The importance today, of "Times-Tables" ???

[bd139]

Times tables are really important to learn. Only learn 12 if you're in an imperial country though. 10 is fine elsewhere.

Never lost them, use them daily. It's a form of memoization (not memorization - different thing!) i.e. caching regularly done mathematical operations so they are less expensive to do later on. When doing mental arithmetic, it speeds you up several orders of magnitude if you just know the answer to mul/div operations. I can crunch stuff most of the time in less time than finding the calculator, entering it and working out if I fudged the entry or not. The only reason I can do this is because I don't have to retain so much intermediate information when doing calculations because the answers to them are just there.

People who lost them didn't need them. The brain filed it away. It's in there somewhere. I can probably still ride a bike but I just can't be arsed these days

[chris_leyson]

On the flip side of the coin as it were, long division wouldn't be so easy if you didn't know your times tables. Of course it all depends on how many digits there are in the the divisor, for difficult or long divisors I would scibble down a look up table on the edge of the page. Many years ago, about 40, in a control lecture we had to do long division with polynomials, I remember thinking wow this is easy and when I had worked out the lecture example and looked up from my page of scribblings the lecturer was still explaining long division to most of the class. I guess that those who had been taught long division had forgotten.
Anyway, back to the subject, anyone who does low level programming knows their 16x table. 11x table is easy and 12x table is cool because of the relatively prime factors 3 and 4, 12 point FFT done using the prime factor algorithm is bloody fast.

[DimitriP]

TELL ME I'm missing something    

The quality of education is improving.
Older generations educated using lower standards are incapable of comprehending the improvement due to using outdated  methods when  benchmarking education quality.
Yeah, yeah, that's got to be it !

 We should start a flipgrid on this (  https://info.flipgrid.com/  )   

[LaserSteve]

I hated my Dad when he made me stay inside and study his huge pile of flashcards all the way to 13x13. The elementary school teachers actually asked him to stop with that in 6th grade as it was "too advanced" for some one with my issues.   Now at age 48,  I run rings around most of my  colleagues on quick approximations,  except for the Chinese-Americans.    Even with a really bad learning disability in math, those tables, plus considerable practice dealing with powers of ten, and a quick set of memorized  rules for dealing with  Decibels get me through the day. 


Dad passed away about ten years ago, but if I could thank him for one thing...  13x13 = 169 floating up in a few brain cycles is a very useful skill. 

Steve

 

[CatalinaWOW]

This is just a variant on the "Why learn anything when you can Google it" question.  My personal opinion is that cache memory in the sense of the recent posts is not terribly limited as it is in many computer architectures.  And certainly not saturated in a large majority of the population.  For one simple example of this, consider people who are well represented on this forum who are poly lingual who still show no limitations on learning more things.  Those who aren't poly lingual obviously have quite a lot of unused memory.

The reason you learn all of these maths and history and physics and so on is to come in ahead of the guys who have to look it up on their smartphone (assuming they have even memorized enough to generate a good search term) and then figure out the interactions and applications.  You are using that time to figure out the problems and potential solutions. 

Our education systems (worldwide apparently) seem to have overlooked this, which will generate real opportunities for a small number of people, and varying degrees of disappointment for most of the rest.

[Cerebus]

The quality of education is improving.

I know you're being semi-sarcastic, but I suspect it probably is improving.

My secondary school teachers where a mix of old-school amateurs with no formal training in education, and college of education graduates. Those with formal training in education were at least OK teachers, some were great, but only one of that group was terrible (He disliked children and I'm pretty sure he signed up only for the long holidays). Some of the older 'amateurs' were good teachers, some were so bad at their jobs that in any other occupation, like road sweeping, they would have been given the sack long ago.

At least nowadays teachers will all have some formal teaching qualifications rather than starting from a non-education degree (or less) and winging it.

While the science of education has matured, and the quality of the teachers has improved, and hopefully continues to improve, over time, not all is necessarily improving. In the areas I'm best placed to judge the 'level' of what is being taught nowadays compared to what was taught in my day - basically science and mathematics - I think I do see some 'dumbing down'. I think it is politically motivated, so that successive governments can claim that there are better national exam results now than were delivered under their predecessors.

What damages education is when, as it has in the UK, it becomes a political football. I don't think any generation since mine has made it from one end of their education to the other without some major upheaval in how education in the UK is organised. Politicians get involved and educators get ignored. I looked through the national curriculum a few years back and it was remarkably clear, from the ways certain 'learning goals' were worded, that political goals had become embedded in the system by the government. Parts almost read like a 'New Labour' manifesto. In my day there was no national curriculum, so tampering with the level or content of curricula was not possible in the same way as it is now, with effectively direct government control of the syllabus.

[IanB]

So I'm just going to drop this here without comment:

https://youtu.be/wgv9BkV-L78?t=24m40s

[VK5RC]

My three daughters, now in late teens /early twenties,  all learnt times tables to 12 by age 10. One did high level maths (IB), as I did in 1979, I could not help her with her maths.
The variability of the education system is huge.
An acquaintance is a headmaster of a secondary school (ages 12 to 17) in a rough area - he is struggling to get most students to the level of being able to read /write to be able to fill in a job application, enough maths to do simple shopping etc and the social skill set - arrive on time etc- to be able to keep the job. 

[bitseeker]

So I'm just going to drop this here without comment:

https://youtu.be/wgv9BkV-L78?t=24m40s

I'd never seen this show or Countdown, before. Great choice in Rachel Riley. Nothing like having a math(s) lover as presenter to whip up the answer on the spot. Oh, those poor guys.

[bd139]

On education, my 14 year old has just started doing calculus, and she’s not the only one. Depends where your kids go to school and how you stimulate them as they are growing up. This is a UK state school for ref, nothing fancy.

Honestly the main problem with education is shitty teachers and they are beyond criticism in the UK as too many protections are afforded. This makes it a race to the bottom. Academies are fixing this turd despite the press stories.

[BradC]

Honestly the main problem with education is shitty teachers and they are beyond criticism in the UK as too many protections are afforded. This makes it a race to the bottom. Academies are fixing this turd despite the press stories.

We have the opposite problem. We have adequate teachers that spend so much time dealing with the undisciplined little shits that get sent to schools by useless parents (who have the idea that the school should be responsible to turn their unwanted/unloved offspring into functioning human beings) that they don't have time to impart knowledge to the kids that are there who really want to learn.

That's what we get when we pay people to breed. The people who should be breeding either can't afford to or leave it too late, while the dregs push out another kid when they want a new flat screen tv to collect the "baby bonus". Yay for society.

[bd139]

Not much you can do about dickheads. Just remember they'll starve first when it comes to it.

[BradC]

Not much you can do about dickheads. Just remember they'll starve first when it comes to it.

You'd think that, but procreation favours the stupid. They'll just outbreed us all.

[@rt]

I never learned all of the times tables.
Certain combinations sunk in, and so did all of the squares,
and the rest I have to start where I know, and add the rest.

Not as fast as from memory (tables meaning recalled from memory),
but I haven’t seen it as any real hinderance.

[bd139]

Not much you can do about dickheads. Just remember they'll starve first when it comes to it.

You'd think that, but procreation favours the stupid. They'll just outbreed us all.

That’s why they’ll starve

[Gribo]

I have never learned the tables, I can still do all multiplications to 1000 instantly (along with all the integer roots). My kid is currently studying multiplication by counting n, I am teaching him all the shortcuts

[SL4P]

When my youngest were very young, I wrote a simple application for Windows - MathMatrix
Which not only developed their table skills, but it also *visually* reinforced the scalar, dimensional aspect of the work.  Timing & scoring helped make it a competition.

Their later maths aren’t perfect, but they easily understand how numbers and values affect each other.
I must test them out when i next see them!  24/21 years old.

[james_s]

Honestly the main problem with education is shitty teachers and they are beyond criticism in the UK as too many protections are afforded. This makes it a race to the bottom. Academies are fixing this turd despite the press stories.

We have the opposite problem. We have adequate teachers that spend so much time dealing with the undisciplined little shits that get sent to schools by useless parents (who have the idea that the school should be responsible to turn their unwanted/unloved offspring into functioning human beings) that they don't have time to impart knowledge to the kids that are there who really want to learn.

That's what we get when we pay people to breed. The people who should be breeding either can't afford to or leave it too late, while the dregs push out another kid when they want a new flat screen tv to collect the "baby bonus". Yay for society.

A problem we have in the US is that with the way the standards are set up, teachers kind of have their hands tied and the more creative types are pushed out in favor of those who can run what are effectively education factories. There is so much focus on standardized tests and standardized metrics of the teacher's success that there is little room for thinking outside the box.

[bd139]

Not much you can do about dickheads. Just remember they'll starve first when it comes to it.

You'd think that, but procreation favours the stupid. They'll just outbreed us all.

You are probably right.

One of my favourite films

[niladherbert]

As one currently suffering through the last 2 months of high school before hopefully going on to learn electrical and electronic engineering, how important is binomial, differential calculus and other hard maths things?

[Rerouter]

niladherbert, electrical you can honestly get through aslong as you know basic algebrea (like grade 6 stuff), electronic engineering you want a solid grasp on statistics, exponentials, and algebra, but i have not really come across anything that i have absolutely needed calculus for,

however you can think of them like tools, they only matter to you if you can think of something to do with it, most of my math skills have applied to bashing out stupid patterns and relations in excel, whereas if i had better access to tools like solidworks simulation for thermal and stress, they may longer apply to me,

[bd139]

Yep. I think most calculations I have done over the years outside of university were "within 10% ballpark" calculations and solving canned equations and using canned engineering calculators provided by vendors. Even stuff like filter design is just "download TI's tool and plug shit into it" or "solve this formula".

Edit: this was a shock coming from university where they hammered us with math that I never used.

[Zero999]

As one currently suffering through the last 2 months of high school before hopefully going on to learn electrical and electronic engineering, how important is binomial, differential calculus and other hard maths things?

Very important to pass any decent EE qualification exam.

When it comes to doing the job, it depends on what you're doing. Quite often simulation tools do all of the advanced maths for you, but it's still important to understand how they work.

[NivagSwerdna]

As one currently suffering through the last 2 months of high school before hopefully going on to learn electrical and electronic engineering, how important is binomial, differential calculus and other hard maths things?

As a non-EE some years ago I did MITx 6.002x (which I think can now be found at https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-1-basic-circuit-mitx-6-002-1x-0) ...No doubt about it you needed calculus (although Wolfram Alpha etc really help).  But Calculus is fun!   

[bd139]

But Calculus is fun!   

That's the right approach to the problem (I also enjoy it). Don't see it as a chore or a wall. It's a puzzle from which you win understanding.