One thing that saddens me in education is the death of Long Division. I took a couple math-ed courses in college and I was shocked when I learned that most it's not being taught in most schools. It's "too hard" and it's "useless", some say, so it's being taken out of the curriculum.
Bullshit it's useless. Multiplication tables are memorized lookup tables. That's "rote" but important, but it's not when math starts to become interesting. Long multiplication and division are the first time people have to use an algorithm for a problem too difficult to do in any other way. And yes, it needs to be done by hand and if it takes a few months for the average student to get it right, fine. It's important. Not the actual skill of dividing 83914 by 203, but the process of carrying out a mechanical algorithm by hand.
Should computers be a part of education? Absolutely. Should programming be taught in school? Yes. Should we abandon the process of running algorithms by hand, as a mechanism for understanding rule-based computation at an early age? No.
Interesting fact: early computers (in the 1940s) were not competitive with human "computers"-- savants whose jobs were to do arithmetical calculations. They were actually slower. What made mechanical computers such a win was that they could keep going and remain reliable, whereas human computers would start making mistakes after 8 hours.
If you've gone through the humiliating process of trying to calculate a 6-by-6 determinant by hand and getting it wrong, you understand this, and you know why the rigor offered by mechanical computation is so important. If you haven't, it probably doesn't make sense to you.
Bullshit it's useless. Multiplication tables are memorized lookup tables. That's "rote" but important, but it's not when math starts to become interesting. Long multiplication and division are the first time people have to use an algorithm for a problem too difficult to do in any other way. And yes, it needs to be done by hand and if it takes a few months for the average student to get it right, fine. It's important. Not the actual skill of dividing 83914 by 203, but the process of carrying out a mechanical algorithm by hand.
Should computers be a part of education? Absolutely. Should programming be taught in school? Yes. Should we abandon the process of running algorithms by hand, as a mechanism for understanding rule-based computation at an early age? No.
Interesting fact: early computers (in the 1940s) were not competitive with human "computers"-- savants whose jobs were to do arithmetical calculations. They were actually slower. What made mechanical computers such a win was that they could keep going and remain reliable, whereas human computers would start making mistakes after 8 hours.
If you've gone through the humiliating process of trying to calculate a 6-by-6 determinant by hand and getting it wrong, you understand this, and you know why the rigor offered by mechanical computation is so important. If you haven't, it probably doesn't make sense to you.