On Tuesday 05 Oct 2010 6:59:01 am Deepa Mohan wrote: > don't like the stress it places on only rote memory, > but rote memory is not an entirely bad thing, as any Indian, faced with a > supermarket assistant who needs a calculator for the simplest reckoning, > will agree. >
Deepa pardon me for being extremely cynical, and not a little irritated about this statement. Rote memory of multiplication tables is all very well and may put me on a higher intellectual plane than a supermarket assistant. But I believe you may be unaware of how far this stupidity goes in India. I think there are two simple things that people need to know about mathematics, which every school child must learn. 1) As maths gets more compex - part of it is plain drudgery - where you add up or multiply long banks of numbers. And because of this drudgery it is possible for the best people to make errors. 2) Errors in maths are not a problem as long as one takes the time to check and cross check one's sums. Accountants do that, as do supermarket assistants and college professors. You do that too when you are looking at your accounts. In real life, when you are doing these sums to re-check for accuracy or errors nobody is sitting on your neck to ask you to finish your sum in seconds or minutes. Except perhaps an impatient custormer next to a slow supermarket assistant. And in maths exams. It has been known for centuries that maths can be drudgery and error prone. It was precisely for that reason that Logarithms came into use in the 1600s. After calculators were invented - they were allowed into higher maths so that children (and others) could move beyond automaton like calculation and cross checking and do some real complex math that actually requires a brain. Not in India. In India children doing problems based on Trigonometric identities and Calculus are not allowed to use Logarithms (in use for over 3 centuries by the rest of the world) or calculators. And I am sorry to say that this stupidity is being perpetuated by the very attitude you have posted - i.e that there is some greatness in rote learning that can be preserved and promoted ad nauseam. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are holding our children down and most people do not know or do not want to believe it. This has not changed since I was young. How much longer are we going to push stupidity in the name of tradition? shiv
