- Often we make a decision because it's easy and usable and we're stuck with it for a long period of time and don't question it. - The best example of this is the QWERTY keyboard which we're stuck with simply because they were designed to slow down typing speed for type writers. - Papert argues that similarly our math curriculums are set on teaching the four arithmetic operations and we never stop to question why we do it. ---- making good choices is not always easy, in part because past choices can often haunt us. There is a tendency for the first usable, but still primitive, product of a new technology to dig itself in. I have called this phenomenon the QWERTY phenomenon. - Seymour Papert in [[Mindstorms]] The activity known as “sums” performs this feedback function in school math. These absurd little repetitive exercises have only one merit: They are easy to grade. But this merit has bought them a firm place at the center of school math. In brief, I maintain that construction of school math is strongly influenced by what seemed to be teachable when math was taught as a “dead” subject, using the primitive, passive technologies of sticks and sand, chalk and blackboard, pencil and paper. The result was an intellectually incoherent set of topics that violates the most elementary mathetic principles of what makes certain material easy to learn and some almost impossible - Seymour Papert in [[Mindstorms]]