On Apr 25, 2:58=A0am, Beliavsky <beliav...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/science/25math.html
> Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices
> By Kenneth Chang
> New York Times, April 25, 2008
>
> 'One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour
> toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling
> on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400
> miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?
>
> Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many
> educators in recent years have incor****ated more and more examples
> from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that
> making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.
>
> That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are
> correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be
> better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real
> world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this
> case 40 (t + 1) =3D 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of
> the second train. (The answer is below.)'
This claim is ridiculous. Learning how to translate a verbal
statement
of the problem into equations is far more im****tant than the mindless
manipulations used to solve (in this case) linear equations. The
latter
only involves application of an algorithm.
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