Quote:
Originally Posted by Angakuk
As a child I was a victim of the "new math". I remember that they had us learning to count and work problems in base 5. It ruined me for math ever after. If they were going to make us learn to do math in something other than base 10 they could at least have taught us to speak binary. With that in my toolbox maybe I could have learned how to communicate with our robot overlords in their native language.
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Oddly, the lesson on base 5 totally resonated with me, and I remember trying desperately to explain it to a friend who just didn't get it, and didn't even get why it was important.
The concept that our number system is entirely dictated by the digits on our hands was a revelatory experience for me. Not too long after that, I got my first computer, I was exposed to binary and hexadecimal notation, and it all fell into place almost effortlessly. I can't stress how important this understanding on some stupid lesson about base 5 was to my future career.
Now that I'm thinking back, my mother was always a horse person. A horse's height is measured in "hands." By conventional standard, a hand is 4 inches. So, when I say a horse is 15 hands, 2 inches, I'm really saying the horse is 5'2". That's also converting between 2 base notations. The "base 5" lesson was building on my forced knowledge of horsemanship.
So you and I had a completely different experience with "new math."
Kind of like this "common core" complaints. Whenever I had to help my kids with a math problem, I generally recognized the lesson as introducing an important concept on *how* to think about a problem, which I'm totally cool with, even if both myself and my kids got frustrated sometimes at the pedantic nature of the problems - especially when a "better" solution presents itself.