I sat down on Monday morning to tell everyone to read the vos Savant
article and of course Phil beat me to it. He's on Eastern time. All I can
say now is AMEN!!!! If you are heavily into "real world APPLICATIONS"
please read. You are not doing any harm but don't expend a lot of energy
and get your hopes up either unless they are really hard problems and you
don't tell the students how to do them but require them to do the problems
correctly to pass. Of course if you do the same thing with "artificial
APPLICATIONS" it will work just as well.
wayne
At 05:12 PM 11/7/99 -0500, you wrote:
>>From today's Newspaper in the Ask Marilyn, Marilyn vos Savant column. Nice
>to see this in the popular press - that's more important than the actual
>question.
>
>Of course maybe someone has a better answer to Sandy's original question.
>
>Phil Mahler
>Middlesex CC
>Springs Road
>Bedford, MA
>
>
>Here's a question from my 83 fifth-grade math students, who keep asking me
>what your answer is: "in real life, when would you ever multiply (or
>divide, for that matter) two negative numbers?" The closest I've come up
>with is, "if you didn't get what you didn't want, that's positive."
>
>-Sandy Hindy, Westlake Village, Calif.
>
>Forget this kind of justification for studying math. It's as irrelevant as
>asking a question like, "In real life, when would you ever do a sit-up?"
>Unless you work as a trainer, you wouldn't. That doesn't mean you should
>complain about doing sit-ups as part of physical conditioning.
>
>People need to be in good intellectual condition too. Even if you're not
>going to make heavy use of math in your profession, you still need to know
>how to think logically. Tell the kids I said that studying math
>accomplishes two goals: It prepares some kids to think like scientists,
>and it prepares all the rest of them to think, period.
>
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Wayne F. Mackey
Director, MRTC
University of Arkansas
ScEn #301
Fayetteville, AR 72701
wmackey@comp.uark.edu
(501) 582-3764
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