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This type of post is perfect Hacker News material! 1) Challenge an existing assumption about something we all do 2) Hand-wave some first-order guesses as to w
by clarkmoody 11y ago
This type of post is perfect Hacker News material!
1) Challenge an existing assumption about something we all do
2) Hand-wave some first-order guesses as to why we do it
3) Get nerdy with code and graphs and come to your conclusion, along with helpful suggestions for bettering the reader
With no prospect of the pre-decimal money system returning, I can only conclude that the logic behind this new priority is simply, “If learning tables up to 10 is good, then learning them up to 12 is better.” And when you want to raise standards in math, then who could argue with that? Unless you actually apply some math to the question!
- Scarblac 11y agoBut do we all learn tables up to 12? In the Netherlands it's only up to 10 for as far back as I know.
- antod 11y agoSame in New Zealand. The only times I ever saw anything with 12x tables it had escaped from the US education market and had exercises involving nickels, dimes and quarters etc.
- TimJRobinson 11y agoInterestingly in Australia we learnt all the way to 12.
- Widdershin 11y agoMy experience in New Zealand differs, we learned the 12x tables at primary school and there was nothing vaguely imperial about it. This was around about a decade ago.
- antod 11y agoInteresting - my experience was in the early 80s. I suspect getting the 12x table added to the NZ maths curriculum was probably the main deliverable of the 2001 Knowledge Wave Conference.
- Wildgoose 11y agoI learned all the way up to the 12 times tables here in England, I was born in 1965. My kids only seem to have learned up to their ten times table however. Personally I strongly believe that this is so important that it should be enforced by rote memorisation very early on (as in my case). For some reason far too many people see no problem with insisting children learn their alphabet to ensure literacy but suddenly lose interest when it is times tables in order to ensure numeracy. Fortunately we have just had a (wrongly much derided) Education Secretary in Government called Michael Gove who has done an excellent job at demanding that these basics are covered and as a result is now widely (and wrongly) hated. He has also insisted that school IT courses should involve teaching programming. Up to now, they have just been about to create a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation, or how to use Microsoft Word. Yes, seriously. That bad. They squandered the early lead the UK had with IT by dumbing down everything to such an extent that no bright kid would want anything to do with computers.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoSpeaking as someone whose entire schooling was in the US -- there was no effort at any point to teach times tables past 10.