When I recently sent out the inconvenient truth video to friends, what I heard back was nostalgia. Parents want their kids to learn math the way they did.
Their ultimate fear is that the new-fangled techniques might make their kids computationally incompetent in a dreamy quest for understanding. Most parents I speak to seem to suggest that they are willing to sacrifice mathematical understanding for computing prowess. Educators seem to want to go the other route- for them computational skill without understanding is useless.
The underlying rationale each group is also fascinating. Parents crave for a pre-calculator era when math involved doing long division by hand. Educators seem to be saying that computation is less important in today's milieu.
Fascinating!
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I believe that both sides are equally important. I think the children should be taught both ways. If they are learning something like long division, have them try a couple by writing the whole thing out and then show them how to do it on the calculator. The more the kids know, the better off they will be. If they know how to do both, it is better for their future in the long run.
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