In the AJC of 11/12/09 is an article on the front page that contains…
“For the first time in its history, the Georgia Department of Education this month will hand out grants for schools to pioneer the use of “handheld computing” to see if it engages students better than traditional book-and-paper methods.”
This makes the Smartfella? a bit nervous. I fear that blind faith in calculators may become a problem. If students do not understand numbers will they accept any answer that their calculators put out because the answer must be right because the calculator put it out? Allow me to belabor the point…
• Will the engineers of the future understand the inviolate principle of, Garbage In…Garbage Out? If they want to know what 5X5 is and they put in 5X55 and find their answer is 275, will they not become suspicious?
• Will the makers of the calculators have no understanding of numbers and, therefore, come up with machines that punch out bad results all the time and really screw things up for everyone?
• Will the rocket scientists of the future send rockets to Mars but end up blowing up downtown Albuquerque?
• Will the students of the future be taking their final exams and try to find the answer of 558X863 but come up with an answer of 17 say to themselves, “Boy, this is not gonna take any time at all. If all the answers are this short, I’m going to be sitting in the coffee shop, drinking my latte and texting in no time at all!”
Since this is the bottom of this Foolishness, the Bottom Line is…I hope the Georgia Department of Education teaches our modern students some Arithmetic.
Would I kid u?
