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weebecka:

OldAndrew - many apologies but I'm new here.  I'm not sure where you're coming from.  Could you tell me a bit more about your background so that I can understand why you hold your views?

You do like to press people for their details, don't you?  Most of us manage to converse on TES without being so nosey.

Middlemarch:

You do like to press people for their details, don't you?  Most of us manage to converse on TES without being so nosey.

Really Middlemarch?  It seems I was misled then.

http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/455737.aspx?PageIndex=7

When discussions get stuck, as here
where OldAndrew is pushing the importance of fluency in solving quadratics and I (and others) am suggesting instead that a connected understanding of the varied contexts and processes of quadratics is sufficient and that an appropriate level of fluency will come with the development of higher order skills,
grounding our viewpoints in our contexts/experience helps to move the conversation on. 

No personal information is required beyond that which is relevant to the subject under discussion.  This is an ethnographic technique Middlemarch, not noseyness.

I was told a few times that OldAndrew had a blog, but depite my requests I was never given a link to it.  Could someone provide one now?  That might be sufficient and the information is already public.

oldandrew:

I'm not suggesting teaching to the test, just suggesting that we don't try to deliberately formulate a version of learning that is "practical" to the point of being dumbed down.

Why is teaching all 7 methods (including this one)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkPfW40DFyk

dumbing down?

Which methods do you feel are important and which are not oldandrew?

bgy1mm:

In the not too distant future everyone will have a phone in his pocket with high-resolution colour display, and with a graphical calculator loaded onto it as standard. More advanced calculators will be available for those who want them.

DM:

bgy1mm:

In the not too distant future everyone will have a phone in his pocket with high-resolution colour display, and with a graphical calculator loaded onto it as standard. More advanced calculators will be available for those who want them.

And only 2% of the population will be able to use them.

This is one of the points I try to make.

It is necessary to teach children how to use calculators. There's a sense that calculators are "cheating", therefore to be discouraged,  therefore it demeans the school to actually acknowledge that they are to be used.

You can't give a child or even an older student something like R (a powerful statistical analysis package) and expect him to use it. As calculators get more sophisticated, they get harder to use.