Author : Rafi (IP: 89.1.250.113 , 89.1.250.113.dynamic.barak-online.net)
Comment:
Regardless of the quality of math education in the US and bananananana, about which you may be right, I never saw the point of teaching kids long division or other elaborate computational procedures (and I recently read an interesting article of a non-mathematician programmer who realized how math could be very useful, gives tips on how to learn it and claims that most of what they teach in school is useless. He gave long division as an example. I agree).
Long division doesn't help anyone do anything. They once taught kids how to approximate logarithms with logarithm tables. I'm sure you're not used to that, and there's no reason you should be, even though they might still teach it in some places where they teach long division. All these useless procedures are also responsible for making people think math is just about numbers and algebra, when in fact the merit in a mathematician who knows how to compute cubic roots quickly without a calculator is null.
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