I guess you would. I keep forgetting that you're Steve's age. The thing about Math Blaster is that it was genuinely fun, and made doing the math fun.
It's pretty shocking when adults don't even know that much.
Um, yeah. My biggest frustration with schools (public and sometimes otherwise) is that there seems to be a distinct emphasis on form over substance--get the score or do the test in X number of minutes--rather than understanding the concepts well enough to figure out how to work out problems you'll encounter in RL. (To say nothing of the travesty of history classes that consist almost exclusively of names and dates, while learning real history--coming to grasp the broad sweep of change and the play of human nature over time--is endlessly fascinating.)
Paul's last year of public school was the third grade, and I used to help out in his classroom one afternoon a week. While waiting for class to start one day, I was talking to two girls at the blackboard about a recent eclipse. The next eclipse of the same type was supposed to be in 2013 and I asked the girls how old they would be then. Neither had a clue how to figure it out.
(Paul loves, btw, to tell people he's a third grade dropout... especially since at 18 he's got a good job that he started as an apprentice when he was 14.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-05-02 05:29 pm (UTC)I guess you would. I keep forgetting that you're Steve's age. The thing about Math Blaster is that it was genuinely fun, and made doing the math fun.
It's pretty shocking when adults don't even know that much.
Um, yeah. My biggest frustration with schools (public and sometimes otherwise) is that there seems to be a distinct emphasis on form over substance--get the score or do the test in X number of minutes--rather than understanding the concepts well enough to figure out how to work out problems you'll encounter in RL. (To say nothing of the travesty of history classes that consist almost exclusively of names and dates, while learning real history--coming to grasp the broad sweep of change and the play of human nature over time--is endlessly fascinating.)
Paul's last year of public school was the third grade, and I used to help out in his classroom one afternoon a week. While waiting for class to start one day, I was talking to two girls at the blackboard about a recent eclipse. The next eclipse of the same type was supposed to be in 2013 and I asked the girls how old they would be then. Neither had a clue how to figure it out.
(Paul loves, btw, to tell people he's a third grade dropout... especially since at 18 he's got a good job that he started as an apprentice when he was 14.)