Comment on Rationality Games & Apps Brainstorming

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 08:37:56 GMT

Just because something doesn't teach everything about a subject doesn't make it a poor instructional aid. Algebra is more than rote memorization, but having the rules memorized does help a lot in getting to the stage where you truly understand it. Even if you do understand it and could in principle recreate the rules from scratch, recalling them from memory is faster than deriving them each time you need them - and since algebra is pretty much the foundation of all advanced math, you'll be needing them a lot if you want to study math at all. (Though if you end up struggling with the harder topics because you didn't have the rules of algebra appropriately memorized, you might never want to study more of it...)

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