Comments by "Christian Baune" (@programaths) on "The Math Sorcerer"
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Context. We learned to use the tables and rulers in primary school because they were late to the party.
And the use of tables was widespread. If you wanted to know your train schedule, you also had to look at timetables.
Also, use of various indexes. I still have a book where the index gives you the page number, the quadrant, and the sub-quadrant. Most people can't use the book!!! It's like a puzzle for them.
Even more stupid, there are "random" numbers on the border of the pages...those indicate where the map continues 😅
Even looking up in a dictionary is challenging for people. I saw people "browse" the dictionary and explained how they could get very close to the correct page if they knew their alphabet and could think of Scrabble.
As a kid, I would always start in the middle, then try to take the right half and split until I had a few pages to work with. The teacher would then explain how to be faster by considering that some letters have few words and that you can try to guess where that word would be.
It sounds stupid, but it was an essential skill in primary school. The teacher always pointed to the dictionary and asked to read aloud ^^
And sometimes, during read-aloud, the teacher would stop us and ask us what we read. Then, ask about difficult words and ask to use the dictionary. So the teacher didn't have to waste too much time. If you were too slow to look up, you would be taught repeatedly, and the dictionary would become your close friend.
The very same with tables ^^
Fast forward to today, kids don't exercise those skills, and there were many instances I had to guide people to use train timetables! They do like kids, reading from the first panel to the last 🤦🏻♂️
And when you step away, it's indicated if it's workdays or weekends. Then, getting closer, you see the hours in bold. Then, in smaller prints, you have the minutes.
And people are confused because they don't string that information together. They miss the bigger picture.
Even recently, I saw students challenged by z-score tables.
Even synoptic tables with rain per m² are harsh to read...
But even worse, synoptic maps! You would think that a highly abstracted map would help since your only concern is finding the start and end stations and then following the lines to find the suitable exchanges. Nope, too difficult ^^
So, it's expected that most people can't use schematics.
All the people who had to use log and trigonometric tables and the dictionary and the atlas were given a precious gift!
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@VesperLoveReal In lower, you are tested against arithmetic because that's a main objective. Then it becomes a requirement, then it becomes acquired.
In some options, like electronics, the student is even encouraged to make arithmetic error and stuff like 10+1=10 is perfectly fine as we do know the student made his life easier. Same with assuming a quadratic is a linear equation because locally, it's good enough.
Then we look at the error margin and if it falls within allowed margin, then we don't care. Why ? Because some components have themselves a 10% margin and tolerance is even higher. So, the answer has to be wrong enough before it receive a zero.
When I was a student, I passed statistic without calculator and we worked on a relatively big dataset (hundred of values). I computed everything by hand and explained at the top of my copy that I didn't had my calculator. So, for each item, I did put the computation in symbolic then the estimator I used and how far away I may get from the answer. The teacher gave me good marks and was impressed.
I applied the same method we do in electronics ^^
Key point: understanding.
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When I was in primary school, they didn't segregate subject yet. So, you had two parts. Morning and afternoon. Both 4 hours sitting.
The exam was a booklet with seemingly random texts, various figures and then a list of questions. You had to use knowledge spanning multiple subjects just to solve some items. And some of the required knowledge was buried in the texts.
I remember an infamous question where you were asked the frequency of a dragon fly flaps and in the text about the dragon fly, you could read that it does a full flap in x seconds. So, you had to convert frequency to period length ^^ Stupid question, but mostly badly answered. The relation between frequency and period was given somewhere else (mind that we where 11 years old and not yet exposed to ration and real physics)
The exam was too hard and got replaced by folders targeting each subject individually so students didn't had to read the whole thing multiple time. Also, 8 hours of exam is now considered inhumane, so they have breaks and only half days.
And yes, it was rough, because even the teacher discovered the exam and the questions were quite different than those from the teacher. Now, this is simply disallowed, pupils can only be questioned on question types they already saw and no new material can be introduced within the test. Also, questions have to be self contained AND without sub items.
So, it's way more easier now ^^
At the same time, at 12, you were considered quite autonomous...That was the goal of primary school, full autonomy. It got pushed to the end of secondary school.
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