OT Can people not do mental arithmetic or use a calculator any more?

[hgt]

More likely with both that teachers are just as illiterate and innumerate as everyone else.

[Tim Lamb]

A slide rule is *using* log tables:-)

[Peter Able]

I was a teacher in the 70s. In my first year I well remember a significantly more experienced colleague asking me "What is pi?" I reeled off the first seven or eight digits, only to be interrupted by "NO! What IS pi". A physics teacher IIRC.

I wonder if things have improved since...;-}

PA

[Joe]

A minor side point is that nowadays logarithms have to be taught by themselves, without obvious application.

If you have electricity or working/charged batteries... if not, it's the slide rule for quick'n'dirty, four-figure logs for better than engineering accuracy, with long multiplication and division for best accuracy.

[Andy Burns]

The tesco ones all seem to be £99

[hgt]

While I was never a school teacher, a number of my mates were school teachers in the 70s and that doesn't surprise me.

Another of my mates is a school teacher today and he is no worse and does ask me that sort of question still.

In fact, come to think of it, in the 60s, it was those that didn't qualify for scholarships for university who ended up as school teachers because the education system would pay their uni fees with the requirement that they had to work as school teachers for a specified time after graduating, so they were in fact mostly rather less literate and numerate than the general university graduates

[SH]

How I wish I could calculate pi

3.141592

easy peasy!

[Tim Streater]

People aren't taught their tables any more, are they.

And why would we do that?

[Tim Streater]

A not unreasonable question. What answer did you give?

[Tim Streater]

They demonstrate that powers don't have to be integers. 2 power 2 is 4, 2 power 3 is 8, etc. But you can also ask what 2 power 3.11 is.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, politicians, who made it not only acceptable, but admirable

[alan_m]

Shouldn't the teaching profession be doing the same?

[Tim Streater]

It helps if the parents take an active interest without overdoing it.

[S Viemeister]

We took an active interest with our (incredibly brilliant!) children. We made learning a game, and they enjoyed it. So did we.

[Tim Lamb]

In message [e-mail]>, Tim Streater [e-mail] writes

My maths teacher said it was the number you get by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. I swear he wore the same pin stripe demob suit for the 6 years I was at the school!

Taught us a lot more about building working model steam locomotives and sailing boats than maths..

>

[Owain Lastname]

You probably learned quite a lot of maths too, without realising it.

Owain

[Tim Lamb]

Hmm. I was bottom end of the B stream and really needed the basics to be hammered home.

We were doing *O* level problem solving because that was what interested him. I think the upside was learning the value of mathematics in almost all life activities.

Found here recently! At age 13 I knew that the maximum speed achieved by a racing yacht is related to 1.6x the waterline length:-)

[Peter Able]

Yes, that was my second reply to the flustered Mr. Jones.

In later years I did talk to my students about pi and used the Monte Carlo method on the recently-acquired desktop computer to get them to learn a bit about computers, programming in BASIC, iterative calculation

- even a bit about graphic presentation (Hercules video!) etc. They did the programming. My program - in assembler - wowed them with its speed.

When I did things like this it got right up the nose of the Head of Maths.

PA

[Peter Able]

See my post, below

PA

[Peter Able]

See my post below.

PA