Michael Scoles said: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI
And the responses have been predictable. Time for a contrary opinion. True, what Ms McDermott complains about does have some merit. The math textbooks she describes, particularly the one which spends its time on geography (!), seem rather uninspired and irrelevant in content. But is she right to claim that it's a crime against education to fail to teach the standard algorithms for multiplication and division we all learned and loved when we were in school? And is Ms McDermott right that not teaching them leads to calamity in calculus and are TIPSters right that it leads to disaster in statistics? Maybe not. Back when we were in school, tiny and cheap calculators were science fiction. We _needed_ those algorithms. We don't any longer, now that we have those really neat calculators. Tell the truth, how long has it been since you actually carried out a long division with pencil and paper? It might be useful to continue to teach the algorithms if they gave insight into the nature of mathematics, but they don't. They're just a set of instructions to be followed by rote. So it seems unlikely that the cause of student difficulties in college math can be blamed on not knowing how to do traditional long multiplication and division. The authors of these textbooks seem to recognize this, although why they think the lattice method is an improvement is beyond me. The cluster method is better, because it may help students understand how numbers work. And as Chris says, it's useful when you have to do it in your head. So not everything in those books is outrageously misguided. But they don't go far enough. If I ran the schools, I'd first ensure that students had really good facility with their calculators, so they have a fast and reliable way of getting the right answers. Then, with the time saved from not having to teach obsolete algorithms, I'd spend more time on teaching the underlying concepts of math and on more advanced topics. Sometimes we cling to old technology longer than we should because it's familiar and it served us so well. I'd guess there was the same debate when we first decided to give up counting on our fingers in favour of making marks on papyrus. But I think it turned out to be a pretty good decision in the end. Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 0C8 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
