[Phys-L] Re: Calculators a Distraction?

[Bernard Cleyet <anngeorg@PACBELL.NET>]

I suspect what one learned well is what they require or at least
recommend to others, especially students.  Why I think this is I
excelled at Latin (four years) and find it very useful for German (as
below) not to mention English grammar.  OTOH, I was given a pocket
circular slide rule in the eighth grade and never learned, except the
most simple, division and multiplication.  (I was already retarded in
arithmetic.)  I did learn many powers of two  (Eccles-Jordan scalars)
and rough estimates of square roots for Poisson error.

bc, opposite of HH.

Hugh Haskell wrote:

> At 17:38 -0500 2/6/05, Herbert H Gottlieb wrote:
>
>
>
> > tell the elementary school teachers to  stop teaching long division.
> > After all .... we have already stopped teaching how to find the square
> > root of a mumber
> > with a pencil and paper ..... It's now time to stop teaching long
> > division.
>
> I'm not sure I agree with that. I had long since forgotten how to
> calculate square roots by hand before calculators to do it were
> available, and I found that I could fairly quickly get a reasonable
> estimate of square roots (as long as there weren't too many sig.
> figs.) by trial and error. But I still use long division when I don't
> happen to have a calculator handy (I don't carry one in my pocket all
> the time) and the numbers are such that I can't get an approximate
> answer in my head.
>
> Long division seems to me to be about as fundamental an operation as
> "long" multiplication, and I rather think that students still need to
> know it, even if they don't use it very much.
>
> On the other hand, I have never felt much loss over my the lack of
> instruction in basic Latin. That may well be "ignorance is bliss,"
> but I seem to be able to appreciate the Latin (and Greek) origins of
> many words without having studied either language. About the only
> time I really felt left out by not having had any Latin was when I
> was studying German, and I saw that the students who had studied
> Latin got hold of the declinations and case endings problems very
> quickly, and I floundered with them for three years and never did get
> it right.
>
> Hugh
> --
>
> Hugh Haskell
> <mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
> <mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>
>
> (919) 467-7610
>
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