Re: TI-89 virtue email needed
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Re: TI-89 virtue email needed
Yet another excellent response. I think we've established now that skills
lost to machines are acceptable losses. After all, as long as one person
still knows how to find a square root, he can program the calcualtor to do
it, and the rest of us can use the calculator. As long as one person knows
how to make soap, the rest of us can buy it from him.
The only problem left, then, is adjusting the cirriculum in the schools to
allow for the new technology. As has been pointed out, when you use
technology to do things, you can move one to harder things you couldn't
do before. This results in greater knowledge overall. Even if you can't
see the trees for the forest, it's a bigger forest. However, teachers and
textbooks are slow to adapt. Integration by hand (etc.) has been taught
since calculus classes began. We have the disadvantage now of being on the
borderline between doing it by hand and letting the calculator do it. We
know the 89 will do it, but the teachers are still required to teach it by
hand. Not to place any blame, this happens in any large organization.
New textbooks editions are only done every few years, so new developements
in between may have to wait before getting put into print. The problem is
compounded before the college level, when schools buy a set of books and
rent them to students, only buying the new edition when the old books are on
the verge of falling apart from age. A real world example, air traffic
control towers were slow to switch from vacuum tubes to transistors due to
government standards. The purpose for standards is to make sure you don't
switch to new technology before it is proven, the only bad thing is the
process for updating the standards is slow. Okay, that a very loose analogy
when applied to schools, but you get my point. All I can say here is that
students five or ten years from now will have the joys of using the full
power of the TI-89. We in the here and now, though, have to grin and bear
it until the change occurs.
>Wow! A good, intelligent discussion going on here! One thing to ask
>ourselves is, "Is the skill we lose important to our life?" I remember 1972
>when I was in 11th grade. HP had just come out with the HP-35, the first
>handheld scientific calculator and our math teachers were really worried
>that we'd forget how to do square roots by hand. Does anyone do square
>roots with pencil and paper anymore? Does anyone even remember how? I
>don't. Some skills, such as whaling, calculating square roots or making
>soap are being lost but does it really matter? These things were once vital
>to survival for many people but today they're irrelevant skills. If you
>told our great grandparents that virtually no one today knows how to make
>soap, they'd have a fit! "How do you keep clean?" Perhaps some of the
>skills we consider vital today will fall into the same category in the
>future. The line will move itself when society as a whole is ready for it
>to move. There will always be people like the Luddites who couldn't accept
>technological change but they will only slow down change by a small
>fraction. The change will happen. It's up to us to be ready.
>
>Tom Lake
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