Re: INNUMERACY, was Re: Use of Calculators

[Doug Craigen <dcc@cyberspc.mb.ca>]

On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, Leigh Palmer wrote:

> I'm 61 years old. I can testify with certainty that numerical skills
> among grade school graduates have atrophied considerably since my own
> youth. When I protest students' reaching for calculators to reckon
> 10% of 215 they think I'm an old fuddy-duddy. I even saw the same
> attitude expressed by one of the contributors here yesterday.

Leigh,

I expect that this comment by B. Esser is what you are referring to:

> > discussion with someone.  I find it disheartening when, in such a        
> > discussion, a post-doc has to run for a calculator for aid in making     
> > simple numerical estimates.                                              
>                                                                            
> Some of us find it disheartening when a fossil continues to waste          
> processor capacity and memory space to do these types of calculations when 
> a little instruction could teach them how to use 20th century tools like   
> the calculator.                                                            

A fossil indeed.  If I was to pick out a "fossil", it wouldn't be the
person who could do calculations without the need for machine assistance.

I suppose I got through high school "just in time".  Only kids with
professionals for parents could afford calculators.  Perhaps there was
some social influence in my opinion, but they struck me as leading
to laziness.  I could always answer a question in math class faster than
anybody could punch buttons on their calculator, so it never bothered me
that some kids had them.  In fact, the kids who used them never knew when
they had a terribly incorrect answer due to mispunching a button.

It is this last point that I expect is at the root of what Jack was saying
above, for which he was called a "fossil".  In Physics we live and breath
math.  Many times daily I perform order of magnitude estimates.  In fact,
I do it without even realizing most of the time.  Its rather like
breathing... its just a part of living.  Without a good basic math sense,
we can not have a feeling about what the right answer should look like
when we set out to solve a problem.  In this case, if anything does go
wrong with using our calculator we are sunk - we don't even realize it.
Realizing when you have made a mistake is vitally important.  My years as
a TA were what convinced me there was a problem. Going around for hours
every week in tutorials and labs finding where students had messed up.
Many things that stood out instantly on their page, 13 * 5.67 = 0.326 or
17*23 = 40 being typical examples, were a complete mystery to these
students.  You could point it out, but on their own they would repunch
every calculation into their calculator to find the bad one.  Besides
that, if you watched them work, they would take all the time to
pick up the calculator and punch numbers in for even single digit
multiplication.  And here we aren't talking about an English major who is
working as a waitress for the summer, we are talking about aspiring
chemists, physicists and engineers.  I find it troubling.

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| Doug Craigen                                                 |
|                                                              |
| If you think Physics is no laughing matter, think again .... |
|    http://cyberspc.mb.ca/~dcc/phys/humor.html                |
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