this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
213 points (97.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43336 readers
807 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"you're not going to carry a calculator with you everywhere"
The thing is I believe that statement is a bit misunderstood.
Calculators were already becoming pocket sized back in the day, but using it to calculate things if you don't know how to use it is where the actual problem is.
Hence the reasoning to learn how to math vs only having the device.
True, but I can count on 0 hands how many people I knew carried one in their pocket.
Now if the calculator were built into a beeper, everyone would have had one.
or a watch!
I'm not saying I disagree, but I had a different experience.
it's very easy to enter wrong numbers on a calculator, but you need some basic reasoning and familiarity to know when an answer is off, and you need to start over
Yeah, in my experience "You won't carry a calculator with you everywhere you go" was what they said to justify pointless busywork.
You may carry one now, but can you calculate percentages on it without your maths lessons? Can you convert fractions? I blame the technology, if it's going to math it needs to math all maths
Frankly, these days? Yeah you totally can. "Hey Siri, what's 3% of 235,889?" or "Hey Siri, what's 8/37ths converted to 300ths?" will most likely just feed you a correct answer.
And you might not have a smartphone or smartwatch with you. I've seen people who needed a calculator to do basic math.