All children in England will need to know up to their 12 times table when they leave primary school under plans announced by the education secretary....
...And Nicky Morgan tells the Sunday Times pupils aged 11 should know correct punctuation, spelling and grammar....
...The Sunday Times says that as part of the proposed measures, children would have to pass tests in long division and multiplication before they start secondary school.

The only time I've ever done long division once I left school was to prove to myself (or someone else) I could still do it. By the time children of say 6 years today leave school, the amount of computing power they will have about their person would make us agog. The only time they won't have a device that's manifestly better at arithmetic than any human brain is when they're in the bath. And possibly not even then.

That is not to say that certain mathematical skills aren't 'life skills', they certainly are. You need to be able to do quick simple mental arithmetic all the time - how long until a bus arrives, how much change should I have been given, how much is a tip if we say 10% of the bill? that kind of stuff. But being able to do long division is a skill that's now as necessary as being able to thatch a roof.

We need to continually decide what skills our children are likely to need in their daily lives and teach them appropriately. Just because something was necessary to be learned when were kids doesn't mean it still is.

Jon

The only time I've ever done long division once I left school was to prove to myself (or someone else) I could still do it. By the time children of say 6 years today leave school, the amount of computing power they will have about their person would make us agog. The only time they won't have a device that's manifestly better at arithmetic than any human brain is when they're in the bath. And possibly not even then.

That is not to say that certain mathematical skills aren't 'life skills', they certainly are. You need to be able to do quick simple mental arithmetic all the time - how long until a bus arrives, how much change should I have been given, how much is a tip if we say 10% of the bill? that kind of stuff. But being able to do long division is a skill that's now as necessary as being able to thatch a roof.

We need to continually decide what skills our children are likely to need in their daily lives and teach them appropriately. Just because something was necessary to be learned when were kids doesn't mean it still is.

And, if you don't know math, how do you know the results coming out of the computer are correct?

There was a great scene in Darknet, the second Daniel Saurez book (Freedom(tm) in English?), where Peter Sebeck is in a fast food restaurant and has ordered two menus for around $9 and the cash register says he owes $15 or so. He keeps arguing with the kid at the cash register that §3.50 + $5.50 doesn't equal $15, but the kid refuses to believe him, because the cash register is telling him that the two menus cost $15... (approx. prices from memory, I don't have the book to hand)

I've used math a lot to double check that the programs I've written are giving the correct results. And it is well known that spreadsheets like Excel give wrong answers a lot, if there are a lot of decimal places involved due to rounding errors.

Then there was the Pentium bug.

If you can't do the math, how do you know you aren't being lied to?

When I go shopping, I often calculate the prices as I go and if the amount at the checkout is very different, then I'll double check the receipt before leaving the store.

If you don't trust a calculator you're not 'being careful', you're weird and you're wasting your time.

So you've never trusted any data any device ever gives to you without manually checking it first? That includes every till receipt you've ever had, every phone call you've ever received, every email... You never take the lift in case it might dump you out at the wrong floor? You always have someone running alongside your car checking the speedo is correct?

We all rely every day on the thousands of fundamental calculations devices around us make. Every. Single. One. of us. Yes, in theory that is a bad thing that we can't replicate what machines do for us manually but the fact is the history of humanity has been the invention of devices that take boring, repetitive tasks away from us so we can spend our time doing better things.

If you don't trust a calculator you're not 'being careful', you're weird and you're wasting your time.

Most people don't spend their daily lives worrying about things where many decimal places are an issue. Most people need to work to two decimal places in the main.

Fair enough. Hey, pity nobody made anything of it and thus it was never fixed eh?

How often has that happened? And when it has happened has it been a fault the machine or a fault of the operator (e.g. entering something twice)?

I have never known the times tables up to the 12-times table. *shrug*

Mark