line6man
Epic Member
- Messages
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StubHead said:
The purpose of those sort of exercises is to meet the criteria specified by the school boards. Education is about teaching arbitrarily chosen objectives, and standardizing them so that every student must be able to do the same work and show their competency. It has very little to do with teaching any skills that you will use in the real world. While this is true of many subjects, mathematics education is particularly "academic" in nature. If you want to get any benefit out of your education, you often need to take classes that apply mathematics knowledge. For example, you might learn all about derivatives in calculus class, but you won't do any more than find f'(x) if f(x)=sin(2x)*cos(x), until you take physics, and learn that you can use derivatives to find jerk, velocity, etc. But if you're not a STEM major, there is really no reason to be learning advanced maths in the first place! It's ridiculous.
Regarding calculators; they are not necessarily a bad thing, depending on how and why they are used. If you cannot do your math without a calculator, then you have a problem! On the other hand, however, if you know how to do your work without a calculator, a calculator can save you time. Modern graphing calculators do a lot of fun stuff, like solving large matrices, or solving for nth-degree polynomial equations. These take a bit of time to work out on paper. I have calculator apps on my phone that graph equations in three dimensions. Playing around with operations and numbers, and watching the graphs change, has given me a better understanding of how certain functions work.
