Map reading

[gfish]

Earlier this year I offhandedly mentioned the loss of map-reading skills due to the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices. I meant it seriously, but purely abstractly. It was in the context of finding supplies after a collapse of civilization scenario, after all! Since then, however, I've spent 6 months with a modern smartphone. This now seems like a very real, very immediate issue.

I love maps. Anyone who knows me even slightly will back me up on this. I love maps so much I've accidentally made multiple friends into cartographers, once through a class recommendation and once through a startup project. I love maps, map reading, map making, everything. I own a sextant. I tried using Polynesian etak skills while biking to Portland once. Hell, I once started a project in middleschool to survey the hill I grew up on, just because working out the angles sounded fun and I'd been impressed with the links between surveying and the roots of math as described in one of the James Burke documentaries. (I didn't get very far. Mostly I just made sure to research geometry as quickly as possible when playing Civilization.)

I say this not (entirely) to brag, but to set the stage. For the last six months, I've looked at maps more frequently than any time since the Mackenzie trip thanks to my phone -- but I'm interacting with them on a vastly more shallow level of comprehension. I just don't have to anymore. This has been technically true for a long time, but the ease with which I can get my exobrain to take care of navigation now is just staggering. It's so very easy that I'm really finding it impossible to avoid. And if I'm not bothering, I can't imagine anyone except a vanishingly small percentage of people ever will.

Map reading dies with this generation.

Comments

[zzyzx-xyzzy.livejournal.com]

Did pocket calculators herald the last generation to learn math?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Not really a fair comparison, as math is a formalized subject ritually taught, while map reading might get a handful of days across an entire educational campaign. There is too much cultural momentum behind teaching kids useless skills like long division for it change as quickly.

[maellenkleth]

Fishie, long division is rather handy to know, should you chance to find yourself having to solve a non-trivial division problem without functional calulator (or, for that matter, functional slide rule -- remember those?)

Elane
who still uses her Sakkisha slide-rule as a working tool

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can invent scenarios where it would be useful. Same for celestial navigation, which is a lot more likely to be a life-critical issue. But it's just not worth it to learn -- trust me, I've tried. I see no reason that the mechanics of math don't fall into the same category. We spend literally years forcing kids to learn through rote memorization, teaching them what to think, not how to think. Do you really think something like long division is a priority when no one growing up today is ever going to lack immediate access to a device that, amongst other things, functions great as a calculator? I'd much rather they spend time on things like statistics, how to research topics, follow references, read bias in articles, know the difference between anecdotes and data, correlation and causation. Important things. Things that can't be done several trillion times faster and more accurately by every single device we use in daily life.

[solarbird]

Do you really think something like long division is a priority when no one growing up today is ever going to lack immediate access to a device that, amongst other things, functions great as a calculator?
Yes, because that sort of basic maths thing is what teaches (some) people reasonable approximations of right answers, so they don't use a calculator to subtract $.35 from $.85, see ".5," and argue with you insisting that a nickel is your correct change until you make them add it back up the other way in their heads.

(Yes, real life experience.)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'm not arguing against *all* math skills, just a focus on their application as compared to their mechanical process. Estimation is, if anything, an even more important skill now than ever, and you can't do that without some basic arithmetic. But you don't use long division for estimation -- you estimate to avoid long division!

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've done long division in my head to come up with an estimate of something fairly frequently.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Ditto neuro. I find long division incredibly useful in my day to day life. All of my basic math skills up through exponents, actually. (I don't use the trig so much, but that's because I don't do carpentry projects.)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

The question isn't can long division be useful, of course it can be. But is it more useful than what you could have been learning instead? More importantly, is it more useful for kids today, who (once they hit the age of needing to do math for real) will never, ever lack for a device with more computational power than the faster supercomputer when we were kids? Instructional time is a finite resource. We should be rejoicing that new technology is making old subjects irrelevant, as there are always 10000 other subjects that would also be good to be teaching.

[gement.livejournal.com]

When that's the case, I do rejoice. I do not think everything ought be taught from the ground up, and when we actually have ready interfaces that do exactly what we need, that's great. I am not as confident as you that it's time to pitch that one just yet.

My ability to do long division is part of an ingrained understanding of proportion. You can argue that we need to figure out how to teach proportion better, which is fine, but my experience of humans is that they do not grab for tools as often as they actually need information.

In short, they need to make guesses without typing everything in. Long division was a big part of how I learned to make those particular guesses. Figuring out the first significant digit of an answer is a really big deal.

Important things.

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

An interesting thing I noticed while in elementary school and confirmed as an adult by asking various groups of students I was substitute teaching. A large majority of people, perhaps 90%, would prefer to do a page of 50 set calculations rather than 10 story problems. The set calculations could be addition, subtraction, multiplication or division with larger numbers than used in the story problems. Translating a verbal problem into numbers is exceedingly difficult for most people.

I am one of the 10% who prefer a few easy calculations because setting up the calculations from a written question is relatively easy for me. I expect that is true for you as well.

Re: Important things.

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

"Word problems! Thank goodness, something to read!"

I never entirely understood most people's objections to them.

Re: Important things.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Physics can be described in one of two ways--"the science of toys" or "advanced word problems."

Re: Important things.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

The fact that a large majority of people consistently hate word problems shows exactly the problem. They can do the mechanical arithmetic, but they can't apply it to arbitrary real world problems. They can do the thing computers are inhumanly good at, but they can't do the one thing computers are really bad at! (So far.) It's a complete mismatch of priorities with the reality people live in. The abject useless redundancy wouldn't be any worse if we spent years teaching people how to accelerate objects at exactly 9.8 meters per second per second.

Personally, I always loved word problems because they're long and fewer of them fit on a page. :)

Re: Important things.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

The fact that a large majority of people consistently hate word problems shows exactly the problem... They can do the thing computers are inhumanly good at, but they can't do the one thing computers are really bad at!

Programming a computer to solve the kinds of problems we normally think of as "word problems" would not be very difficult, because they tend to be stylized and follow predictable patterns. Training a typical statistical natural language processing engine on a corpus of pre-tagged examples of word problems paired with a direct translation into algebraic notation would probably do it.

What's truly difficult is encountering a new situation and figuring out which information is relevant, where to start, what the problem to be solved even is. We don't know how to teach computers how to do anything like that, but our typical program of teaching humans isn't so great at it either. Certainly "word problems" are not an effective indicator of students' ability to do real problem solving.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Just an odd data point: Most years, none of my students (at a two-year college, including older evening students) has ever heard of a Mercator projection.

[zzyzx-xyzzy.livejournal.com]

The larger issue is I can't imagine what you could possibly mean for map reading to be lost. 'map reading' to me is the cognitive ability to assign correspondences between a visual representation and an object, and to make deductions about the object from its representation. It encompasses reading scale drawings, or IKEA instructions, or navigating a web site, or working the menu on an ATM; It's a large portion of what an IQ test is going after; it's not in any danger as long as the Flynn effect doesn't backtrack by several hundred years.

Well, of course you might mean something way more banal, like the bag of tricks associated with the specific map-reading practice of correlating positions on a printed image to positions on the geoid. That's like long division: the people who have a need to deeply know how it works... will learn it just fine, because the ability to work through correspondences between representation and represented isn't going anywhere (and, I would argue, is only placed under more demand and thereby enhanced by technology like your android phone.)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Skills like: Finding your position on a map with minimal prior information. That is a very hard thing to do if you're not on a street grid, and often quite hard even then. Or how to read contour lines. How to decide between alternate routes based on the information on the map, like knowing wiggly lines are longer and slower. Generally, how to generate a mental model of an area based on a map, instead of just using it to find the nearest Starbucks icon.

That said, computer maps are teaching people new map skills that they never needed before. Like interpreting aerial photography, which used to be a skill only cartographers and CIA analysts ever learned. Now most everyone I know finds it second nature to estimate the height of a building based on the length of its shadow. So that's pretty cool.

[pielology.livejournal.com]

Some of these skills are "gone" already - my college geology classes involved lessons on how to read contour maps, and most people needed them.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

The vast majority of the folks coming through search and rescue training -- who have been spending lots of time in the middle of nowhere ALL THEIR LIVES -- have absolutely no idea how to do any of these things. Most of them can't even understand the concept of marking sightline bearings to a landmark.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

thanks for clarifying.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Actually, statistically, I have to say that the answer to this question is "yes". The percentage of people raised in the calculator era who can productively do useful math without one is tiny.

[zzyzx-xyzzy.livejournal.com]

"this skill has died" is a rather hyperbolic and alarmist (and stupid) way to phrase "the smaller percentage of people who find this usefull still have this skill."