No wonder kids cant these days.....

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Tiny Spark

Tiny Spark

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Yeah we have all heard (and many said ime sure) Kids cant do ..... these days.

A while back I was talking to a college lecturer who said 90% of the kids they get these days cant do basic maths or even use a calculator.
Now I found this odd, not so much that they cant do maths but they cant use a calculator.
Now I was pretty good at maths back in the day and we were rarely aloud to use a calculator but lets face it they are not to hard to use....

Well I should say they never USED to be hard to use!

Now I think I may understand why kids cant use calculators, probably because you need a damn PHD to work it!
I had a test the other day which I was told I would need a scientific calculator for, Now ive had the same scientific calculator since I was at school, served me well through college and everything else now I couldnt find the damn thing the other day so went and brought a new one only to find when I sat this test that the answers this thing gave me were damn near useless!

I had to do 20 x 0.72, Now I know this is going to give me a answer somewhere near 15 but ime not good enough to work out exactly what.
So imagine my suprise when this bloody thing gives me a answer of 29/2!

Dont get me wrong ime sure thats a answer someone somewhere may need but I dont!
Hell I dont even know how to change that to a realistic answer I mean WTF!
Are you supposed to take instruction manuals into exam halls these days or what?

And before anyone says I know its a fractional equivalent but I could of worked that out in my head without the calculators assistance :p
 
Haha, that takes me back a bit!!

I too can remember when calculators were not allowed into examination rooms. Virtually all the C&G exams and a good few others, they wanted to SEE your calculations, in fact if i remember correctly, the written calculations formed part of your point count...

I think i know what you mean though, you get used to using a particular calculator and when lumbered having to use a different make, things can easily go to pot!!

But i'll agree with Ian, with many (not all i might add) of these kids, it must be like trying to educate pork!! lol!!
 
Engineer54 said:
I too can remember when calculators were not allowed into examination rooms. Virtually all the C&G exams and a good few others, they wanted to SEE your calculations, in fact if i remember correctly, the written calculations formed part of your point count...
Click to expand...

!0 marks for a question and you would get 1 mark for the correct answer the rest was from all the working out you had to show
 
We have exactly the same problem at college !

We spend half the time working out how to put the sum in the calculator ! Even the tutor doesnt have a clue !

Not a casio fx -85GT by any chance is it Tiny ?
 
From what I gather from the yoth thats still the case where they get so many points for showing workings.
But thats on a Level 2 Maths exam he was allowed a calculator for some of the Level 3 one.

Whats worrying though is when he gave me a mock LV2 exam paper and asked me to help him as he was struggling with it.
I had a quick flick through and then looked at him with a raised eye brow and asked him why he needed my help to work out the area of Ben and Kerry's back yard....
 
matt1386 said:
We have exactly the same problem at college !

We spend half the time working out how to put the sum in the calculator ! Even the tutor doesnt have a clue !

Not a casio fx -85GT by any chance is it Tiny ?
Click to expand...

Yes it was mate.
Take it they are renowned for it then??

God I wish I could find my 20 year old Casio.....
 
Engineer54 said:
Haha, that takes me back a bit!!

I too can remember when calculators were not allowed into examination rooms. Virtually all the C&G exams and a good few others, they wanted to SEE your calculations, in fact if i remember correctly, the written calculations formed part of your point count...
Click to expand...


They still are, nothing has changed you still have to show your workings.
 
Tiny Spark said:
Yes it was mate.
Take it they are renowned for it then??

God I wish I could find my 20 year old Casio.....
Click to expand...

We are all just about getting used to how they work now mate, but they never give you a straight bloody answer !

Unless its a round number it always gives you the answer as a fraction, why ???

You then have to press the S<->D button to convert into standard form

Also if the tutor writes a sum on the board he wants us to work out, the way he puts it on the board, the calculator wont recognise, so we then spend 20 minutes working out how to input the sum to get a proper answer !

What a pain
 
There will be a button marked 'SD' (off the top of my head) press this, and the answer will convert to a number/decimal format. You can change the settings for the answer units the calculator will give you, but I can't remember how to change it
 
mark80 said:
There will be a button marked 'SD' (off the top of my head) press this, and the answer will convert to a number/decimal format. You can change the settings for the answer units the calculator will give you, but I can't remember how to change it
Click to expand...

Buy a casio (I think) scientific calc they come with instructions lol

Hold shift then press mode and go through till you find the one you want
 
my scientific calculator proved newton's law of " every action produces an equal and opposite reaction". i threw it at the wall. the wall dented, the calculator shattered. QED.
 
Tiny Spark said:
Yeah we have all heard (and many said ime sure) Kids cant do ..... these days.

A while back I was talking to a college lecturer who said 90% of the kids they get these days cant do basic maths or even use a calculator.
Click to expand...

Seems simple enough, but there are two schools of thought on facebook.

4x4+4x4+4-4x4=?

Apparently 73% of people get the question wrong.
Click to expand...

Basic Maths!!!!
I've pulled the above quote from somewhere else.
Unbelievable!!!!!
But then again, that could just be representative of the mentality of Facebook users. :ciappa::smilielol5:
 
Well normally I would agree with you .. if it can't be downloaded, tweeted, facebooked or iphoned then kids just don't give a flying one.

Then daughter came home from school with the good news is she got A* in her Health & Social Care GCSE Exam and is the only one to get A*..... so my faith has been restored a bit. The flipside is a girl in her class who is 15 is 6 months pregnant and nobody is shocked at all, just matter of fact about it. ~ :(
 
Archy Styrigg said:
Basic Maths!!!!
I've pulled the above quote from somewhere else.
Unbelievable!!!!!
But then again, that could just be representative of the mentality of Facebook users. :ciappa::smilielol5:
Click to expand...


I hate all that "like if you want to support...." - its a trick, marketing. Wrapped up in a feel gulty if you don't trap.

even those click on your preferred answer things - not sure how it works but its probably just like old fashioned web page advertising - the more hits you have the more dollar you can command.
 
"Seems simple enough, but there are two schools of thought on facebook.

4x4+4x4+4-4x4=?

Apparently 73% of people get the question wrong."

A = 42. Thats the answer to everything lol. (ok its 320 without the use of a calculator or pen and paper).

I was shown the art of maths the old ways. eg:- the OP's question

20 x 0.72

0.72 x 10 = (just move the decimal up one) 7.2
7.2 x 2 = 14.4

Scientific calculators are a pain to understand but most of the time they are not needed but useful to have to hand.

 
imagesCAMNS9II.jpg
..............
 
I recall a full morning lost at college where the tutor tried to help everyone figure out how to express exponents on their various brands of calculator.

I use realcalc usually. A handy app on my phone that is a basic uncomplicated scientific calculator.
 
PEMDAS = Parenthesis, Exponents, multiplications, division, adding, and subtraction.

I looked it up from an American web site, they always have to be different.
 
Just the old codgers moaning.. But we wouldn't know as much without you'd and your experiences. If you don't know , you don't know .
 
Tiny Spark said:
Yeah we have all heard (and many said ime sure) Kids cant do ..... these days.

A while back I was talking to a college lecturer who said 90% of the kids they get these days cant do basic maths or even use a calculator.
Now I found this odd, not so much that they cant do maths but they cant use a calculator.
Now I was pretty good at maths back in the day and we were rarely aloud to use a calculator but lets face it they are not to hard to use....

Well I should say they never USED to be hard to use!

Now I think I may understand why kids cant use calculators, probably because you need a damn PHD to work it!
I had a test the other day which I was told I would need a scientific calculator for, Now ive had the same scientific calculator since I was at school, served me well through college and everything else now I couldnt find the damn thing the other day so went and brought a new one only to find when I sat this test that the answers this thing gave me were damn near useless!

I had to do 20 x 0.72, Now I know this is going to give me a answer somewhere near 15 but ime not good enough to work out exactly what.
So imagine my suprise when this bloody thing gives me a answer of 29/2!

Dont get me wrong ime sure thats a answer someone somewhere may need but I dont!
Hell I dont even know how to change that to a realistic answer I mean WTF!
Are you supposed to take instruction manuals into exam halls these days or what?

And before anyone says I know its a fractional equivalent but I could of worked that out in my head without the calculators assistance :p
Click to expand...

Why do you need a cal for 20× 0.72

Split it down in head 10x 0.72 = (7.2x2)=14.4

Simples
 
Tiny Spark said:
Yeah we have all heard (and many said ime sure) Kids cant do ..... these days.

A while back I was talking to a college lecturer who said 90% of the kids they get these days cant do basic maths or even use a calculator.
Now I found this odd, not so much that they cant do maths but they cant use a calculator.
Now I was pretty good at maths back in the day and we were rarely aloud to use a calculator but lets face it they are not to hard to use....

Well I should say they never USED to be hard to use!

Now I think I may understand why kids cant use calculators, probably because you need a damn PHD to work it!
I had a test the other day which I was told I would need a scientific calculator for, Now ive had the same scientific calculator since I was at school, served me well through college and everything else now I couldnt find the damn thing the other day so went and brought a new one only to find when I sat this test that the answers this thing gave me were damn near useless!

I had to do 20 x 0.72, Now I know this is going to give me a answer somewhere near 15 but ime not good enough to work out exactly what.
So imagine my suprise when this bloody thing gives me a answer of 29/2!

Dont get me wrong ime sure thats a answer someone somewhere may need but I dont!
Hell I dont even know how to change that to a realistic answer I mean WTF!
Are you supposed to take instruction manuals into exam halls these days or what?

And before anyone says I know its a fractional equivalent but I could of worked that out in my head without the calculators assistance :p
Click to expand...

You're not alone there bonny lad .. I can't use them scientific things either.

In my day, we used Slide Rules but the only thing I used them for was stirring paint.
 
shanky887614 said:
I know what a log table is but I have never seen one?

Can you post a pic for everyone that is missing out
Click to expand...

It's a book of tables and there are two books.

The first is Logarithms and the second is Antilogarithms.

So for example you have a couple of huge numbers that you want to multiply together and know that doing it longhand with pen and paper will take forever you get you book of Logarithm tables out and in it you find numbers that correspond with what you're multiplying.

Think of it as like coding a secret message.

You add these numbers together then look for the sum of numbers in your Antilogarithms table and it gives you the answer like de coding a secret message.

It's difficult to explain here without having the things in front of you and since I haven't used them since about 1972 my memory is a bit shaky

The slide rule was developed from these tables.

THIS will explain it for you Logarithm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Picture here: http://www.girishgovindan.com/uploads/mt/Log_Antilog.pdf
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Archy Styrigg said:
Calculators, slide rules...
Pah! Log tables every time! :)
Click to expand...

Thats take me back, I just caught the back end of using a slide rule in maths. Wouldn't have a clue how to use it now other than knowing you could pull the middle bit out and move a cursor!

And definately prefer using my calculator to log tables .......
 
LeeH said:
They still are, nothing has changed you still have to show your workings.
Click to expand...

Now you are joking, ....Nothing has changed?? No such thing as multiple choice questions in any C&G or any other of the exams i sat. You had to answer the question posed with the correct answer. In other words if you hadn't done the studying and the revision, you failed!! lol!!
 
As the father of two teenagers (16 & 14) it drives me absolutely nuts! "What homework have you got, then?" "Look something up on Google".

When they came out of primary school they knew their times tables, could do long(ish) addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc. Six months at secondary and they've forgotten how to tie their shoe laces. In fairness, the lad's quite bright so I make a point of making him do stuff in his head at home still, but I still pull my hair out sometimes when he reaches for the calculator to do some fairly basic stuff.

LOL......in the middle of writing this post ^^^ I got interrupted by girl going off to school: "Dad, can I have £4 for a new calculator please?" (they sell 'the school one' at school). "Why?" "It's run out of battery". Put a new battery in (it's like witchcraft, you know) and it's still dead so I'm not sure if I've got the right shrapnel around (and sending a sixteen year old girl out the door with a purple and expecting change is just a wasted exercise) so I throw mine at her and say borrow mine for the day and we'll sort it out later, to which she explodes in rage because "yours hasn't got the right buttons on it!!" FFS, shoot me now, I don't want to see the end of civilisation that we appear to be breeding.
 
Rockingit said:
As the father of two teenagers (16 & 14) it drives me absolutely nuts! "What homework have you got, then?" "Look something up on Google".

When they came out of primary school they knew their times tables, could do long(ish) addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc. Six months at secondary and they've forgotten how to tie their shoe laces. In fairness, the lad's quite bright so I make a point of making him do stuff in his head at home still, but I still pull my hair out sometimes when he reaches for the calculator to do some fairly basic stuff.

LOL......in the middle of writing this post ^^^ I got interrupted by girl going off to school: "Dad, can I have £4 for a new calculator please?" (they sell 'the school one' at school). "Why?" "It's run out of battery". Put a new battery in (it's like witchcraft, you know) and it's still dead so I'm not sure if I've got the right shrapnel around (and sending a sixteen year old girl out the door with a purple and expecting change is just a wasted exercise) so I throw mine at her and say borrow mine for the day and we'll sort it out later, to which she explodes in rage because "yours hasn't got the right buttons on it!!" FFS, shoot me now, I don't want to see the end of civilisation that we appear to be breeding.
Click to expand...

I do wonder how much stuff gets chucked out these days because the batteries have run out. My kids usually come to me saying it's stopped and dad goes in his battery box and fixes it. I cringe when I'm at mates houses and they just accept that it stopped so it's been thrown away and they need a new one, they will spend pounds rather than pence but then if the school has a stock of calculators rather than batteries is that the way they are being educated
 

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