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

[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.