quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:

quote:

Originally posted by P250UA5:
Guess length x width & evaluate with the above measure. Then guess again & reevaluate, and keep on like that until you get x, and you have the correct dimensions.

This is how you do it when you are too dumb to know the correct formula (which is about as easy as it comes). This is what your tax dollars are supporting...to the tune of roughly $10K/year/student.

Yeah, I did it 'their way' which took 5-6 lines to evaluate.
Then did it the easy way in 2-3 steps.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
Around thirty or forty years ago, I was taking an old-timer to retrieve his repaired airplane from an airport an hour or so away. The old-timer was retired from either Pan-American or TWA, I don't remember which but when he retired, he held the record for the number of trans-Atlantic flights.

At the time that we made this trip, GPS navigation was not common in General Aviation; the primary radio navigation aid was VOR and we determined the correct WCA (Wind Correction Angle) by a process called "bracketing."
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He did that in is head in a second or two, and nailed our heading for the flight. No calculator, no circular slide rule, no working it out on paper.

I remembered that "one weird trick" and used it for a few decades of flying. It always worked.

That is a really cool trick! I never heard that before.

I used to keep a notebook of Rules of Thumb like that. When to lead the turn in on a DME arc, when to start a descent based on ground speed, wind correction angle in the hold, etc. It wasn't that long ago we were still flying DME arcs to a VOR approach, or NDB approaches into non-radar airports. One airport was famous for having to hold over the NDB which was both the initial fix and the missed approach fix. We got really good at being precise using those mental hacks.

It wasn't long after I became Captain that we started getting new hires who had never flown an airplane with an ADF. There's nothing like getting hold instructions at night in crappy weather headed into a mountain airport when the FO admits it!

But now The Box (FMS) is the brain. Too bad for the newer generations, they are missing out on the art of flying.

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Originally posted by radioman:


...Seeing one single problem from the OP isn't seeing the entire picture. You have to look at the entire workbook of lessons, which I have.

The problem makes no sense to me because I do not have the full instruction manual. If I would be involved in the full lesson it would probably become more clear. This is like a board game without an instruction manual.

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Originally posted by Fly-Sig:

It wasn't that long ago we were still flying DME arcs to a VOR approach

Just a short hop from Our Little Airport (X04), Ocala uses a DME arc to the ILS / LOC approach for RWY 36. I drilled my instrument students on this in the simulator, usually with nasty winds dialed in, and once a student had it nailed down, we would get in the airplane and go fly it. The café at Ocala had excellent breakfast choices, and very good burgers at lunch time.

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Originally posted by P250UA5:
Helped my wife's friend's 5th grader with some math last night, from 4 states away (they're in CA).

Basic concept, you're given the area of a rectangle, and that the width is x of the length.
Method: Guess length x width & evaluate with the above measure. Then guess again & reevaluate, and keep on like that until you get x, and you have the correct dimensions.

Really annoying & roundabout way to do it, when some simple algebra got me there a lot faster.
I had to read the example a couple times to figure out how they wanted it to be done.

While typical US math curricula start gently introducing a few algebra concepts in 4th and 5th grade, in many public school pipelines pre-algebra is not offered until 7th or 8th grade and algebra is not offered until 8th or 9th grade.

Even top academically-focused private schools don’t generally teach algebra as a subject until at least 7th grade.

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:

quote:

Originally posted by P250UA5:
Helped my wife's friend's 5th grader with some math last night, from 4 states away (they're in CA).

Basic concept, you're given the area of a rectangle, and that the width is x of the length.
Method: Guess length x width & evaluate with the above measure. Then guess again & reevaluate, and keep on like that until you get x, and you have the correct dimensions.

Really annoying & roundabout way to do it, when some simple algebra got me there a lot faster.
I had to read the example a couple times to figure out how they wanted it to be done.

While typical US math curricula start gently introducing a few algebra concepts in 4th and 5th grade, in many public school pipelines pre-algebra is not offered until 7th or 8th grade and algebra is not offered until 8th or 9th grade.

Even top academically-focused private schools don’t generally teach algebra as a subject until at least 7th grade.

Right, and I get that, which was why I went through the effort to do it 'their way' to be actually helpful to the 5th grader.
Then did it the 'easy' way which took less than half the time.

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
It's not about cake trays. It could be beans in cups, or rounds in mags. It doesn't matter. It's just a multiplication problem.

It's just a graphical method for multiplying 20 X 17

I'm guessing (hoping) that's the idea. To make it real, real life, not just cold boring numbers presented to them, but at the same time teach them to throw away the "story" and everything else, and only work with the cold numbers to solve the problem.