07-27-2009, 02:38 AM
As the son of a 30 year math teacher, and as someone whose hobbies often require math, I often wonder about modern teaching...
Give the students both the formula, and a calculator, and what are they actually learning? They can't remember the formula, and they can't do the math to solve it without a calculator...
If I'm in my shop, and I need to calculate (for example) the cutting speed for a particular tool on a particular material, unless I want to waste a lot of time, I need to be able to recall both the formula (4 * C)/D, if not the different values of "C"... though it's easy enough to remember a few "ball park" values for common materials I might machine.
And most of the time, I can do the math in my head...
There are lots of formula's in the shop that I wouldn't reasonably expect someone to know... but then again, not expecting someone to know ANY of them, nor be able to do the math for SOME of them mentally, is.. well.. borders on the ridiculous!
I know that math class is not a work environment...
But to not prepare students to do ANY remembering of formula's or ANY manual calculation... Madness (OK... maybe that's excessive).
And I say all this as someone who is pretty awful at mental math!
Give the students both the formula, and a calculator, and what are they actually learning? They can't remember the formula, and they can't do the math to solve it without a calculator...
If I'm in my shop, and I need to calculate (for example) the cutting speed for a particular tool on a particular material, unless I want to waste a lot of time, I need to be able to recall both the formula (4 * C)/D, if not the different values of "C"... though it's easy enough to remember a few "ball park" values for common materials I might machine.
And most of the time, I can do the math in my head...
There are lots of formula's in the shop that I wouldn't reasonably expect someone to know... but then again, not expecting someone to know ANY of them, nor be able to do the math for SOME of them mentally, is.. well.. borders on the ridiculous!
I know that math class is not a work environment...
But to not prepare students to do ANY remembering of formula's or ANY manual calculation... Madness (OK... maybe that's excessive).
And I say all this as someone who is pretty awful at mental math!