bull.
The mental gymnastics involved in first rote learning and then applying this memory are the building blocks of a functional BS detector.
Small wonder Progressives have campaigned to destroy the teaching of mathematics.
Reading ,writing and arithmetic were the foundations of a functioning civil society.
This level of function equips citizens to spot fools and bandits, are you surprised that professional do-gooders(Conmen),bureaucrats and politicians would actively destroy such a danger to their careers?
shift the decimal place left one and add another half. Easy.
Anybody remember having to use log tables? I still have my book 40 years later.I think it’s classified as a “rare book” now. And the beauracracy,socialist teachers,and the politicians are working hard to remove ALL math from school,because,you know,calculators and computor modelling can do it Soooooo much better. Pure BS from the progs.
I’m somehow reminded of StatsCan’s bungled employment numbers for July 2014
200 estimated vs. 42000 actual???
Blamed on a computer error – No mention that at least 12 bureaucrats likely signed off on the report’s release.
http://globalnews.ca/news/1509688/dont-panic-statscan-job-errors-more-awkward-than-catastrophic/
At the last family get-to-gather our very thoughtful liberal niece was explaining how all the Old Farts have screwed everything up. I am a Baby-Boomer so this was my Dad’s generation she was bad mouthing, I could not let that stand. I strongly mentioned to her that those Old Farts put a Man on the Moon with an IBM 9 inch dual floppy disk drive with 54K of memory. She quickly fired back her Generation X built the International Space Station. My Mother-in-Law, 83 years old and very conservative, God Bless her soul, said; ” Yea, but you got no way to get there.”
,
You gota love those Old Farts.
I still have my laminated card of base-10 logarithms from high-school chemistry class (1968-1969). I don’t use it, by the fact that I have used logarithms and antilogs comes in handy from time to time (I’m a free-lance software developer who encounters compound-interest or similar calculations frequently).
Neither of those are science breakthroughs, Rizwan. Engineering maybe. People have been breaking codes for centuries, albeit the hard way. And there was nothing startlingly new about the science of rocketry.
The only true science breakthrough that I can think of is decoding the human genome. Without a lot of computing power, such a project was literally impossible.
“And learning how to make change.”
The wife and I have been to several businesses staffed with young adults that can’t calculate basic change in their heads. We are taking $9.75 from a ten. This one kid could not get the cash register to work, could not find his iPhone and didn’t know how to use the manual calculator. He grabbed a few loonies and “said I hope this is right”. The same dolt handed back $5 on our $17 purchase paid with a $20.
I used to dine in downtown Ottawa with non-Finance, non-Bank of Canada, non-Statcan folks. They treated the “shift the decimal and add half” as a black art, but they trusted the 15x table.
Captcha: “knmy6r”, or kan my 6-yr old read?
To impress the babes in math class, you only need to memorize the logs of 2 (.301), 3 (.477), and 7 (.845) for most work – you can derive most of the rest in your head, at least to two places, from these. (Okay, learn log(11) (1.041) and log(13) (1.114) if you really want to show off.)
Captcha: “v52333”, or v log(10/3).
I figure “larnin’ a kid is like a computer.
The math eg algebra is the programming….teaching HOW to think.
The memorized stuff is the data base.
What we got here is not a failure to communicate…it’s an organic computer with no programming or data base.
Does that clarify yer fuzzification?
I’ve saying this for years. Memorizing is not bad. Memorizing often precedes understanding. I don’t know if memorizing poetry has the same effect on structuring the brain as mathematics. I doubt it, one favoring language, sounds and emotions and the other a more rigorous structure. There have been studies showing that study of music and success in mathematics relate. As far as achievements that have been made by computers and not someone with a sliderule–just about anything where the sheer number of computations required would exceed the ability of someone to do them manually. The recent satellite encounter with a developing comet is one. Some delicate medical procedures which are done by machines directed by computers. Improvements in imaging techniques for medical purposes. Robotics.
Got three kids in public school and I cannot even begin to tell you how much I utterly loath the public education system.
And it is getting worse and worse.
I was never taught the multiplication tables , by school or parent. It disabled my math skills immensely. Children just don’t discover things. Like the wheel or fire. You have to be taught. Just like manners they don’t come by instinct.The left have turned our schools into centres for ideological propaganda, where sex education trumps writing. Socialization reading. Its now not only propaganda pits but institutions devoted to anti-reason or logic in favour of intuition & feelings. These are now cages where children are the guinea pigs of the social engineers.
I always had problems with the square root calcs manually, and still do.
IMNSHO there should be no computers in early school, and anyone not seeing the importance and simple sense of that can kiss my arse.
I was never taught the multiplication tables , by school or parent. It disabled my math skills immensely. Children just don’t discover things. Like the wheel or fire. You have to be taught. Just like manners they don’t come by instinct.The left have turned our schools into centres for ideological propaganda, where making out education trumps writing. Socialization reading. Its now not only propaganda pits but institutions devoted to anti-reason or logic in favour of intuition & feelings. These are now cages where children are the guinea pigs of the social engineers.
Another example of unsettled science.
One current leftist buzzword is “evidence-based”, but they’ve been running their “progressive education” scam for several decades now on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.
My grandson just graduated grade 12 unable to do addition or multiplication without a calculator. I weep for him and his classmates.
54 years ago I worked as a barman in an English pub. Prices were in Pounds, shillings and pence and some bottled beers were priced to a half penny. You poured a round of drinks and added the total in your head. You entered the total amount in the till and made change yourself.
Marcopohlo, there is domain-specific value in learning and rehearsing fundamental math operations to the point they become unconscious operations. This enables higher-level functionality and creativity at more difficult levels of math. And given that mathematical thinking is fundamental to so many areas of thinking, there is more general benefit. As a math major (honours), I did countless epsilon-delta proofs of differentiation and integration, countless inductive proofs, countless constructivist/intuitionist proofs, countless computability proofs, and countless other math proofs. Having developed through varied repetition, for example, an innate intuition and feel for the notion of “proves too much” has been invaluable in crafting legal argument. You can’t teach this skill to articling students who haven’t taken math, philosophy of logic or some other logically rigorous apprenticeship.