[modeleng] Re: Swarf!
- From: peter.chadwick@xxxxxxxxxxx
- To: modeleng@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006 09:03:09 +0000
Jesse said:
>My son teaches machine shop and many of
his students are functionally illiterate and innumerate,<
In my innocence, I would have thought that you just CANNOT do much - if
anything - in a machine
shop without being relatively numerate. Except maybe sweep the floor and
fetch the tea. I'll admit
to using a calculator (although my favourite calculator is my old HP41,
using Reverse Polish
Notation - I've had that for 19 years now, having shamed my boss into
buying it for me for work by
going into a customer meeting with a slide rule in hand!) which was about
2 UKP and isn't RPN,
so I have trouble driving it for anything other than very simple
calculations. But I find that for a lot of
the simplest marking out, I need to do a bit of calculation - things like
PCDs, distances between
gear centres and so on. Even have to use triganometry occasionally.
So is this lack of numeracy the reason that the kids don't do well in a
machine shop course?
And is it perhaps why there aren't that many younger people entering model
engineering?
Peter Chadwick
Swindon
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