Are children getiing more stupid?

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yoyo123
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Joined: Mon Jun 18, 2007 3:32 pm
Location: East Kent

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by yoyo123 »

..but then maybe the children who were going to understand anyway , grasp it first time whatever the method. A great deal of my time is spent finding different ways to approach a problem for those who don't 'get it'.

The famous "all children to be average or above" is not attainable!
new2me
Posts: 162
Joined: Mon Mar 15, 2010 5:52 pm

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by new2me »

If only 20% or so of children are failing to meet level 4, doesn't this mean that level 4 is pitched way below the ability of an 'average' child.
tokyonambu
Posts: 109
Joined: Thu Oct 21, 2010 5:38 pm

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by tokyonambu »

Depends if average means mean or median, and what the shape of the distribution looks like.
Looking for help
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Location: Berkshire

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by Looking for help »

See the thing is, our statistics today are (maybe) far more accurate or meaningful than they were back in the day, so one conclusion today is not the same as it was 20 years ago.


I have to say that I think our children today have more grasp of numeracy in particular because of advancements in teaching methods eg chunking, which as a parent, I took a very long time to get to the bottom of but now love. I used to think there was no other method than long division, and even spent time with my children to teach them my method, but invariably they found other fun things to do like drying their hair, or in fact cleaning toilets.

I think we make far too much of statistical information. There are lots of children leaving primary school today with less than a full grasp of English, but that in itself is not a problem, English might not be the mother tongue. We have to be very careful what we take form statistics.
yoyo123
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Location: East Kent

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by yoyo123 »

'There are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics...'
tokyonambu
Posts: 109
Joined: Thu Oct 21, 2010 5:38 pm

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by tokyonambu »

It's worth pointing out as well that, for those that regard long division as some sort of shibboleth, long division is just a special case of chunking where you constrain the chunks to be the largest multiple of a power of ten at each point. If you happen to choose your chunks well, you go through exactly the stages of long division (except all the zeros are present and correct, which is the conceptual problem with long division).

Work out 8439/97 by both chunking and long division. The vital move in long division is realising that 843/97 = 8 remainder 67, which is equivalent to the chunker making their first guess as 80. The difference is that if a chunker happens to guess 70, they're off to the races (1649, so their next move is to subtract 970), while the long division user has to continue playing with the first stage until the remainder is less than 97. That some proponents of long multiplication can't see this equivalence demonstrates that all they have is a rote method, just as the inability to see the equivalence of grid multiplication with long multiplication shows the same problem.

Long division and long multiplication, as taught in the sixties, play a sleight of hand with place value, and it's not totally surprising that a lot of people of our age actually have a fairly shaky understanding of how things to the right of the decimal point actually work. If you need to teach a brute force rote method, because people need to multiply before they are able to understand how it works (or, in some cases, what it actually means), then long multiplication works well enough. Long division, I'd argue, doesn't: the set of people who can actually do it on arbitrary numbers and get it right is fairly small, and always was. But in both cases, we have today a perfectly effective rote method that gives answers without understanding how it works, with the risk of invisible error: the calculator. The purpose of teaching the ability to divide arbitrary integers by hand has to be more than "to get the answer".
no_ball

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by no_ball »

One has to wonder what is the point anymore with access to calculators in exam situation and the modern work place. A further sign of dumbing down of general society!
yoyo123
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Joined: Mon Jun 18, 2007 3:32 pm
Location: East Kent

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by yoyo123 »

no_ball wrote:One has to wonder what is the point anymore with access to calculators in exam situation and the modern work place. A further sign of dumbing down of general society!
mental maths..

the numeracy strategy really helps with that, lots of estimation 39x 101, roughly 30 x100 so 3000ish.

Calculators are brilliant at calculating, but if you have no idea of the ball park figure you just accept what the machine tells you.

Yo only have to look at my typing to relaise that fingers hit teh wrong keys often!
Loopyloulou
Posts: 878
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 5:20 pm

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by Loopyloulou »

4000? :wink:
Loopy
yoyo123
Posts: 8099
Joined: Mon Jun 18, 2007 3:32 pm
Location: East Kent

Re: Are children getiing more stupid?

Post by yoyo123 »

darn it!!

yes...

39 is almost 40 so 40

:oops: :oops: :oops:
that's what you get for trying to do 4 things at once..
I'll crawl back into my box and go back to being flippant again
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