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Estonian Schools To Teach Computer-Based Math
First time accepted submitter Ben Rooney writes "Children in the Baltic state of Estonia will learn statistics based less on computation and doing math by hand and more on framing and interpreting problems, and thinking about validation and strategy. From the article: 'Jon McLoone is Content Director for computerbasedmath.org, a project to redefine school math education assuming the use of computers. The company announced a deal Monday with the Estonian Education ministry to trial a self-contained statistics program replacing the more traditional curriculum. “We are re-thinking computer education with the assumption that computers are the tools for computation,” said Mr. McLoone. “Schools are still focused on teaching hand calculating. Computation used to be the bottleneck. The hard part was solving the equations, so that was the skill you had to teach. These days that is the bit that computers can do. What computers can’t do is set up the problem, interpret the problem, think about validation and strategy. That is what we should be teaching and spending less time teaching children to be poor computers rather than good mathematicians.”'"
That is what we should be teaching and spending less time teaching children to be poor computers rather than good mathematicians.
We should be doing both. They are not mutually exclusive and they are both important.
How sad it would be to ask someone how much two plus two is and they tell you I don't have my computer. I don't know.
Why are we still using TI-84's to do our calculations? We should be teaching kids how to represent it as something that Matlab, Numpy, or R could solve.
It is about time that schools embraced calculators and computers when it comes to math. When it comes to having a competitive edge and actually DOING something with math, the question isn't if you can do 123123.12 x 213123 / 23423.28 in your head, it is about learning to apply mathematical principles in the real world. You quite simply cannot get a job simply because you are good at doing addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. 100 years ago before the advent of the computer that might be true. Today though? Everyone has a calculator on them nearly all the time. The question is not if you can accurately calculate how much that $7.99 shirt is going to be if it is taxed at 7%, but how to plug in the numbers for that. The question isn't manually computing how to do a PageRank algorithm, but understanding the logic behind that (and improving it!).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Another article on how other countries are doing something different (i.e. "better") than us!
There is nothing more to say.
Especially since it's sepcifically statistics that's involved in the push.
Back in the last half of the 1960s hand calculators were just becoming available and affordable. There was a bunch of pressure to ban them and maintain the old curricula, with hand computation everywhere.
The big mover to calculators was the statistics department. That's because the arithmetic involved in statistics calculations is long and tedius. Assignments could only be toys. Computing a chi-square test using pencils and paper was a group term project. So the students had to eat a semester of theory and have hands-on experience of doing the work ONCE.
With hand calculators a chi-square on a reasonably-sized dataset could be done for a daily assignment. The students could move on from crunching and actually SEE the tools work, getting a "feel" for the processes. That, in turn, meant they could learn MORE tools in the same time.
With computers the computation can be faster than the delay can be perceived, so students can apply another factor-of-many multiplier to how much of the subject they can cover and how well they can comprehend it.
There are some subjects where the number of computations small enough that manual arithmetic is occasionally useful at a professional level, complex enough that understanding all the steps to set it up is important, and powerful enough that a small number of complex computations does something important - rather than bogging you down in an impossibly large number of simple, repetitive, and error-prone steps. Statistics is NOT one of these subjects.
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you insensitive clod!
I mean really - back when I took Maths 'O' levels you weren't allowed calculators in the exam room. I'd do the maths and then check my answer on the slipstick. Slide rules aren't great for accuracy, but ok for quick checks.
BTW I haven't used it for years.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
In addition, learn kids not to use and learn only a single OS or particular programming language. Use them all, get to know them, learn their pros and cons.
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I think after establishing a base of being able to do simple arithmetic with adequate competency, there is diminishing returns in making people better human calculators. It's not that I don;t think this is a useful skill, but rather that I feel the lost opportunity cost from not teaching them more useful things like how to think about problem solving is not a good tradeoff.
We make kids do the same kinds of math problems over and over again. I can barely remember how to do long division nowadays (although I could probably figure it out fairly quickly). Is the reason I can figure it out based on the fact that I was forced to do it over and over again as a kids? Not really. I can figure it out because I know what it is that long division was meant to achieve. I can apply what I learned alter on to rederive long division, although memory can speed this up a a little bit.
Knowing how to think is more versatile than memory. Knowing how to think allows you to do more than just long division. In the same way that we wouldn't dream of making kids use books of logarithms in light of how much better using a calculator is, why not let them use calculators for basic arithmetic, once they've mastered it (and by mastered I don't mean do lightning fast, but just reliably). All the time saved by using calculators means that we can teach them how to do new things sooner.
In my experience, this is the case for everything, from primary school through to university. Memorisation is the way that stuff is taught throughout education, which makes sense - it's easy, makes marking and standardised testing easier, and it makes people seem competent. It also ignores the fact that learning the concepts and being able to apply them is so much more important.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Headline says math[s]. Summary says statistics.
They aren't the same thing.
Let's hope it's Ben Rooney's last submission too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have to admit my bias for the former, but teaching rote calculation in one's head has some value, if only as mental calisthenics. That said, I applaud the Estonian school system for getting more reality based, unlike so many school systems here in the USA.
Full disclosure: I'm half Estonian, do some math in my head, and I still write in cursive, occasionally. Keeps the kids from understanding it. :)
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The article talks about teaching STATISTICS. Yes, children and adults too, need to learn about how to interpret statistics and methodologies for collecting and analyzing data. This is s good thing and doing it by hand is often a stupidly tedious task. When it comes to learning arithmetic by rote, it's not a bad idea. Rote learning is often misunderstood, it does not mean mindless learning, it means that you become familiar enough with the material so that you have a good understanding of the underlying principles. I teach HS physics, the students are allowed to use a formula sheet on tests as I believe memorizing formulas is not the best use of brain cells, but guess what, the students that do the best seem to have them in their head because when approaching a problem they are able to call on a knowledge base in order to narrow the possible solutions without wasting hours looking up formulas and seeing if it fits. Ya its neat that you have a computer near you at all times, but I'll still rely on the guy with experience and knowledge to save my life during a plane crash, rather than the lame dude looking up the stall speed in the manual.
After all, it's e-Stonia we're talking about!
So we're back to the old calculator debate, but in new clothes. When I was at school the argument was all about whether to use calculators or not. For most of my school career, I survived without recourse to a calculator. I had a calculator, but I never used it, because the course materials were always designed in such a way that we didn't need one. We didn't need to "calculate" the final answer, we just reduced equations, and that led us to exactly what the quote in the summary calls for: mathematicians, not calculators. OK, so statistics has a lot more number crunching in it, but that's already stuff we switch to the scientific calculator for after the first month or so: factorials, n-P-r, n-Choose-r etc.
I am very dubious about how you can abstract any further without losing a fundamental and important understanding of what the maths actually is, and how can you decide which mathematical tool to employ if you don't fully understand what the tool does?
Furthermore, going back to winning argument in the 1980s/90s calculator debate, it's really only this manual stage that develops our skills of approximation, and when working with a computer, we need to be able to look at a result and guesstimate whether it's in the right ball-park or clearly way off the mark.
(Incidentally, I took CS at university and we did lots of geometry and algebra, and we didn't need graphics calculators -- in fact, we were actively discouraged from using them, partly because it would have been onerous on the exam invigilators to have to go round and physically reset everyone's calculator by hand to clear the memory before the start of an exam. If I remember rightly, the rules literally banned them outright, but individual invigilators often let them in and forced the reset themselves.)
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P.S. Why can't computer math be taught as well as teaching kids how to do math on their own?
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