
Reforming the teaching system is a subject of constant controversy. A group
of high-level highly-qualified teachers studied this problem, and specially
a question that was worrying the large majority of future students (well...,
er... their parents): The evolution of a mathematical problem.
        You can feel the problem through this comparison:


Teaching in the 60's:

        A farmer sells a a bag of potatoes for $100. Production costs used 4/5
of the sales price. What was his profit?


Traditional teaching in the 70's:

        A farmer sells a bag of potatoes for $100. Production costs used 4/5
of sales price, that is, $80. How much was his profit?


Modern teaching in the 70's:

        A farmer exchanges a set "P" of potatoes  for a set "M" of money. The
order  of the set "M" is 100 and each element is worth $1. Make a draw
of 100 dots representing the elements of the set "M". The set "C" of the
production costs has 20 dots less than the set "M", so answer now the next
question: What is the order of the set "B" of profits? (draw its elements
in red).


New teaching system of the 80's:

        A farmer sells a bag of potatoes for $100. Since the production costs
were $80, the profit was $20.
        Now, underline the words "potatoes" and discuss it with your class
neighbour.


Reformed system of the 80's


        A privileaged Kapitalist steels injustly $20 over a beg of patatous
analize the text and find out gramatik. ortografy and ponctuation erros and
say something about dis process of getting reach.


Computer Aided Instruction in the 90's:

        A sells engineer of an agriculture facility consults the Agro-BBS
which he accesses through a PS/2 running OS/2 (50Mb hard disk, 4Mb 80 ns RAM,
25 MHz 80386) to find out the current day's price of potatoes. He introduces
the value  in his spreadsheet program, analyses linear regression tendencies
in his FARMMANAGER expert system, and after seeing the results in his new
VGA-compatible multisync monitor, and saving the results in the disk (not
forgeting to backup it) he outputs the result to a color laser printer (using
Post Script).
        Make a drawing with your mouse of the 3-D integrated contour of a bag
of potatoes. Next, log in the Agro-BBS and follow the instructions of the
menu.


Teaching in 2000's

        What's a farmer?




