On Sep 17, 1:57*pm, spamtrap1888 > wrote:
> On Sep 17, 9:16*am, blake murphy > wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:08:25 -0700, Ranée at Arabian Knits wrote:
>
> > > In article >,
> > > *zxcvbob > wrote:
>
> > >> (actually, New Math was teaching young kids to work in different
> > >> number bases like octal and binary for no apparent reason.)
>
> > > * *I think it was fourth or fifth grade when they foisted that idiocy on
> > > us. *
>
> > what is idiotic about teaching there other base numbers systems apart from
> > ten?
>
> It's not math you can use unless you want to be a programmer.

It's not about using math. It's about training your brain to think
in different ways. Math is weight training for your brain.

Thinking about bases other than base 10 is supposed to get
you distinguishing the *idea* of numbers from the *symbols*
used to express them.

However, I'll agree that New Math was abysmally taught.

> I wish elementary math classes spent more time on practical
> applications and less time on pure manipulation. (Mom and Dad want to
> paint their bedroom. Given that their room is 10 feet by 15 feet by 8
> feet high, how many gallons of paint do they need to buy, given that
> one gallon of paint covers 500 square feet, and two coats will be
> needed to cover the existing color.)
>
> The vast majority of students, even ones good at manipulation, will
> find setting up this problem to be difficult.

And the second coat won't take as much paint as the first coat did.

I stopped after differential equations. Not taking a course with
"modern" or "theoretical" in the title kept me from a B.S. in math,
even though I had enough credits.

The most fun I had in math was a class entitled Modeling and
Simulation. On the first day, we considered how tall could
King Kong get before he'd collapse under his own weight.

Around Thanksgiving, we pooled data about our turkeys to
come up with an equation describing the time to cook a
turkey.

In between, of course, we did serious mathy stuff.

Cindy Hamilton