> I laughed out loud at the author's complaint that math homework involved doing a lot of calculation without the aid of a calculator. Well yes, that is how you develop math feel.
IIRC historically, mathematical algorithms used to be encoded as a handful of steps, so that people could do them on abacuses and the like without understanding what they were using.
Just sitting there crunching numbers by hand won't give you a feeling for maths. - Or the ability to approximate well, which is the real thing. That's a selection of tricks to do with multiplication and division that'll get you into the right ballpark.
That's something that can be encoded and taught as its own skill, spending ages doing things by hand in the hope that people will hit on that skill for themselves ain't it.
IIRC historically, mathematical algorithms used to be encoded as a handful of steps, so that people could do them on abacuses and the like without understanding what they were using.
Just sitting there crunching numbers by hand won't give you a feeling for maths. - Or the ability to approximate well, which is the real thing. That's a selection of tricks to do with multiplication and division that'll get you into the right ballpark.
That's something that can be encoded and taught as its own skill, spending ages doing things by hand in the hope that people will hit on that skill for themselves ain't it.