Why I don't agree with calculators replacing long-hand

[Strazdas]

I don't blame schools. Calculators are mighty handy and with most celphones having one integrated, well, it is easy to see why people don't do math in the head. We should still be able to do it though. What we should give people is the "dirty" trick to solve problems. LIke that 459*15 that is up there, instead of doing the hassel that is the whole opperation, add a zero to the second number to have 4590, then divide by two (which is easy to do) to get 2295 and add these two numbers to get 6885, which I thinik it is the right answer in less than a minute (checked it, it is right). A trick, multiplyin by 15 is the same as multiplying by 5 and 10 and adding the result, so we do the ten (which is trivial, just add a zero to the number) and with that the product times five is very easy as it is half of the given number, so you can get both factors with easy calculations and just add them. We don't need to only make them do it the long way, that way is obsolete now, it is important to show the tricks to doing that in their heads quickly, especially to give people the notion of around what number should the answer be, a better numerical sense. Percetnages are easy with tricks aside from the standard wat. We don't need to drill long hand, that isn't feasible nowdays, we need to show good tricks to poeple so they can do it faster without reaching for a calculator.

very much this. i dont blame schools i blame stupid teachers. i always do the calculation like you describe in my hand ever since junior school, and teachers would always get furious for me "not writing the calculation down" because i would do it in my head.

actually i still get angry looks from my university professors when they present a ridiculously easy thing and tell us to "Calcualte" and then i proceede to claim its easy stand up and tell them the correct answer. i mean how card can it be to find 2/3 of 300.000, seriuosly!
anyone would instantly see its 200.000, but not the professors apparently.

 

[Auron225]

While we are at it, we should get rid of cars. I feel peoples legs aren't being tested enough, we should go back to walking. Let us also remove all written records, memory isn't what it used to be. Also, please immediately remove your computer, it is making you weak.
Soon you can discard all technology and rely solely on your 'superior' natural instincts.

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You win the thread

OT: You stood there for 20 minutes and waited? And you're not exaggerating? How long was the queue behind you that this person needed 20 minutes to work that out? And why didn't you just do it for him/her?

After 1 minute I'd have done it myself and the person in question would probably have been very grateful for the assistance.
In 20 minutes I could have tutored the person somewhat so it doesn't happen quite as often in the future.
What I wouldn't have done was stood there and watched them sweat.

 

[Chemical Alia]

However, I do write everything freehand in cursive, in the hopes of someday trolling some kid who never learned it. Apparently they don't teach that anymore.

True. I was at a language school in Morocco totally rocking my taught-before-non-cursive cursive handwriting in front of all the Americans. My unintelligible scrawl was genuinely deemed "Beautiful".

Seems like the only good-looking cursive is contrived cursive. Mine just gets worse and worse. It looks like a Doctor and an Engineer had a baby, and that baby was my wrist.

Oh, same here. I have the handwriting of a thousand madmen who grow madder with each passing day. Anyone who successfully reads what I write must feel a deep sense of accomplishment. But I do hate writing out sympathy cards for friends and coworkers, it always ends up looking like a serial killer left someone a warning.

 

[McMullen]

Its pretty simple. There are times I've gone to a store or restaurant and the cashier has an issue ringing up something or taking off a coupon. They spend 20 minutes or more trying to figure out how to subtract the coupon amount from the non-taxed total because:

A. They don't have a calculator handy
B. They don't know how to do subtraction or percentages

This is just stupid and I blame schools for allowing kids to use calculators in place of learning math on their own. Its not a guarantee you will have a calculator when you really need one and knowing simple math is extremely handy. Sure there are folk who just aren't good at numbers, and need calculators but still I don't think they should be working in a position where they potentially need to use math without assistance.

Do you agree or disagree and why

There are other reasons to use calculators; math is more than just arithmetic, and much time has been wasted by continuing to emphasize manual computation in pre-calc and up.

As an example, I invite you to calculate the semivariance of monthly global average temperature over the past ten years using all possible whole-month lags by hand, and then come back and say whether your time was well spent. It's not hard; you just do a series of simple arithmetic operations on all pairs of data points separated by a certain distance. Then you do it again for all pairs separated by the next larger distance, and so on until there are no pairs separated by a greater distance than the one you just used. If you're diligent, keep good records, and can stay focused, I think you should be able to get it done in one working day.

My students, in order to move on with their assignments in an efficient manner, should generally be able to do this in about, oh, ten to thirty minutes, depending on how they go about it. Lots to cover, you know.

Now this is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point: arithmetic is great and all for daily life, but it is not the point of math. And no, not all people are equally good at it. I got As in both calculus classes I took, but will still take a while to mentally compute 67-18, even though we had daily drills in first grade in which we filled (or in my case, tried to fill) a sheet of about 40 arithmetic questions in a minute.

I don't think removing calculators will solve any problems. In fact, I would wager that this would be a nearly guaranteed way to make math education even less effective than it is now. I was a D and F student in math classes that emphasized manual computation. I barely got Cs in my junior college math classes, both of which I had to drop and re-attempt first. Then I got into a field where I used math, but not in the way it was taught; here, math was a means, not an end, and the computation was done by computer. I was thinking about it in conceptual terms, dealing with vector algebra in three dimensions every day, but never actually calculating anything myself. I just had to know how to build an equation that would do what I wanted. After a couple years of this I took calculus and aced it, started programming, and now teach a statistics lab at my university. This all happened once the point of math stopped being the calculation of specific values; once it stopped being about what the equation produced and started being about what it does. I stayed up till 2 last night doing math because I was having fun, and in that time I only calculated one product by hand to check what I was doing. The computer, on the other hand, performed several billion calculations, and as a result I was able to generate a set of maps showing the data I was trying to display.

This makes me wonder how many other people could have loved math, but never did because they were taught it in a way that only emphasized manual computation. I imagine that nearly everyone who hates math could probably have been taught to value it, if the emphasis had been different. I think it would improve things to see a little more of this (and there are efforts to introduce alternative teaching methods which emphasize the approach I used above, which have so far been meeting with success), and a lot less emphasis on manual computation, at least after first grade.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Its pretty simple. There are times I've gone to a store or restaurant and the cashier has an issue ringing up something or taking off a coupon. They spend 20 minutes or more trying to figure out how to subtract the coupon amount from the non-taxed total because:

A. They don't have a calculator handy
B. They don't know how to do subtraction or percentages

This is just stupid and I blame schools for allowing kids to use calculators in place of learning math on their own. Its not a guarantee you will have a calculator when you really need one and knowing simple math is extremely handy. Sure there are folk who just aren't good at numbers, and need calculators but still I don't think they should be working in a position where they potentially need to use math without assistance.

Do you agree or disagree and why

As a cashier that can't do any form of math in my head (can't even do percentages with out first writing down the formula) generally the cash register does all the work. I literally could be replaced with a uscan machine if costumers actually liked using them.

though I agree with you that Calculators are the problem. I wasn't terribly great at math to begin with, and calculators greatly exasperated the problem.

 

[SpAc3man]

As a Computer Engineering student I don't really have time to solve things by hand if my calculator does it for me. It helps prevent small errors that I might make in a larger mathematical problem. If I'm working out something while out and about I would bust out my phone and use the calculator on that.

Then again to get accepted into an engineering degree you have to be a maths boss to start with..