[FRIAM] New Mexican's Sunday's story on education proficiency

[steve smith]

> Numbers are real things. The more one explores them, the more 
> experiences one has of them, the more confidently one comes to rely on 
> them.

automatic cash registers (and calculators to some extent) reduced 
numbers to numerals (or in some cases mere signifiers?) so it any wonder 
that people whose daily work is facilitated by them are not only enabled 
to lose (or fail to acquire) numeracy but have had numeracy and basic 
arithmetic (add/subtract whole numbers) displaced by this.

The year my parents bought us a dart-board for xmas (mid grade 2) and 
the subsequent dart-play-binging and even dreaming dart scoring really 
cemented my basic arithmetic skills.  The modulo 21 version where if you 
went *over* 21 you went back to the residual points over 21, putting a 
big premium on being able to subtract your current score from 21 and 
seeking a 3 dart combination of scores to sum to that value and then 
recalculate after each dart-throw.

There were no calculators of note (mechanical tape adders though) in my 
youth so long-addition/subtraction were ubiquitous skills as was doing 
the same in your head for at least a few digit numbers.   They became 
widespread by the time I was out of college and change-making cash 
registers the same... numeracy had already begun to become numerology at 
that time (late 70s).

I learned a slip-stick out of curiosity and the portability/compactness 
of a trig table-on-a-stick in middle school with model rocketry 
(estimating altitude visually) and it took me from working with numbers 
to working with quantities and magnitudes and estimates and "acceptable 
errors".   I probably didn't do a single calculation with one after that 
(maybe a couple) but it really set in my mind how exponents/logs worked 
and an intuition for trigonometric relations (mostly just looking up a 
tangent of an angle and dividing by some odd number being the 
standoff-pacing from the launch of the oberver).

Half the folks here surely used a slide-rule at some point in their life 
and roughly half probably only barely knows what they look like or how 
they work?   Pretty quick transition.   Zs and Millenials probably will 
have the same experience with maps and directions... given the mobile 
devices.
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