Tools We Need In Life

Post date: Nov 12, 2009 8:18:23 AM

Schools today are not teaching the basics that I learn. I am seeing many young people graduating from the schools who are not really ready to compete in today's world. This will only lead to the decline of our nation. I am a very big advocate of technology. But I do draw the line when people depend on technology to the point of disregarding learning the basic skills on how to cope without the use of that technology.

Here is some examples,

• I went to the Mississippi coast after hurricane Katrina. I saw store owners who were swamped by customers, trying to handle their own sales because they could not depend on their cashiers. I asked one hardware owner why he had his cashiers working the floor instead of handling the sales, He told me that his computerized cash registers were down and were not able to instruct his cashiers what the change would be.

  • When I traveled up to Sault Ste Marie, MI, I saw a second grader show off his calculator that was given to him. I asked him who gave it to him, he told me that everyone in his grade was given one by the public school system. I believe that many young people are not learning their fractions like they should because they are taught on calculators and now many are only able to grasp the decimal system. I say calculators should be banned from Elementary and Middle schools and by the time the child reaches High school, he should have already mastered the means of working problems without a calculator Many don't even understand the concept what a fraction is.

  • Like one 20 year old man who argued with me that 1/4 was bigger than 1/3

  • And I saw another young man count the ticks on his tape measure to figure out that 3/8 was half of 3/4.

  • Reason I made the Tutorial titled How to mentally divide a fraction in half.

A lot of this is due to the fact that many school systems now subscribe to the ideal that teaching the multiplication table is not necessary because we now have calculators to do the work. So now they come up with new ways for students to stumble their way to the correct answer. Like a guessing algorithm for people who don't know their multiplication table. (They call it reasoning.)

This ideology has spread to other areas. In 1998 the Naval Acadamy stopped teaching a course (that has been taught since 1845) on celestial navigation and the use of the sextant. Because the GPS is more accurate, and makes navigation easier. Someone once told me of a story of a man who fashioned a crude sextant out a soda straw, pencil, and string and was able get the idea of which way to row. That knowledge was a tool that save his life. I am not knocking the GPS, but I hate to see knowledge kicked aside because it is "obsolete".

Lets use the metaphor of a person saying "I don't need a jack and a tire iron in my car because I have a cell phone to call for road service." But one day he is trying to get to safety from a on coming storm and he gets a flat. He goes to call for help and discovers he didn't have any bars or his cell phone was dead. Now he wasn't able to change his own tire and the storm hits and he dies. You would say that was foolish on his part to not carry a jack and a tire iron. So is not learning the basic tools we need, like the multiplication table.

Watch this video to see what I am talking about. Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

When we think of the Japanese today, we think of high tech. But here you can see in this video, that they haven't abandoned teaching their children the ways of working out their problems with only their mind. I am not saying we need to turn our children into human calculators, but lets not throw away the very basic tools neither. And don't let our future generation fall behind other countries, otherwise our country will only become a "has been".

I even seeing adults today who seem to exalt ignorance as something to be proud of. I recall a few years ago, I was talking to some people when a woman (in the presence of her 10 year boy) rebuked me for my use of "big words". I stopped, thought over what I had said and then asked her what big word I had used.

She tried to pronouce a word "Sta...... stam.... something"

Then it clicked. "Oh you mean stamina."

"Yeah, that's the word, no one else would know what that word would mean but you."

About that time someone walks in and I asked him if he knew what the word meant. He gives me a puzzled look and said

"um, endurance, ...... how long a person can hold out.... um, you didn't know that?"

She then stormed out "OK, only you two would know what it is."

The sad part of that story was how she was teaching her son that it was ok to have a limited vocabulary and it was something to be ashamed of if he was to learn too much.

Just because a person may know the definition of a lot of words, doesn't mean he is going to go around talking with a lot of archaic or "big words". You know,..... I could have really have used some big words on her. Then she would have been really been flummoxed*. :-P

Remember knowledge is tools. The more tools in our toolbox, the better off we are.

*Learned that word when I was child, while reading the Hobbit.