2/3rds Don’t Know Fractions, And the Other 1/2 Want to Get Rid of Them
“Fractions have had their day, being useful for by-hand calculation,” says University of Pennsylvania math professor Dennis DeTurck. “But in this digital age, they’re as obsolete as Roman numerals are.”
DeTurck thinks we should stick to decimals and not teach fractions until after a student learns calculus.
“Part of that is our kids are remarkably sophisticated consumers. They want to know why they are forced to do complicated and difficult calculations. You can’t say, ‘Have faith and it will all become clear,’ ” DeTurck said. “Kids figuratively throw up their hands. It is no longer seen as relevant. By the time they see the relevance again they have missed the intermediary stuff.”
Kids don’t see the relevance of anything that isn’t related to their daily lives as kids. That’s why we send them to school. It’s thinking like Professor DeTurck’s that will lead us to a society where these kids will be prepared for nothing except a job in a pizzeria… and even then they will struggle to come up with a method for dividing a pie into equal portions of 0.125.
December 27th, 2007 at 01:24
Back in the good old days, fractions were often taught *before* decimals–especially since one expected to encounter fractions (1/2, 1/4) well before encountering a decimal. In fact, what we call decimals used to be called “decimal fractions”, drawing the comparison to fractions–whose operations had already been learned.