Animal Farm

[infinite monkey]

Would you rather live on an Animal Farm, or in an Animal House?

Please submit a 500 word essay comparing and contrasting the two (50 pts)

[classicman]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

They were not about rote learning - that's what catholic school is for.

BS.

[HungLikeJesus]

What's wrong with rote learning? How else are you going to learn the multiplication tables?

[glatt]

Originally Posted by HungLikeJesus

What's wrong with rote learning? How else are you going to learn the multiplication tables?

http://www.rocknlearn.com/html/multiplication_rap.htm

[infinite monkey]

Here's how you learn the Nines tables:

1) Piss off Sister Francis
2) I mean really piss her off
3) Write the nines tables on the blackboard a couple dozen times
4) You'll never forget them

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by HungLikeJesus

What's wrong with rote learning? How else are you going to learn the multiplication tables?

Learn multiplication tables. No, you learn how to multiply, then you use a slide rule.

[infinite monkey]

Do they learn to use slide rules anymore?

I was talking to a cow orker today, he has a final in his Stats class. I talked about how I hated Prob and Stats in college. He said they do a lot of it in Excel. As far as I know Excel wasn't even invented when I took probability and statistics. Weird world.

[Happy Monkey]

No, they don't. I had an el cheapo plastic slide rule, but only as a novelty, and never used it in school.

[Aliantha]

I don't even know what a slide rule is.

[Happy Monkey]

Here's one!

[HungLikeJesus]

Last year I found a slide rule, in really good condition, at an antique store in New Orleans. I've learned a lot from it.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

Do they learn to use slide rules anymore?

I learned in about 1975. One had to be leery of those newfangled calculators.

[infinite monkey]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

I learned in about 1975. One had to be leery of those newfangled calculators.

Mr G made us learn it. I just went on a search through my desk drawers (desk I've had my whole life) thinking it was in there but I didn't see it. There's still a bunch of my HS stuff in it though.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

My kids' elementary school's stated goal was to teach the kids how to learn and think. They were not about rote learning - that's what catholic school is for.

...Says the man whose children have never been to Catholic school.

[monster]

Originally Posted by HungLikeJesus

What's wrong with rote learning? How else are you going to learn the multiplication tables?

By not putting them in tables for a start. Lets call them multiplication "facts" because I'm too tired to come up with a better word. They are learned by multiplying numbers together in as many settings as possible. By discussing observed patterns such as always ending up with a number ending with 0 or 5 when multiplying by 5.

Multiplication facts are not learned by rote in my kids' school. Sure, some of the kids are older than those in some regular schools when they can finally answer every single one at the snap of a finger, but they sure as heck understand it, can picture it in their heads and they have it down by the time they are ready to move on to complex problems where it helps to have them all memorized.

If -and only if- you reach the end of 4th grade (ish) and don't know them all pretty readily, will you then be required to actually make a concerted effort to learn them. But still that is done in a fun useful way. This is one of my volunteer jobs -helping those kids. And I do it by identifying which ones they are having problems with and trying to work out why. Then I create games based on those problems. Like car races with Hotwheels cars and special dice that you must multiply together to move that many spaces -where you can take as many turns as you want so the faster you get the answer, the faster you go. And a rip off of Set.

It works, and these kid have no hatred of math, no concept that there is a general conception that math is hard and boring. that is a self-fulfilling prophecy and it need to be buried. Learning multiplication tables by rote is what turns kids off from math. that and their parents passing on their hatred of doing math in school. Because it's boring.......

Even in the most traditional schools, you don't learn to spell every word from a weekly spelling list. You pick most of them up through reading and writing and actually using them. The lists are/should be saved for the harder words. Imagine how hard/dull English would be if you spent most of your early years staring at lists of words rather than reading/being read to. If you were expected to know all the words before you got to put them together in any interesting way. We don't do it with language, why do it with math?

/passionate mathnerd with an agenda and a bee in her bonnet