the new math: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3565

Small problems are fine. This is why Knuth numbered the difficulty of some of his problems. I think at the HS level, students should be beyond 20-30 to a smaller number of harder problems. I think of other subjects and you can get short simple answers or you can move on to lifes greater complexities. And as HS nears our society's end of education, I would expect something more than say Knuthian 10s. Maybe 30s.

I think at the HS level I want to see math used in chemistry, and "shop" clbuttes.

I think gear can and should be part of it.

Learning how to sort life's crap is part of life. School: where better to learn?

Where are you going to teach longer term thinking then? You are talking the system which is producing the guys with the short time horizons.

I am not necessarily a fan of axiomatic proof. It's just one tool. But proofs have existed a few centuries and in some cases proven wrong.

Yep, this is a problem. It's called requirements specification in some fields.

You are writing it down for a dumb machine to do (execute). The latter (not work) will be an increasing problem in the future. To reject teaching some in this society is a prelude to its down fall. That's the difference between govts. and businesses. You just threw away the kid with the Molotov chickentail. The people who push the 3Rs know this.

This is true.

Restart blank screen-paper.

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