27 Jul
2012
27 Jul
'12
8:28 a.m.
Faye Coker wrote:
I know kids who were learning squares, cubes, square roots, algebra etc at age five but at age seven can not parrot their times tables and they are labelled as slow learners because of it.
I *still* can't remember 6 or 8 times tables, because when they tried to teach them to me, I said "this is stupid. Just use 3s or 2s" -- i.e. prime factorization. This turned out to be a poor optimization, since now when I am e.g. in the supermarket trying to do division in my head, I quickly blow my 7±2 stack (which is definitely on the -2 side)...