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CronoDAS comments on [Link] Why the kids don’t know no algebra - Less Wrong Discussion
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Personally, I think it's harder to learn arithmetic than to learn algebra once you already know arithmetic. The amount of memorization that you need to do to be able to calculate 247 / 15 is a lot more than the amount of memorization that you have to do to go from being able to calculate 247 / 15 to being able to solve (2X + 3) / 5 = 13.
It looks like the second sentence contradicts the first. Does one of them have a typo?
Yeah, I goofed. Fixed now.
I now agree with both sentences!
Edit: Although it is possible to do arithmetic without memorizing multiplication tables and similar large collections of arithmetic facts (by, say, drawing dots on paper and counting them). See one of my favorite quotes.
Yeah, it's just much more efficient that way. (Sometimes when I had a bit of trouble recalling the product of, say, 8 * 7, I found myself doing things like calculating 7 * 7+7 to find the answer instead.)
Also, a professor I had at college for one of my computer-related courses said that the long division algorithm is one of the most complicated algorithms around and it's by far more complicated than any of the other algorithms taught in school.