The increase in the use of calculators in the classroom is hard to believe. Now "everyone" agrees on their importance, one teacher told me. The more I hear about the benefits of calculators in schools, the less surprised I am when students call me for tutoring(家教) in math. Having worked six years as an engineer before changing to tutoring, I often suggest to my students that they consider technical and scientific careers, but I'm disappointed when I see an increasing number of kids who lack simple math skills.
Teachers may defend the use of calculators, but they ignore the reason that we teach math in the first place. Math trains the mind. By this I mean that students learn to think logically(逻辑地), to go from the information they know to the information they desire, and to become familiar with both numbers and ideas. These skills are important for children to become thinking, intelligent(聪明的) adults.
Having a calculator doesn't make it any easier for a student to decide how to solve(解决) a math problem. Rather, it only encourages him to try every possible mixture of addition, subtraction(减法), multiplication or division(除法) without thinking which would be better. Without a calculator, a student is much more likely to reduce his work by thinking about the problem first. Learning good methods for solving difficult problems is very important, not just for math but for life.
Math is as much about knowing why the rules work as knowing what the rules are. A student who cannot do long division obviously does not understand the rules on which it is based. My students who view the multiplication tables as simply a list of numbers have much more difficulty in math than those who know that multiplication is just repeated addition. Calculators prevent students from seeing this kind of natural pattern and beauty in math.
A student who learns to work with numbers inside his head can think about how to solve a problem and then complete the actual calculations(计算) easily. He will also have a much better idea of what the answer should be, since experience has taught him "number sense", or the relationship between numbers.
Students learn far more when they do the math themselves. I've tutored young people who immediately reach for their calculators. If they would take a few seconds to understand the problem at hand, they would most likely find an easier answer without needing a calculator. I have also watched students wrongly enter a problem like 12 + 322 into their calculators as 112 + 32 and not notice the obviously wrong answer. After all, they used a calculator, so it must be right.
When children in the third grade use a calculator to solve 9 x 4, they are still using a calculator to solve the same problem in high school. Because they never felt comfortable working with numbers as children, they have serious problems when they go on to higher math like algebra(代数). If we don't require students to solve simple problems by themselves, how can we expect them to solve more difficult problems?
Many teachers as well as students say, "Why shouldn't we use calculators? We'll never do division by hand in real life." This may be true. Not many of us need math for any practical reason. But that's not the only purpose of teaching math. We teach it to help students think logically, which improves the mind and increases the student's ability to become a useful part of society: the most important goal of education.
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Throw Out the Calculator 课文讲解
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