Peter Gold wrote:
If legible cursive writing was the sole measurement of ability, I'd
be in the same boat as many doctors - floating off to oblivion.
Me too - it takes me longer to read my shopping list than to get my
groceries... ;-)
However, I'd qualify Marcus' comment about using one's phone for
complex calculations. If you don't have the knowledge to derive a
statement of a need for calculating a solution by using observation,
experience, and analytic thinking, and lack the knowledge to present
the problem statement to the calculating device, then, unless the
device itself has the intelligence to do it for you, and is willing
to do it (think "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that") it's whether it's
the original calculus (stones used as counters), abaci, or iPhones,
it's useless.
Yes, I agree with that, and I suspect that Dan may as well. (Dan, I hope
I don't misrepresent your opinion in this post - I mean "Dan"
metaphorically rather than personally.) The thing that's changing is
that the internet is providing those devices, so we're able to get
correct answers without really understanding what the question was.
Take a mortgage calculator - you can pick a mortgage product, plug in
the amount that you want to borrow and it will tell you what your
monthly payments would be. It knows that the product you chose attracts
an initiation fee and that for the amount that you wish to borrow, the
bank will give you the mortgage for 25 points less than the standard
interest rate. At a deeper level, it knows that the repayments are based
on the assumption that the fee will be paid out of the amount borrowed,
and numerous other details. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't
want to know those things - I want to know if I'm in the ballpark.
Dan might question the accuracy of the calculator and the inability to
cross-check it (especially if he was a Floridian voter... :-) and I
would agree with him. The average person will lose the ability to do
these calculations, but in order to create the calculator, someone will
always have to understand how to do them. The same applies for writing,
I suspect - most of us will be able to muddle along, but specialist
writers will always be required.
This does leave us with a gap in our knowledge - we have no choice but
to trust the calculator because we couldn't figure it out if we wanted
to. I'm less concerned due to a combination of factors - I don't really
care in the first place, I'm fairly certain that given the vagaries of
the bank's policy I wouldn't be able to figure it out anyway and
finally, I *want* the bank to tell me how much it will be. I can put
much more faith in an answer that they provided than one that I worked
out for myself.
My mother's criticism of the multiplication table matrix printed on
the back cover of my grade-school composition books was, "You'll
never learn to multiply by yourself, if you can just look it up!"
Multiplication is an interesting case of abstraction in itself.
Mathematicians (which I am *not*) regard multiplication to be shorthand
for addition, but we don't teach that to kids. The question 5x6 can also
be posed as 5+5+5+5+5+5, but the multiplication version is less verbose,
so we pretend that they're different operations in order to make it less
confusing. Well, that and the fact that the addition table matrix would
have required a substantially bigger back cover...
One of the sequences bore out the premise that even young kids can
figure a lot of this (learning to use the computers to write, look for
information and learning to use it) out for themselves, and help others
to do it.
It's hard to even imagine the next couple of generations of computer
users. I'll get out of computers before then - it'll hurt my brain way
too much trying to keep up with a grade 6 programming class...
Marcus
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