You guys are probably really mad at me. Either that, or you haven't noticed that the last time I posted here was September. But oh well.
I realize that blogging is a healthy release of general frustrations toward the world, and without it, I slowly but surely start alienating all of my friends until I am left wrapped in a cocoon of myself.
But that's not the topic of today's instruction. Today we talk about calculators!
Today I had a calculus test, because I'm a big nerd who takes calc, and apparently we weren't allowed to use our calculators. So I tried my danmdest on it but still forgot how to do a few of the problems, and I'm pretty sure I didn't do my best. Fortunately it's a test that the teacher lets you retake. So I wasn't completely screwed. But as I realized that I didn't know how to do the remaining 3 problems, I came into this bubble of anger and frustration toward the teacher because we weren't allowed to use our calculators. This was the first test that we couldn't use them. When in my future life am I going to walk into a room, and be told "hey. You have to integrate this problem or else we won't hire you to engineer our shit." When? The real world has calculators. The real world has the internet. The real world has group work, and collaboration. I thought college was supposed to prepare you for the real world. It just doesn't make sense. Conrad Wolfram, the man who created Wolfram|Alpha said "In math education, we're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do [computation] by hand. Yet, that's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. Instead, we ought to be using computers to do [computation] and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one, two and four -- conceptualizing problems, applying them, getting the teacher to run them through how to do that." It's a quote from his 2010 Ted Talk. I'll post the link at the bottom; it's one of my favorites.
Calculators are a metaphor really for all other various pieces of technology that have made our lives easier. It makes no sense that we have to purposefully cripple ourselves to do things that we will never see in the same format in the real world. Highschool is even worse than college, but that's a whole other mess to deal with.
I don't see how my life or career would be improved or better in the least because I was forced to learn how to integrate by parts, when I don't even know when integrations are used in the real world. Call me bitter because I am.
I guess it's sort of inevitable. The world is an imperfect place. If it was, then everything would be so much more boring.
I've got nothing else on this rant. I'll be sure to blog more often folks. Æ is back.
http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html
-Æ
