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Reply to "real old exercise book"

Baseman posted:
Stormborn posted:

One of the things that hampered Ramanujan the great Indian mathematician was that he learned the fundamentals of mathematics from a book of used to teach British high school boys. The book was like the one by Hardy and Littlewood, we used in primary and high school on pure math that make you solve problems very easily and encouraged the cramming of theorems. The problem for Ramanujan was he  never  expanded he theorems and his work ended up cryptic.. His notebooks are still being deciphered because at the higher levels his habit of writing out equations without any build up to how they were derived it became as code. He always got the answer right but others trying to understand and generalize his work has to hard at breaking down his ideas. Given he was an extraordinary genius means a century has gone by and the world is still to come to grips with his greatness and discoveries. 

Banna, I agree with some of your points raised. And you brought up India, yes this an example of a cram culture and why India has so many highly educated people but it not an innovative and inventive people!  If you score below 97 you are 2nd tier and mediocre!  This works well in some professions, not all!

Anyway, what we were talking is memorizing the very basic, say 12 times tables and the conversion measures!  Beyond that, you should be into problem solving!

As I said, memorizing those tables breaks the spirit of the kid. Teach them that  2 x 4 is the same as 4 X 2 and they begin to grasp a strategy of using one table to produce the next. One can use the fingers to do 9 times table in under a min but what good is that when the child already knows the table if they learnt up to 8 times. 

FM
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