[ATM] what is centimeter

[Jeff Baldwin]

As a math teacher in a public school in PRK {People's Republik of
Kalifornia], I see a disaster in curriculum. We are evaluated on only around
23 or 26 things, and everything else we are basically required to quit
teaching. So bases are no longer even taught in school. In fact, at the last
teacher's meeting for our district, we were told to solve a problem in as
many ways as we could. It was multiplying 23 times 27. My first alternate
method was difference of squares, but my second alternative was converting
to based 23. Not a single individual in the room of 60 math teachers had
ever heard of such a thing, and many were veteran teachers. Nobody in their
right mind would do this problem this way, but the idea that math teachers
no longer have alternate base arithmetic in their brains and books freaks me
out.
Sorry to add my diatribe to this already long thread.
Baldy

-----Original Message-----
From: atm-bounces at atmlist.net [mailto:atm-bounces at atmlist.net] On Behalf Of
Daniel Fundo
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 6:44 AM
To: 'Milton Waddams'; 'Richard'; atm at atmlist.net; richard1941 at gmail.com
Subject: Re: [ATM] what is centimeter

I always thought that base 12 made more sense.  We had a teacher in high
school (back in the early 60's) That had us work some problems as base
twelve......became easy after a while!

*****-----
Dan F.
Memphis, TN

--- On Sun, 4/22/12, Richard <richard1941 at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Richard <richard1941 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [ATM] what is centimeter
> To: "'Milton Waddams'" <milton.waddams at ymail.com>, "'Richard'" 
> <richard at foucault.co.uk>, atm at atmlist.net
> Date: Sunday, April 22, 2012, 7:25 PM
> As a high school student in
> California in the mid 1950's, all of my science classes were metric.   
> Wassa big deal?   Metric is easier, until we overthrow our number 
> system and go to base 16.

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