Today's high school seniors.....ouch.

[sld]

I see the results of our education system when newly graduated engineers start work. These kids are a whiz on anything computer related but have a hard time grasping basics. Set back / bend allowance for flat pattern parts, edge distance, fastener pitch, minimum bend radius, fasteners, etc... They always say the computer does that for you. The trouble is, the computer result is from human input and is frequently wrong. It has to be double checked.

I just shake my head.... Most guys my age started off working on bicycles as kids and then cars, trucks and tractors. These skills are what kept us ahead of the Indians that desperately want to take our engineering jobs. This new generation will not have that advantage.

 

[check]

I have taught statistics for some 30 years at University, and I see a major factor simply being attitude. If you don't take an interested, positive attitude, you're not gonna make any effort to learn even the basics, and certainly not any effort to retain something like the times tables, nor to practice it every once in a while.

We used to play guessing games in the car when going up to the cottage, whereby we would each guess the exact minute that we would arrive at the cottage, once we were fairly close, and knew the number of miles/kilometers left before we got there. I would make it simple by traveling, say, 120 Kilometers per hour, which means one kilometer every 30 seconds. Then I would throw in a curveball, by saying that we can only travel 60 Km. per hour once we get onto our little cottage road, which was the last 13 km.

Another exercise was to calculate the total volume of concrete that I needed for our new 24' x 24' garage pad. And the amount of lumber that I would need, both in terms of the studs, and the plywood. It got real fun when we began to calculate the plywood needed for the roof, taking into account the overhang. Then we had to calculate the number of strings of Christmas lights to circumnavigate the fascia of the garage.

Yet another example was to calculate the amount of interest on our mortgage, both per month and per year.

Then we would look at income tax rates, and how the marginal rate varied as a function of how much money you made. (My daughter was real interested in how we pay half the tax rate on capital gains that we pay on earned income. It made her more interested in investing in real estate when she grows up.)

Then, we have 15% total sales tax here in Ontario, and I would get her to calculate the amount but she had to add on in order to pay for something that she wanted to buy.

There are lots and lots of examples that you can use to keep kids' minds active mathematically, but it is a real pain to get them to do these exercises, simply because they don't find them interesting.

Actually, the one time I really got my daughter's attention was when I was submitting my tax return one time, and she saw how much income tax I had to give to the government. She almost had a heart attack at the ripe old age of about 11 years old!

 

[check]

Another big problem I see is that people don't attempt to understand numbers. Like when I think about the number 7, I see a lot of things, like a 6 and a 1, a 4 and a 3, a 5 and a 2, and a 7 and a 0. And, if the number is not a prime number, I think about the factors (e.g., a 6 is a 2 x 3 and a 6 x 1). If you use a calculator all the time, you don't "see" these components of numbers, which makes it harder to estimate, and that is a second major problem. When I was helping my kid with math in the younger years, I would always encourage her to understand a problem, by estimating the result, and this made a big difference, especially if she made a typo or something on the calculator and got a wildly incorrect result.

 

[Looking4new]

especially if she made a typo or something on the calculator and got a wildly incorrect result.

If the answer doesn't look logical, it probably isn't the right answer. I got told that by a math teacher I had waaaaaayyyyy back when.

 

[Travelover]

I do volunteer work at a local state park and sometimes mentor Eagle Scout projects like little bridges, etc in the park. I was shocked to hear that this one scout troop (I think 17 years old or so) was not allowed to use power tools - not even a cordless drill. I asked them how they planned to build a bridge without any tools and they said they would carry the material in and watch me assemble it. :confused2:

To be fair, other Eagle Scouts have completed projects with power tools, but the dads seemed to be be using the power tools.

 

[bcp]

One way to get kids to be wary of the calculator's result (if using a basic calculator) is to do a problem like 1+2x3=. It is especially good if they can use a "scientific" calculator with the same problem at the same time.

Bruce

 

[Looking4new]

One way to get kids to be wary of the calculator's result (if using a basic calculator) is to do a problem like 1+2x3=. It is especially good if they can use a "scientific" calculator with the same problem at the same time.
Bruce

Cute!

 

[farmer2009]

One way to get kids to be wary of the calculator's result (if using a basic calculator) is to do a problem like 1+2x3=. It is especially good if they can use a "scientific" calculator with the same problem at the same time. Bruce

Actually that wouldn't be that hard to work correctly on a regular calculator if they knew the proper order to work a math problem.
1.Parentheses
2.Exponents
3.Multiplication
4.Division
5.Addition
6.Subtraction

Goes back to the basics.

 

[sld]

My Dear Aunt Sue

Think they still teach that?

 

[farmer2009]

I sure hope so. If not these kids will be lost. I've been out of school 13 years now and I know it. But I was taught: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. Pretty much the same. Really helpful in advanced algebra.