Rochester takes another hit

[hup_d_dup]

Xerox Corporation has been taken over by Fujifilm Holdings. The company, formerly headquartered in Rochester, has been steadily losing market share and employees since its copier patents began to expire in the 1980's. Fuji plans to cut about 10,000 jobs worldwide. Kodak and Xerox were the two largest employers in Rochester, as well as two of the largest companies in the U.S.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/busi ... d=49411706" target="_blank

[Dan Schultz]

IBM went through the same thing a couple of decades ago.

[Radar]

Yes last week we learned that Xerox is vacating their headquarters building in downtown Rochester to move to their Webster (a north eastern suburb of Rochester) manufacturer facility. Then we learned about the Fuji merger. The Biggest Employer in Rochester now is the University of Rochester, which includes Strong Hospital, and the Eastman School of Music. Not great news for a city struggling to come back.

[Donn]

I'll tell you what, you can have Amazon, with my blessings.

[Three Valves]

Amazon and Billionaire- Boy Bezos picks the pockets of every local and State government by not withholding and paying their fare share of sales tax. Not to mention selling counterfeit merchandise....

Care to guess why he gets away with it??

[pwhitaker]

They can't handle the truth!

[Dan Schultz]

..... That's OK. Though at premium prices, at least, we can always count on American universities to always teach our children the absolute truth.

[iiipopes]

They can't handle the truth!

...says the mathematician.

Common Core tries very hard, but all it can manage to do with arithmetic and mathematics is to make them "confusing"...Though it attempts to, if fails to make them lie.

"Common Core" reminds me of "New Math" that we suffered in the early '70s. Equally as bad. Even my cousins, two teachers, and one of them is married to a superintendent, cringe at "Common Core," especially since we have teachers from previous generations and eras in all branches of the family.

What ever happened to memorizing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables, being taught to "carry" the digits, and the difference between estimates and actual computation?

[MaryAnn]

I'm glad I went to grade school when I did....I remember doing long division homework in 3rd grade. It was a process, and I doubt I understood what it meant, but I was able to get right answers. When I was older and actually studied math, (as opposed to arithmetic) I was still confused but got right answers (and would still like to go back and understand it some day.) Now....I don't even know if they teach times tables any more, or what they have replaced long division with. I should go do some volunteer math tutoring just to find out.

[Three Valves]

Benny would never hit Rochester;

he had more insidious methods...

[Three Valves]

Q. Why did men used to lounge around in extremely high waisted (by modern hip-hugger standards) pleated trousers??

A. Because they are so freaking comfortable, that's why!!

[pwhitaker]

Waist knot; want knot.

[roweenie]

They can't handle the truth!

...says the mathematician.

Common Core tries very hard, but all it can manage to do with arithmetic and mathematics is to make them "confusing"...Though it attempts to, if fails to make them lie.

"Common Core" reminds me of "New Math" that we suffered in the early '70s. Equally as bad. Even my cousins, two teachers, and one of them is married to a superintendent, cringe at "Common Core," especially since we have teachers from previous generations and eras in all branches of the family.

What ever happened to memorizing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables, being taught to "carry" the digits, and the difference between estimates and actual computation?

It's all about the money.

Math (1+1=2, etc.) hasn't changed since the beginning, nor will it ever.

What changes over time is how it's presented; and how it's presented is determined by "eggheads in ivory towers" (a.k.a. "academicians in universities"), who, despite having never taught the subject at hand (and also anxious to come up with a new "angle" to justify their cushy existence), are going to tell YOU, the lowly knuckle-dragging teacher with 20+ years experience (a.k.a. "the person on the front lines who actually sees what works, and what doesn't"), how it's supposed to be done.....and in the meantime, collect a healthy sum in grant money, funded by our tax dollars.

But hold on, for this is only the beginning - as the new "concept" filters down to its final destination, others jump on the gravy train (ie. textbook publishers, heaven forefend we use an old textbook, even if it already works well) and take their cut.

Ultimately, all of this is driven by the currently-prevalent (stupid) concept that "if it's new, it must be better".

Nevermind the fact that it makes it harder for the kids to understand; at least we can all "feel good about ourselves" for having "done something" about "the problem", right?

(rant over)

[Three Valves]

Ultimately, all of this is driven by the currently-prevalent (stupid) concept that "if it's new, it must be better".

True for math, true for pants!!

[hup_d_dup]

Could someone please provide some samples of new math? I always hear the complaints, but never the examples.

Just curious.

Hup

[Donn]

Could someone please provide some samples of new math?

Good question. I looked around a little, and it was surprising how little we seem to remember about it. From someone at the "Straight Dope science advisory board",

The following examples may help to clarify the difference between the new and old math.

1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?

1970 (Traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. What is his profit?

1975 (New Math): A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1.

(a) make 100 dots representing the elements of the set M

(b) The set C representing costs of production contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent the set C as a subset of the set M.

(c) What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?

1990 (Dumbed-down math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Underline the number 20.

1997 (Whole Math): By cutting down a forest full of beautiful trees, a logger makes $20.

(a) What do you think of this way of making money?

(b) How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?

(c) Draw a picture of the forest as you’d like it to look.

This implies that there have been more than one "new" maths, one in the '60s and one in the '70s. I spent the '60s in primary/secondary and don't remember the exotic topics supposedly taught in new math - modular arithmetic, matrices etc. Could be that's "New Math (1975)".

Since that mostly satirical illustration painted a ridiculous picture of "Whole Math (1997)", I looked that up, though it's a little off topic as of course that's much later than "New Math". As best as I can make out on casual review, it tries harder to pull in the context of the kind of problems where we use math, and to teach the skills that we use in finding the appropriate math to use. That sounds good, but then someone has to write the textbooks, and that appears to be where a lot of these initiatives go sour.

Regina Brunner, a mathematics and computer science professor at Cedar Crest College, gave the following example to illustrate the difference between an old math problem and a new one:

Old Method -- "If Bobby has 23 balls and Jimmy has 47, what is the total number of balls?"

New Method -- Students are told to "measure one square foot on the playground and count how many ants are in the square foot. Then estimate how many ants there are on the playground." They also could be asked to do the same exercise in a muddy area or a grassy area and draw comparisons, which would bring science into the lesson.

... yeah, "science", but also some appreciation for how we get numbers. Count ants in the grass, and then think about what that number means, relative to the number counted on the asphalt. One's much more accurate than the other, because you're very likely to miss some of the ants in the grass. Neither is perfectly accurate. The numbers will also vary over time, etc. etc. You want kids to be able to run arithmetic, but also have sense of why, and how much it depends on the data, and a sense of purpose from that connection could make it easier to devote the attention necessary to learning the arithmetic.

For an example someone related to me, a guy I know who has done some remedial tutoring at grade school level: he'd pose a simple arithmetic question, like 100 - 57. Kid shrugs, no idea. My friend changes the question to, suppose I sell you something for 57¢, you give me a dollar, and I give you back 23¢. Kid immediately protests that he's been robbed! I don't know how often it would really work like that, but it was a real story. The principle that by accident happen to be (I think) "Whole Math", is that the problem is put in a real life functional domain that does call for arithmetic. If the kid turned out to still have a problem reliably getting the answer, maybe you could draw on the the estimation that's a part of whole math: consider, about how much are 57, and 23, out of 100? If you subtract and carry and make a mistake, can you tell that your result isn't close to what you'd expect? I'm just making some guesses here, not involved in education at all, but it makes a great deal of sense to me that real ability to use mathematics involves a fairly broad range of skills, like estimation.

[Three Valves]

Have you seen what they expect kids to play just to try out for County Band recently??

[Radar]

Well as a 57 year old with two grown sons the biggest difference I've seen in Math from when I was in school until now is the absence of text books, and the blending of math subjects together. When I was in high school in ninth grade you took algebra, 10th grade Geometry, 11th Grade Trig, 12th Grad Calculus and you were given an appropriate text book to work from with examples and text explaining how to do the problems. Now you're given worksheets off the copy machine with no instruction as to how you are expected to solve the problems. If you got the information in class you're good to go, if you didn't understand it during class you have no chance when you get home of figuring it out from the worksheets provided. One example of this is my son who I believe was in 5th or 6th grade at the time, was doing a unit in school on estimating (which I couldn't tell from the homework problem he was sent home with). His homework assignment was to come up with the area of a circle drawn on Graph paper. I showed him the formula for the area of a circle and we solved the problem. His teacher was expecting them to count the squares on the graph paper and estimate the area of the circle. The result of this was I got a nasty note from the Teacher asking me not to help my son with his math homework. If there had been a text book to go along with this unit, I would have probably seen what they were working on, and would have been able to properly explain it to him. The different methods they teach math in now, combined with the lack of actual text books causes a lot of confusion for parents because we don't actually have a chance to see what or how the children are being taught. No doubt if we saw it in a text book we could understand it, and be able to help our children do the work as the teachers intended. The math concepts aren't that different from what we learned, but the order and way the information is presented is quite different.