A few education ramblings
2002-01-24 15:27:30+00 by
Dan Lyke
3 comments
David Chess talks about his daughter's science class, asking:
is there any respectable linguistic community for whom "battery"
is a subset of "generator"?
Several things come up: I was leafing through some materials from my childhood, and came across notes from a session on fractions. There, carefully laid out and obviously memorized, were terms that I have never heard as an adult.
And in related news, Alec learned the lesson: He talked to the right people and got a different math teacher, and hasn't called me for tutoring help even when I've offered.
[ related topics:
Children and growing up Current Events Mathematics
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:34:44+00 by:
concept14
So what are those terms you've never used as an adult?
Numerator, denominator, reciprocal?
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:34:44+00 by:
Dan Lyke
The ones I found again easily this morning were "proper fractions" and "improper fractions".
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:34:45+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Thought about "reciprocal" a bit: I've heard and read and used "one over" a lot. I've never heard someone talk about, say, in real-time rendering, the difficulties of calculating "the reciprocal of z". This may be an anomaly just because the equations I'm usually working with are either something simple like 1/z or have enough divisions that terms like "reciprocal" aren't precise enough to describe the operation.
But unlike "proper" and "improper" fractions (<1 and >=1, respectively), numerator and denominator get used in my life a lot.