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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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every student keep a dictionary to look up any word they didn’t know how to pronounce at all times.

This is the absolute stupidest thing I have ever heard. The idea that somebody would suggest something this stupid, in earnest, is baffling to me. It seems the equivalent would be to have every child carry a book that had every combination of numbers added together in a lookup table, instead of teaching them how to do math.

Astonishing.

That was how they used to do logarithms and trigonometric functions.

I don't have a part of my brain dedicated to trig.

What does that have to do with anything? That was the best way, and those table were painfully calculated (e.g. by series expansion), and then shared with others so they wouldn't have to repeat the work.

With phonics (and word attack skills, as they were called when I learned them), you have a better way than "memorize each answer).

Even tables are better than this -- you interpolate between the given values to get the ones you need.

(Also, in some domains tables is pretty close to how those things are still done, it's just the computer is doing it for you. Admittedly for most there are fairly good functions or HW that converge on the answer quickly, so that's done rather than just a table, but even that is something of a blend, where a number of coefficients is saved, and the computer plugs the number into a long polynomial).

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