Re: Abolish Fractions?

On 2008-01-31, Bill Dubuque <wgd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But such ratios and proportions can just as easily be expressed in
terms of decimal fractions for the purposes of the layperson.

How many decimal places do you want for 1/3?

I do see part of the point. There's a reason why virtually no
programming languages make any provision for dealing with rationals.
For practical purposes, integers suffice for almost all computations
that must be exact, and there are decimals (well, bicimals) for the
rest.


In fact I suspect most readers will have a hard time thinking of any
real-word problem that requires integral fractions as opposed to
decimal fractions.

Yeah, most of the examples I could come up with could be eliminated by
a very simple rewording of the problem. Almost all of the remainder
were cases where using fractions would be misleadingly exact anyway.


Perhaps DeTurck is proposing that one should delay the teaching of
integral fractions until the student has sufficient background to
appreciate some of these finer points, esp. if there is no other
need to introduce them earlier.

The only practical (rather than pedagogical) advantage I see is that
fractions sometimes allow exact computation whereas decimals are
almost always inexact.

I haven't read DeTurck's proposal at all, but I think introducing
fractions along with other symbolic math concepts (e.g. basic algebra)
would be quite reasonable. Then again I think at least some parts of
symbolic math could and should be introduced a lot earlier than they
are.


- Tim
.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Abolish Fractions?
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