Thursday, April 30

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Daily News Stuff 30 April 2020

No End Of Excitement Edition

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Arithmetic Music Video of the Day




Disclaimer: You can't take three from two, two is less than three.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:20 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Am i missing the joke, or is there now an even more roundabout, NEW-new math? The new math Tom sings about is the way I learned how, and distinctly remember people ranting about the 'new math' elemetary schools were teaching while i was in highschool. 

Posted by: Karl Drexler at Thursday, April 30 2020 11:54 PM (B7S37)

2 VS Code is free, too.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:32 AM (Iwkd4)

3 Yes, Common Core incorporates a new new math, which is really "just" trying to force the kind of shortcuts quick thinkers have come up with on kids who aren't ready for them yet, or rather, things that look like said shortcuts.
From an example I found real quick, instead of adding 78 and 57 to get 135, you can add 70 and 50 to get 120, then ad 8 and 7 to get 15, then add those two intermediate sums to get the final answer.  Or the one that really troubles people, instead of subtracting 28 from 86 the old-fashioned way in the video, you notice that 28 + 2 = 30, and 30 + 10 = 40 and 40 + 40 = 80, and if you add 6 more, you get 86.  So now add up the 2 and the 10 and the 40 and the 6 to get 58, and there's your result.  It's kinda-sorta similar to the way I would do that in my own head, although backwards, and also as if someone with a low IQ listened to my explanation and misunderstood it.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:45 AM (Iwkd4)

4 The way I would do the last problem is, instead of messing around with extraneous steps like converting the subtraction to addition, I'd just go 86 - 10 = 76 - 10 - 66 (etc) until I was at 36.  Now I have a running-total  partial answer of 50.  I can then either subtract 6 to get to 30, then subtract 2 more to get to 28, add the 6 and the 2 to the 50 to get 58, or just go from 36 to 28, and add the 8 to the 50.  The differences are that I've skipped the unnecessary re-framing of the problem, and I've been doing partial sums strictly by tens and ones because it simplifies the numbers I have to keep in my head, and I also don't add/subtract by 40s, for the same reason.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:55 AM (Iwkd4)

5 Oh!  Almost forgot--the other, equally-bad or maybe worse problem, is they START with this shortcut-that-actually-isn't instead of explaining the long way and then saying "now here's a faster way."

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 01 2020 12:57 AM (Iwkd4)

6 I went to a mixture of private and state-run schools, but the private schools were old-fashioned enough to make us memorize our tables, so that when I did go to the state-run school I was way ahead of the idiots who'd grown up in that system.  When I finally started looking at the "New Math" (which was a 1960s thing that still hadn't penetrated the hinterlands in the 1980s) is looked like a lame attempt to introduce algebraic thinking to arithmetic.  While this is perfectly valid philosophically, it's silly in elementary education, because memorizing is far far faster (and more reliable), especially for children whose brains are very good at memorization and not quite so great at abstraction.
Even now, 40 years on, I can say "6*9=54" without having to think about it.

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 01 2020 08:28 AM (obo9H)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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