Toujours;bt80025 said:
Dude a great calculator is ~100 dollars if not more. I've had a TI-83+ required for calculus for years, and that's on amazon for 94 bucks. >_o It's ridiculous. But I agree that a lot of math, while helpful as a thinking exercise pretty much, won't be relevant in the real world because you can look up/punch in whatever thing you need to know. There's no real-world situation where you can't just reach for a calculator.
Same with memorizing formulas and things like the periodic table in other classes. You will never be in a situation where you will have to have this memorized in work, even if you work as a chemist. D:<
What do most people need graphing calculators for?? o_O; I literally haven't touched mine since high school and I got my roommate's colour graphing calculator last year and haven't had a chance to use it. It's either so advanced you don't need any of the features on it or it's so basic it won't handle the graphing you need when you move on to more advanced courses. :P I will note it did me quite well in high school calculus and it is nice to check a graph real quick to know where your equation is headed but I haven't found one useful in a very long time, especially once I got access to Maple or MATLAB.
My $30 calculator is a Casio fx-991MS. It handles everything I throw at it and even this is too advanced to be allowed in any of my exams in university. (The approved calculators have no permanent memory and no helpful functions like solving equations.) It's also sooo much lighter than a TI-8* so it's just excellent for keeping in your purse or carrying with you everywhere. (This is the part where I find out I'm the only person who regularly carries a scientific calculator in her purse. :s)
Drakow;bt80027 said:
Oh yeah, I forgot the Americans and Canadians get to take hardcore scientific calculators into their exams, lmao.
Erica my dear, allow me to break it down for you. Why do you think schools get you to do similar problems over and over? Well, let me ask you this to get your mind rolling. Why do I practice the same punches and kicks each time I take a karate lesson? Why do I practice the same songs on the piano each time I go to play?
To develop muscle memory. Repetition builds this memory, even to the point where certain actions can become second nature. This applies to both physical muscles and 'mental' muscles. Yes you can argue that for most people, it's not needed to be able to do these exercises mentally or particularly quickly, but would it not be ideal to be able to do so? Wouldn't everyone want to be able to do these things quickly and (almost) effortlessly anyway?
We don't, haha. I was never allowed any calculator in my math exams and in my CS/Stats exams, when a calculator
is allowed, it has to be a pretty basic one. As I said above, nothing with permanent memory for variables or solving algorithms. I usually don't even need to use them, but we're allowed to have them if we need 'em which sort of pushes my "you will never need to have these things memorized" view.
I'm all for memorizing the basics. But I still think that many practise problems at this point is kind of overkill. o_O; They should be there if you feel you need them (and we need to start teaching people to actually
do extra work if they feel they aren't getting things) and anything required should be
challenging instead of just mindless application of the same thing. Because then you aren't really thinking, you're just following instructions. And I get that a lot of people need that to learn but... I dunno. It's always seemed kind of pointless to me.
For a lot of people, these things are really pointless. It's sometimes hard for me to get my head around the idea that some people don't want to do even addition or subtraction in their head because it's so much slower than using a calculator [for them] and, yes, they could fix that by just practising and doing it over and over until they're much faster but... why? It'd be like me learning the periodic table, to take Toujours's example. I might be able to recognize references a lot easier and all that but I'd never really use it (although this is a bad example because mental math is useful for pretty much everyone whereas the periodic table is kind of useless outside of the sciences :P). Honestly, I don't even use fractions much at all though. I don't think that people generally multiply fractions or need to deal with them that much so this much emphasis on them when calculators will work just fine seems overkill. I don't think they come up enough for people to
need to be efficient and mental-mathing them. And if they need paper to do the multiplication or division? Might as well just cut that out and use a calculator.
Lornami;bt80032 said:
That got storytelly. BUT ANYWAYS, what I'm saying it that I'm all for learning the basics. But actually learning it, not just memorizing 'how to calculate' by doing it again and again and again and again and again. I just hate that. I want to understand it, because when I understand it I can usually figure out what to do.
Yes yes yes! This is kind of the worst part about the North American school system, at least. There is just so much emphasis on memorizing formulas and algorithms and finite examples (like times tables, though I'm not really against this one since it is useful) that they never really teach the theory behind things. And it's not even like theory is that difficult at basic levels. I wish they showed more kinds of examples than just writing a question on the board and telling you how to solve it. I really like
Vihart's videos for this very reason because she explains some fairly complicated math with... doodles. And they
make sense. It's just another way for someone to visualize something and come to an understanding rather than just bombarding them with practise problems and hoping they figure out how it works from repetition. I'm a firm believer that anyone who knows
why something works will be able to figure out how it works on their own. And if you know the why and how, it's probably faster to just use a calculator for the calculation. Nothing wrong with that so long as you know what to punch in.