I have a question. I'll preface this by saying that my dad has taught mathematics and physics for 45 years, and he agrees with me.
What good does it do to teach a 4th grader, or for that matter, any child F.E.E. = Front End Estimation?
In FEE, you take the first digit of a number and make all subsequent numbers 0 to get your answer. For example.
Using the front number only, if Bob sells 198 candy bars, and Alice sells 679 candy bars, how many did they sell?
A)800 B)900 C)500 D) 700
The answer is D, 700. This answer is not even close to what the answer would really be, 877. However, if you rounded the numbers, the answer would be 900, which is relatively close.
My oldest child has to do problems of this sort for Accellerated Math. I can not for the life of me understand what good it does to teach a kid to work problems in this way. Many times, the answers are not even close, especially when you have numbers like 1,845 + 1,590 which would equal 1,000 + 1,000, which of course is no where close to the solution.
Why teach a child this method?? Does anybody understand it?? It certainly wasn't taught when I was in school, and my semi-genius father doesn't understand the reasoning either.
I did find this link that I thought was interesting.
Thanks for any input.
What good does it do to teach a 4th grader, or for that matter, any child F.E.E. = Front End Estimation?
In FEE, you take the first digit of a number and make all subsequent numbers 0 to get your answer. For example.
Using the front number only, if Bob sells 198 candy bars, and Alice sells 679 candy bars, how many did they sell?
A)800 B)900 C)500 D) 700
The answer is D, 700. This answer is not even close to what the answer would really be, 877. However, if you rounded the numbers, the answer would be 900, which is relatively close.
My oldest child has to do problems of this sort for Accellerated Math. I can not for the life of me understand what good it does to teach a kid to work problems in this way. Many times, the answers are not even close, especially when you have numbers like 1,845 + 1,590 which would equal 1,000 + 1,000, which of course is no where close to the solution.
Why teach a child this method?? Does anybody understand it?? It certainly wasn't taught when I was in school, and my semi-genius father doesn't understand the reasoning either.
I did find this link that I thought was interesting.
Thanks for any input.
