the discussion about bill cosby's speech at the naacp commemoration of the supreme courts ruling on brown vs board of education (those of you who havent continued to follow the thread may have missed a comment by 'bill cosby' ) has shaken loose a couple of memories that have not much to do with the topic but arent totally out of the park in that they relate to education in general and the way people are taught to learn.
the first involves the young son of a friend who was supposed to be doing his arithmetic homework problems while we were working on his father's company's annual catalog. the kid reminds me a lot of myself in one unfortunate respect: he had 15 addition and subtraction problems to solve--which he could easily have completed in 10 minutes and then spent the next 60 minutes playing--that he ignored, pretended to be working on, ignored a while longer, whined about the injustice of being forced to sit inside while it was nice outside and otherwise wasted a tull 70 minutes accomplishing nothing. my father could multiply two three digit numbers in his head in less time than it took me to type this sentence. so he had very little patience during the 9 years or so when i did pretty much the same as my friend's son night after night after night.
what i eventually began to believe was a dislike of mathmatics or inability to understand math was something entirely different...although i didnt realize that until i was nearly 24. in the meantime, the world lost a potentially great (or prematurely dead) herpetologist because i didnt have the skills to make it past freshman biochemistry.
anyway, it struck me strange that my friend's son had to deal with solving arithmetic problems when calculators were so easily and inexpensively available. i mentioned it to my friend and then told him that my real problem with all the forms of math that one learns later would very likely not been a problem if i'd been able to use a calculator in 3rd grade. i made silly addition and subtraction mistakes (i still do) and multiplication/division just made it worse. as my classes moved on into story problems, i knew the correct operation...but id get the wrong answer and after a while i stopped caring.
working my first 'real' job (one that didnt involve a guitar and that i wasnt planning to quit as soon as i had enough money to live between gigs), i was picked to help a consultant work out some designs. i knew there was a way to make all the parts work together and i knew that way was called 'geometry' and i also remembered id immediately forgotten what little geometry id somehow managed to absorb only 9 years earlier. on the way home i stopped at a used book store and picked up a geometry textbook and over the next 2-3 weeks i retaught (actually taught would be more accurate because i really hadnt learned a damn thing about geometry the first time) myself the entire course. i was more than surprised and decided to see if i could do the same thing with algebra. my friends thought i was nuts anyway; any residual doubts they might have harbored vanished upon the arrival of the algebra book. 3 weeks later, i was able to do all the tests without a problem. suddenly my college board math test scores (which were higher than any in my school that year--high enough that the nun who was only passing me through algebra 2 to get rid of me felt compelled to slap me with the results hahaha) made more sense.
the other memory involves a guy who taught me about ocean fishing. hed dropped out of high school but was doing well for himself because he was a talented mechanic. his dream was to skipper a sportfishing party boat. hed spent a good part of his life on fishing boats--commercial and sportfishing--and he knew more than most of the guys who piloted the boats we fished on.
the licensed skippers knew that he did so i fished free whenever we went together. on several occasions, id witnessed him talking the captain through situations that could easily have been catastrophic. id also been with him when he put the boat on a spot using only his instincts and this mysterious notebook filled with sketches of barely distinguishable markers (sight-lining a buoy on one side with an oil platform on the other but both nearly invisible).
eventually he put together enough money and resolve to take a course in preparation for the coast guard certification test. he really threw himself into the course but was having a difficult time with the sections that dealt with navigation based on speed, time and distance. i offered to help him and discovered his real problem was a seeming inability to determine which operation was called for. in other words, if youre cruising at 8 knots (? hahaha) for 6 hours, how long will it take you to reach point x? he could use a calculator during the test, but it didnt help if he didnt know that the key to determining the answer was to multiply speed x time to = distance. when to multiply, what to multiply, when to divide, etc. was beyond his grasp in the abstract. behind the wheel, he would have done it correctly without realizing he was 'solving a problem'. (i knew someone else who had the same difficulty even though hed served a full hitch in the navy and had piloted a gunboat in some sort of secret cambodian campaign in the early 70s).
would using a calculator in 3rd grade have helped those two guys? i believe so because it would have taken the unnecessary drudgery out of arithmetic and freed them up--the same way it would have freed me--to concentrate on the real issue which is how not how much is 5 + 12?
i can almost hear voices asking...'yeah but what happens when you dont have a calculator and you havent memorized all those stupid times tables?' just as i can hear my own response: 'you make sure you have a calculator...i dont go out without my glasses or a watch.' whats more, im fairly sure that just doing the operations and seein the arithmetic would quickly and subliminally 'teach' the basics we all memorize anyway.