Academic priorities 325

K Williams

^^^^^

Such as homonyms? The word is "rote"

In a word, bullpoo. You can teach the process of finding roots of polynomials and maxima-minima to a reasonably intelligent 6th grader using a graphing calculator. The same student could also easily be taught the processes of numeric integration and differentiation. I'm not suggesting that this is the the best possible curriculum, merely that your belief is absurd.

Yes, damn kids under 40 don't know how to use a slide rule or log and trig tables. How are they going to do anything significant? I am all for learning skills, but they are not the be-all and end-all of mathematics. Many students have never been exposed to wonderful fields of mathematics because they are bored to rest by the mechanical way that much of it is taught. I require my Calculus students to show their work for all problems, but I also show them how to check their answers using the graphing calculators. They know the process AND how to let the machine do it. If any of them were working an actual, real-world problem I would full expect them to use the calculator. I would trust them to get the correct answer over someone doing it long hand.

And no programmer should ever write code that would allow a buffer overflow exploit. People do not always look for mistakes and have this silly expectation that things will work. How many people who use spreadsheets understand binary decimal numbers and the non-intuitive lack of precision that go with them? That has been the cause of many, many errors but I don't think the accountants or even scientists will be giving up Excel any time soon even if they would be better served by a Radix representation rather than IEEE 754

This can be a problem, I think think it is far from the disaster you make it out to be and as a mathematics instructor on both the secondary and collegiate levels I probably see a bit more of it than you.

Now you are making my point for me. Logic is one of the areas of mathematics which is usually not covered due to the large amount of memorization that is expected. I began programming at age 11 (my mother was in a computer science program at a local university). I'd had no formal exposure to logic or algebra but was able to have a pretty good time with BASIC and ForTran and sending the programs in by hand-punched cards taught me to check my logic and syntax carefully. I guess you'd say that these kids learning to program who can compile and get their errors with less than 24 hour turn around couldn't possibly learn programming as well as I did since they're depending on the tools rather than working it out for themselves.

Bill