They give me a headeache. My grandpa from Italy liked them. Fatty and Skinny, they're nice. That was his comment.
This post was edited by WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH at November 22, 2019 11:16 AM MST
Yeah...that 'old math' really sucked. I had to memorize stuff. No calculators. We had to figure things out the hard way. BUT, I can tell a store clerk how much I owe before I get to checkout. Kids nowadays don't even know what a square root is. I had a student who once asked me what time it was. I told her to look at the clock. (Hands) She said she didn't know how to read it. 15 years old. Shame.
Square roots are those things under and an ice cube plant that help it such up water. At least you didn't have to use an abacus.
This post was edited by Shuhak at November 22, 2019 5:37 PM MST
Errr, I do know you know there is no such thing as "old maths" - though there may have been old ways of teaching it, for better or worse!
Most of the arithmetic and mathematics used daily in all manner of trades and professions was established centuries ago, some right back in Classical Greek and Arabic times.
Even those supposedly-modern but obscure beasts, Matrices, which have crept into the UK schools maths syllabi, were developed in the 19C by among others Prof. Charles Dodgson (he who wrote the two Alice novels under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll), but their principles were devised far back in antiquity. They are used in certain scientific calculations at very high level, not for ordinary arithmetic. The Venn Diagram too, though not a numerical tool, is also a Victorian invention.
Those children who do not know what a square-root is or how to read a clock should either be ashamed, or genuinely can't help it because their schools or the syllabus-designers are failing them.
Until Wikipedia froze it, I contributed to its Answers site. The Maths section was full of what appeared to be American children's homework pleas to solve simple Imperial & metric measures conversions. Bizarrely, the site suffered from a little clique of contributors who delighted in baffling the youngsters with a morass of needless sums couched in terms used totally incorrectly! Typically the question might be "How many kilometers [sic!] equal 40 miles?". These bozos would quote umpteen irrelevant middle-conversions like inches to cms, invoke "algebra" without using it, and "dimensional analysis" which it clearly is not - and then sometimes gave the wrong answer!
(For that example, the conversion factor close enough for most real journeys of modest distances is 8/5, so 40miles X 8/5 gives 64kilometres - I chose 40 as giving easy mental arithmetic! More accurately, it is 64.4km.) ===
I recall a few years ago, a scientist despairingly told me of work-experience students unable to grasp the decibel which was her company's stock-in-trade measurement scale , because they had never been taught anything about Logarithms. (The decibel is not a linear unit like the metre or Volt, but a multiple of the logarithm of a ratio; and is used for measuring not only sound but also vibrations and electrical signals.)
Even worse perhaps was one who confessed being unable to solve what she thought would be a fairly easy problem in their real-world work, because, he said, he had not been taught Trigonometry! Ye Gods!
++++
I once took one of my young nephews to task for reckoning you don't need know much maths because you can use a calculator. No-one had taught that you might own a calculator - but you can't use it unless you know the maths!
===
Some years back I struggled with an awkward calculation pertaining to something in one of my hobbies. It might have had an irregular root or something, but anyway was too hard for me by ordinary mechanical arithmetic. Could I find it? Not at all! Cursing, I searched for my slide-rule. Could not find that either. I had to use log tables, after a bit of revision of the technique.
Next day I bought a new scientific calculator, surprised to find that like portable telephones they had had been slimmed down over the years but then expanded into hefty, bulky things again.
Three weeks later, looking for something else, I opened a drawer and there was the AWOL calculator, where I knew I could not possibly have put it, could I now.
/////
Hmmm. Schools now grandiosely call even simple arithmetic, "mathematics", but I wonder how advanced they are at primary level now. Many young people now are dangerously naïve about money because they have not been taught it fully enough to see through the allure of the credit-card, "buy"-now-pay-later, etc. I think I can just remember from that age, or can at least derive, how to perform Compound Arithmetic to find prices of a quantity of a commodity sold at so-many £.s.d. a ton (pre-decimal money and Imperial weights).
Shuhak 