What are we teaching our young people? If my order at A&W is $4.25 and I give the server a ten and a quarter, why does he have to key in that amount and have to wait for the machine to tell him $6 change? As long as the machine does the thinking, he’s okay, but if the power goes out he is in trouble.
Why teach rote memorization like the multiplication tables in the elementary grades? Since young minds can absorb what almost seems like an infinite amount of trivia, this is the time for foundations.
In high school when it comes time to do tasks such as factoring trinomial expressions, you can run though several pairs of possibilities in your head (example: if two numbers multiply to 72, you narrow the possibilities to 36 x 2, 24 x 3, 18 x 4, 12 x 6, etc.) But if you have to use a calculator, the result is a problem that takes minutes instead of seconds. An exam with 30 questions, instead of 15 or 20 minutes, now can take well over an hour.
No wonder our students give up and drop further and further behind in higher math. All because some “genius” educators think making kids memorize multiplication tables is a waste of time and boring.
Teaching basic processes (adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing) is critical. Giving kids a calculator so they can get the answers with no thinking is robbing them of the skills they should be developing. We have to stop using our kids as guinea pigs for social engineering. Some experiments in “modern” teaching strategies have not always proven to be successful. When “whole language” was introduced, phonics all but disappeared from the curriculum. Spelling, grammar are also disappearing and handwriting (cursive) is no longer included in any curriculum.
When you add pharmaceutical medication (for ADD, ADHD, even dyslexia), but provide easy access to sugar drinks, when you eliminate unstructured play (like recess), why do we question what is happening in our schools?
Robert Bandurka
Humboldt, SK
