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[I couldn't resist reproducing this old but still amusing article on teaching through the ages... Ed.]

Teaching in the 60s : A farmer sells a bag of potatoes for $45. Production costs use 80% of the sales price. What was his profit?

Traditional teaching in the 70s ; A farmer sells a bag of potatoes for $50. . Production costs use 4/5ths of the sales price, that is $40.00. What was his profit?

Modern Teaching in the 70s : 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 drawing 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 80s : A farmer sells a bag of potatoes for $50. Since the production costs were $40, the profit was $10. Now, underline the word "potatoes" and discuss it with your class neighbour.

Reformed system of the 80s : A privileged Kapitalist steels injustly over a beg of potatous analise the text and find out gramatik, orthography and ponctuation errors an say something about dis process of getting reach.

Computer aided instruction in the 1990s : A sales engineer of an agriculture facility consults the agro- BBS which he accesses through a PS/@ running OS /2 (50Mb hard disk, 4 Mb of 80ns RAM, 25 MHz 80386 ) to find out the current day's price of potatoes. He introduced the value into his spreadsheet program, analyses the linear regression tendencies in his Farm Manager expert system and after seeing the results on his new VGA-compatible multisync monitor and saving the results to the disk (not forgetting to back it up) he then outputs the result to a colour laser printer (using PostScript). Make a drawing with your mouse of the 3D integrated contour of a bag of potatoes. Next, log into the Agro-BBS and follow the instructions in the menu.

Teaching in the 2000s What's a farmer?

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