this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
588 points (97.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35881 readers
3597 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

From https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/14phpbq/how_is_it_possible_that_roughly_50_of_americans/

Question above is pretty blunt but was doing a study for a college course and came across that stat. How is that possible? My high school sucked but I was well equipped even with that sub standard level of education for college. Obviously income is a thing but to think 1 out of 5 American adults is categorized as illiterate is…astounding. Now poor media literacy I get, but not this. Edit: this was from a department of education report from 2022. Just incase people are curious where that comes from. It does also specify as literate in English so maybe not as grim as I thought.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] yaaaaayPancakes 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Does she understand the concept of multiplication though? That's ultimately the important part.

Learning rote things like multiplication tables seems kinda silly in a world where Google can just do the math for you. But the important thing is to be able to recognize when multiplication is useful.

[–] FlyingSquid 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There are still plenty of instances where doing arithmetic quickly in your head is useful (figuring out a tip at the cash register, for example) that memorizing it can have advantages.

[–] yaaaaayPancakes 2 points 1 year ago

I agree that mental math is useful, but in scenarios like that, times tables aren't really useful since the tables are rotely memorized and rarely does a bill fall nicely into a times table.

Better to learn a technique like "move the decimal place left one position and double that number to get 20%".

But realistically, with a phone in your pocket, it's not much more effort to pull it out and use the calculator.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly. I didn't learn multiplication tables, but instead, my teachers taught what multiplication was and how to do it. Sure, after practicing how to do it I memorized a lot of basic math facts, but it was more important that I understand what I was doing rather than just knowing that 9×5=45. Then again, my parents saw the sorry state of public schools (both teachers) and made sure that I was sent to a decent private school after seeing the travesty of the local public school's reading curriculum.