taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (07/08/86)
This article is from WAnderson.wbst@Xerox.COM and was received on Mon Jul 7 06:36:42 1986 Greg, I agree that memorizing the 13 times tables, and "endless addition of 4 digit numbers" does NOT encourage understanding of addition. I did the endless addition, I think I got the picture after round 2 or 3. But my 8 year old son has been learning division this year, and he understands it as repeated subtractions. It takes him a fair amount of time to divide 54 by 6. At some point memorizing the multiplication tables is only a common sense strategy for doing simple arithmetic. I didn't mean to imply that computers and calculators should NOT be used. But there are potentially dangerous situations in which people use computers to get results without understanding the computation or the validity of the result. An example that comes to mind was mentioned at a local ACM meeting talk by the director of the statistics lab at Cornell University. His group started developing test cases for microprocessor based statistics packages because these packages were being used more and more by researchers to carry out statistical computations on experimental data. The tests uncovered some packages that gave correlation values greater than 1.0 for certain kinds of data. How can one have confidence in the correlations that are less than 1.0? They might be correct, and then they might not. And often the (expected) results of the calculation are not obvious from the data. It's the propensity for blind acceptance of the validity of computer results that moves me to ask for caution. Bill Anderson