When will people need to do basic algebra in their head? The difficulty between 13+24 and 169+ 742 rises dramatically. Yeah it makes your life convenient if you can add simple numbers, but is it necessary when everyone has a calculator?
That’s just what we tell kids so they’ll learn to do basic math on their own. Otherwise you’ll end up with people who can’t even do 13+24 without having to use a calculator.
Arthur_Leywin@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Atomic@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Like someone said. It’s not just about knowing what something is, but having the ability to recognize what something isn’t.
The ability to look at a result and be skeptical if it doesn’t look reasonable.
169+742. Just by looking I can tell it has to be pretty close to 900 because 160+740 is 900. That gives me a good estimate to go by. So when I arrive at 911. I can look at it and say. Yeah. That’s probably correct, it looks reasonable.
Friendliestfire@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes.
Riyosha_Namae@reddthat.com 10 months ago
How so?
Mtrad@lemm.ee 10 months ago
That sounds like ot could be a focused lesson. Why try to skirt around what the desired goal is?
That also could be placed into detecting if something is wrong with AI too. Teach people things to just help spot these errors.
In my experience, it’s so much more effective to learn how to find the answers and spot the issues than to memorize how to do everything. There’s too much now to know it all yourself.
Grabthar@lemmy.world 10 months ago
37? In a row?
overzeetop@lemmy.world 10 months ago
More importantly, you end up with people who don’t recognize that 13+24=87 is incorrect. Math->calculator is not about knowing the math, per se, but knowing enough to recognize when it’s wrong.
I don’t envy professors/teachers who are hacing to figure out novel ways of determining the level of mastery of a class of 30, 40, or 100 students in the era of online assistance. Because, really, we still need people who can turn out top level, accurate, well researched documentation. If we lose them, who will we train the next gen LLM on? ;-)
InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I had a telecom teacher who would either allow you to use a calculator, but you had to get everything right.
Or go without and you could get away with rougher estimates.
Doing stuff like decibels by hand isn’t too bad if you can get away with a ballpark and it’s a much more useful skill to develop than just punching numbers in a calculator.