My own ungrounded math-education rant: who cares about the long division algorithm? Drop it, along with the square root algorithm (which they used to teach in schools -- it's in old textbooks). Stop wasting time on arithmetic, use a damn calculator.
What everyone needs to be able to do in their head, fluently, is to estimate to one significant figure, or just to order of magnitude. That the arithmetic that people fail on, in practice, over and over.
I don't understand our high-school emphasis on trigonometry, either. It's fun, but it's not terribly useful, and it's not really a calculus prequisite for that matter. I'd rip it out and teach some basic probability theory, and probability applications.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 07:38 am (UTC)What everyone needs to be able to do in their head, fluently, is to estimate to one significant figure, or just to order of magnitude. That the arithmetic that people fail on, in practice, over and over.
I don't understand our high-school emphasis on trigonometry, either. It's fun, but it's not terribly useful, and it's not really a calculus prequisite for that matter. I'd rip it out and teach some basic probability theory, and probability applications.