The teaching of math has not caught up with the computational reality we live in. Computers are ubiquitous and most of what is taught in basic algebra classes

The teaching of math has not caught up with the computational reality we live in. Computers are ubiquitous and most of what is taught in basic algebra classes is taught due to legacy reasons. Very few equations can be solved by hand and those that can be solved by hand can be solved by a computer algebra system. Almost all equations students learn to solve are those that are reducible to linear or quadratic equations. What is the point of such exercises when most equations are not of these types? Learning to find the equation to model a situation is far more important than learning how to solve that equation by hand. Learning what it means to numerically approximate an equation’s solutions and where such approximations might fail is what we should teach. In the past computation was hard. We had tables of logs and other numerical data. Doing things by hand was a limitation of the pre-computing era. Let’s not keep math the way we did prior to the present reality of ubiquitous computing.