alt Hacker News> Calculators do do arithmetic and if you ask me to do the kind of calculations I had to do in high school by hand today I wouldnt be able to
I got scared by how awfully my juniour (middle? 5-11) school mathematics had slipped when helping my 9 year old boy with his homework yesterday.
I literally couldn't remember how to carry the 1 when doing subtractions of 3 digit numbers! Felt literally idiotic having to ask an LLM for help. :(
On my part, I don't use that carry method at ll. When I have to substract, I substract by chunks that my brain can easily subtract. For example 1233 - 718, I'll do 1233 - 700 = 533 then 533 - 20 = 513 then 513 + 2 = 515. It's completely instinctive (and thus I can't explain to my children :-) )
What I have asked my children to do very often is back-of-the-envelope multiplications and other computations. That really helped them to get a sense of the magnitude of things.