One Point of View: Basic Mathematical Skills or School Survival Skills?
E. A. Maier · The Arithmetic Teacher · 1987
Some lists of “basic mathematical skills” lead me to wonder why certain topics are included. To me the designation of a mathematical skill as “basic” implies the need for that skill in life beyond school. But I see topics on such lists that have nothing to do with pre paring students to function mathematically in the nonschool world. For example, consider paper-and-pencil procedures for computing problems like 136.7 × 56.8 or 7584 ÷ 354. In a half-century of doing mathematics—as a schoolboy, as a college and graduate student, in any number of odd jobs that paid my way through college, as an industrial mathematician, as a university teacher and reearcher, in everyday life, and just for fun—nothing I have done, apart from schoolwork, requires uch procedures today.