No, ability is primarily driven by effort put into it. I wasn't good at math when I was a kid, I was terrible at reading. I could barely read at all until I was 8, certainly well behind my peers. The logical extension of your view is that I not be required to read or write because it was frustrating.

After many years, I did eventually manage to master reading sufficiently well that I can read without needing to hear the words in my head as I go along and I actually enjoy reading. The parts of my brain responsible for it eventually were able to figure it out and now I can read quite well.

The same thing goes for other subjects, we make students take those classes so that they can develop those portions of the brain that they wouldn't otherwise develop. This is one of the reasons why Americans, even ones with poor health generally, are in better condition neurologically into old age than people in other countries.

Had the educational establishment taken your view on this, I would never have been able to get the satisfaction out of helping other people learn how to read and do math. I would have been severely disadvantaged even though I have only a minor learning disorder.

The problem is that you rarely, if ever, see somebody that can't do basic arithmetic who is able to understand things well enough to use a calculator. I tutor developmental math students on this stuff, and by and large I don't see very many of them that understand the concepts without being able to perform basic arithmetic. It's far more common for them to get the arithmetic, but be completely unable to do math.

There's no contradiction there. There is some declarative knowledge that you have to learn in any field. If you don't know your times tables, it's difficult to function at all in society where math is being used. It was expected of myself and my classmates to be permitted to move to fifth grade that we know our times tables up to 10x10.

In fact without some declarative knowledge you'll never advance very far. It's declarative because there isn't really anything to understand other than the fact that it is what it is.

But, what I'm talking about is that they'll be expected to do question after question extremely quickly without being asked to understand why or be able to come up with the equations on their own. It's basically completely worthless in the real world as nobody ever gives you a problem like that to solve outside of the academic world.

The US has been focused more on mathematics for as long as I can remember. That's one reason why the US is usually behind China in terms of math, China places a ton of value on turning children into calculators rather than understanding any of the math they're being expected to rote memorize.

I'm not so sure that going the computer route is such a great idea. It's all well and good to use computers and calculators, but if you don't know your times tables and you can't do long division, you're going to be stuck having to have a calculator at all times. Which is more reasonable now than it used to be, but you'd be surprised how much faster it can be to do things on paper sometimes.

Oh, and good luck getting a calculator to tell you what went wrong when a number you get isn't right.

Not really, gaming in general does have positive impacts on the brain. This specific type of game is too new to make those sorts of definitive statements. But, it's been known since at least the early '80s that gaming does improve the rate at which people think beyond the typical hand eye coordination claims.

I'd recommend reading Maximum Brainpower by Breznitz, Shlomo before making such claims. The research is less conclusive when it comes to things which happen once one is an adult and it's unlikely that anything will change the outcome once dementia is already present, but the idea that the brain doesn't adapt to such stimulation at all or does so in such a specific way is not something that's particularly well supported.

No, that's actually more recent. I remember when I was a kid having to do a lot more work because my handwriting was much smaller than my classmates. The reason for the specificity is that students get rather good at using the largest margins, typeface and font size that they can get away with to pad their work. It means that if they want to pad out their work, they have to go to a lot more work than just adding additional points to their report.

Private data no, but I'm pretty sure that FB requires people to pay if they want to use spiders to get all the data that's been posted, rather than just small amounts about individuals.

Thank you for proving my point. It's well established that you can't make money if you're being paid less in interest than you're losing to inflation. In order to make money you need to actually have interest rates marginally higher than inflation. What's more, you can't invest small amounts of money as efficiently as you can large amounts of money leading to the situation that the GGGP was talking about.

But, then again, why should I assume that a specialty that only recently discovered that not everybody makes purely rational decisions with full knowledge of what they're doing, would understand something that simple.

So, you've successfully proven that you're a bigot and don't require the Pope to rationalize your bigotry. I'm sure your mother would be so proud of you.

The Pope should have been passed over in favor of somebody a little more aware of the consequences of his words.

It's not really that complicated, as long as you don't have a PhD in economics it's pretty clear. The fact that it's not more commonly known is purely because people are incredibly lazy when it comes to intellectual matters.

Looks like I pissed off one of the 503 people that actually was foolish enough to buy one of these things.

Indeed, that's why I generally glance at other people's watches during meetings, it's much less likely that anybody will figure out what's going on.

Also, it's astonishing how many people make those sorts of claims, like the GP, about young folks when it's those young folks parents who apparently failed to instill the values that they're then bitching about young people not having.

Or, you buy ones that are a year or so out of fashion at a massive discount. My Seiko was $150, IIRC, and that was a huge discount off the price when that model was current. Plus, since they tend to last forever, nobody realizes that I got a really good deal on it.

That's only guaranteed if the messages don't need to move between servers. If they do, then there's the theoretical 5 days or so that the servers are supposed to keep trying to find a route before giving up. One of the downsides to the decentralized nature of the net is that sometimes things just get lost.

Doing it wrong? You can't grade papers when you're giving classes. And they typically don't give you more than an hour of prep time a day. Which means that you're working outside of school time to keep up with the demands of the job.

I'm very curious as to how one avoids doing any of the prep work or grading that's associated with giving out home work. Yes, the ratio is a bit better if you're giving more homework, but students don't have unlimited time to do homework and if each teacher assigns 15 minutes of homework, that adds up to an hour and a half a night. On top of which you've then got to grade probably 5 classes worth of homework.

If there were an easier way without completely abandoning the students, I think teachers would be doing that.