Kid Looks Like A Genius With 8 + 5 Doesn’t Add Up To 10

[Rikurzhen]

 

[hadit]

Take 1 from 8 and 1 from 5, add together and get 2. Then take 4 from 7 and add it to the 2 and now you have 6. Take the 2 from 3 and add it to the 4 and now you have a 6 and a 6 and a 1. Next take a 1 from each 6 and add them to the one, now you have a 5 and a 5 and a 3. Don't take the easy route. Next add the 5 and the 3 together and you have a 5 and an 8. Exactly where you started from but now you've transformed the 5 into an 8 and the 8 into the 5!!! (Bonus points). Now take a 3 from the 8 and add the remainder to the 5 and you have a 10 and a 3.

Congratulations, you've given the teacher a migraine by forcing her to follow along. If she can make you jump through useless hoops then turnabout should be fair play.

It's not useless. The more kids play with numbers, the more ways they find to solve a problem, the more they understand the process.

Helluva big improvement on memorizing "8 + 5 = 13." How do you make a thirteen? "I don't know." Where's the 10's place? "What?"

It is not difficult to memorize the sums of any two single digits because there are only 100, and most are trivial. For example, adding one or zero to any other. Once you have learned them, adding multidigit numbers becomes a simple matter. This just looks like a solution in search of a problem, like they've given up on kids being able to memorize trivial things.

 

[ricechickie]

Terrible! Awful! Lots of older people learn to make change this way, but using it in a classroom is an outrage!

 

[hadit]

Threads like this go a long way in explaining why our public school systems rank dead last in the developed world...and why 40% of adults in places like Chicago are complete illiterates. All of them alumni of Common Core curriculums no doubt.

It's just basic arithmetic that any 7 year old could do. Sorry if it's to much for you.

Ummm...that's "too" much and "7 year-old". I see you have trouble stringing together cogent sentences like any 7 year-old could do. Common Core English graduate are we?

Do you understand that Common Core is a new thing?

It has to be, so we can blame any of its problems on Obama's evil plan to make us stupid!

How much does he have to do, considering he got elected with zero accomplishments?

 

[ricechickie]

It is not difficult to memorize the sums of any two single digits because there are only 100, and most are trivial. For example, adding one or zero to any other. Once you have learned them, adding multidigit numbers becomes a simple matter. This just looks like a solution in search of a problem, like they've given up on kids being able to memorize trivial things.

Memorizing things that have no meaning are of little use when it comes to understanding a process.

 

[Tom Sweetnam]

Wrong. You use the word too when you could easily substitute the word also. My use of the word to, was correct. I guess you failed English and Math?

You're a moron, and if you were a public school teacher you'd be a dangerous moron.

 

[hadit]

It is not difficult to memorize the sums of any two single digits because there are only 100, and most are trivial. For example, adding one or zero to any other. Once you have learned them, adding multidigit numbers becomes a simple matter. This just looks like a solution in search of a problem, like they've given up on kids being able to memorize trivial things.

Memorizing things that have no meaning are of little use when it comes to understanding a process.

It is of great use when moving on to more advanced concepts, because you're not continually getting bogged down trying to calculate for the 10th time in a row what 8 + 5 equals. All this does is put process in where it's really not needed. I memorized addition and multiplication tables for all the single digits. That freed my mind up to handle algebra and calculus.

 

[ricechickie]

It is not difficult to memorize the sums of any two single digits because there are only 100, and most are trivial. For example, adding one or zero to any other. Once you have learned them, adding multidigit numbers becomes a simple matter. This just looks like a solution in search of a problem, like they've given up on kids being able to memorize trivial things.

Memorizing things that have no meaning are of little use when it comes to understanding a process.

It is of great use when moving on to more advanced concepts, because you're not continually getting bogged down trying to calculate for the 10th time in a row what 8 + 5 equals. All this does is put process in where it's really not needed. I memorized addition and multiplication tables for all the single digits. That freed my mind up to handle algebra and calculus.

Why can't there be room for both? When children start to add, then they need to fool around with the process of putting things together. They need to play with numbers, see what happens when you add two positive numbers, what happens when you add two negatives, discover the patterns. Then, they are better equipped to memorize. Because when you memorize with a solid foundation, it's easier to know if the answer that popped into your head makes sense, or if you've memorized wrong.

 

[Rikurzhen]

It is not difficult to memorize the sums of any two single digits because there are only 100, and most are trivial. For example, adding one or zero to any other. Once you have learned them, adding multidigit numbers becomes a simple matter. This just looks like a solution in search of a problem, like they've given up on kids being able to memorize trivial things.

Memorizing things that have no meaning are of little use when it comes to understanding a process.

Wrong. Memorizing allows you to see patterns, it frees up brain processing power by retrieving an answer from memory. This is where idiot constructivist go wrong. We see this same idiot leftist thought pattern in many realms. The classic example was with the mortgage debacle. Idiot leftists observed that middle class folks were homeowners and were mostly upstanding citizens. They believed causality flowed from homeowner to upstanding citizen, rather than the reverse, and so they sought to encourage blacks and Hispanics to buy homes in order to transform them into upstanding citizens. Bzzt. wrong. Same thing going on here - good students, who have already mastered the memorization, are found to develop principles, to understand the process, so idiot "education theorists" conclude that the way to develop understanding is to skip memorization and jump to the discovery phase.

The crash and burn of discovery learning shows up in inter-jurisdictional testing. See, the other epic fuck-up of these idiot "education theorists" is that their validation of their studies was piss-poor. If the FDA was validating new pharmaceuticals the way education "professionals" validate new pedagogies, we'd be releasing thalidomide-like new drugs regularly.

 

[Rikurzhen]

It is not difficult to memorize the sums of any two single digits because there are only 100, and most are trivial. For example, adding one or zero to any other. Once you have learned them, adding multidigit numbers becomes a simple matter. This just looks like a solution in search of a problem, like they've given up on kids being able to memorize trivial things.

Memorizing things that have no meaning are of little use when it comes to understanding a process.

It is of great use when moving on to more advanced concepts, because you're not continually getting bogged down trying to calculate for the 10th time in a row what 8 + 5 equals. All this does is put process in where it's really not needed. I memorized addition and multiplication tables for all the single digits. That freed my mind up to handle algebra and calculus.

Why can't there be room for both?

Because instructional time is finite and there are opportunity costs for choices that we make.

 

[R.D.]

 

[Rikurzhen]

It is not difficult to memorize the sums of any two single digits because there are only 100, and most are trivial. For example, adding one or zero to any other. Once you have learned them, adding multidigit numbers becomes a simple matter. This just looks like a solution in search of a problem, like they've given up on kids being able to memorize trivial things.

Memorizing things that have no meaning are of little use when it comes to understanding a process.

It is of great use when moving on to more advanced concepts, because you're not continually getting bogged down trying to calculate for the 10th time in a row what 8 + 5 equals. All this does is put process in where it's really not needed. I memorized addition and multiplication tables for all the single digits. That freed my mind up to handle algebra and calculus.

Because when you memorize with a solid foundation, it's easier to know if the answer that popped into your head makes sense, or if you've memorized wrong.

You have it backwards. The entire POINT of memorization is to avoid the answer validation phase. When you memorize 5 x 5 = 25, you shouldn't need to double check your answer.

 

[ricechickie]

Because instructional time is finite and there are opportunity costs for choices that we make.

I'm so glad that I teach the way I do.

While instructional time is still finite, it is much more efficiently used.

 

[ricechickie]

You have it backwards. The entire POINT of memorization is to avoid the answer validation phase. When you memorize 5 x 5 = 25, you shouldn't need to double check your answer.

You've never misremembered something?

It's nice when something is so memorized as to become second-nature. Before then, it's nice to not have to simply make a wild guess.

 

[Rikurzhen]

I've never seen that before but now I see where "Math Educators" learned their math.

 

[Rikurzhen]

You have it backwards. The entire POINT of memorization is to avoid the answer validation phase. When you memorize 5 x 5 = 25, you shouldn't need to double check your answer.

You've never misremembered something?

It's nice when something is so memorized as to become second-nature. Before then, it's nice to not have to simply make a wild guess.

When you have a question and an answer and a series, then you can apply your thinking to DISCOVERING a pattern.

 

[Tom Sweetnam]

I wrote this piece 15 years ago for the now-defunct IM-UR webzine. I think it's still germane to a thread like this. At the time, Proposition 54 loomed important in California’s upcoming election. Proposition 54 was the natural evolution of Proposition 209, the initiative that brought to an end affirmative action college entrance preferences in California.

Proposition 54 deemed to prevent the state from gathering racial information on its citizens, and went a long way in hammering the coffin lid shut once and for all on the left-wing institution of apartheid we know as “racial preferences”. This article examines the state of affirmative action in California in its last year, and opines on the 30-year litany of suicide set upon by this nation’s public school systems.

How Asians Will Save American Education

Four years ago I obtained transcripts for a PBS Firing Line special in which panelists from both sides of the issue discussed the looming demise of affirmative action in California. The series was timely in that sentiment brewed strongly amongst California's Asians to end race preferences in college admissions. Asians voiced their consternation through lawsuits and social activism that helped generate an initiative which was voted into law four years ago, abolishing affirmative action considerations in college admissions and state hiring. I borrowed my figures for this piece from those transcripts. Here is how California's affirmative action-based college admissions system looked in its swan song.

Admissions to UCLA in 1997 based strictly on academic merit: Asian 54% white 47% Hispanic 5% black 1.7%
Black applicants to UCLA stood better than a 98% chance that their admission would not be based on any consideration of academic ability. That same rule applied to 19 of 20 Mexican- Americans. Yet 54% of Chinese, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, or other Asian students were considered for admission on their academic merits only. More than half of these people had to produce a high SAT score to get into UCLA. Why this anomaly then, if affirmative action deigns to help "minorities"?

Current racial metaphysics bases race favoritism on the historical record of discrimination against minorities and women, black people in particular. "Hispanics" are problematic, not only because they are the majority in California now, but because so many got here illegally or are the progeny of illegal aliens, so a history of discrimination in their case is a nebulous claim to say the least, especially since the vast majority of America's Hispanic population is quite new, most tracing their roots to Mexico within the past 50 years. Yet for many years, a child of illegal aliens from Mexico got into UCLA easier than a white student whose father was killed in action serving this nation in war. White liberals, blacks, and Hispanics never saw anything unfair in this setup, and always shouted down its detractors with charges of racism, right up until California's Asians confronted them with racial actuality.

Past discrimination is the legal justification for affirmative action in the United States. So it follows then, that Cambodian, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Malaysian, and Pakistani immigrants to the US have long perpetrated discrimination against American blacks, Hispanics, and women...correct? This is the only basis on which affirmative action could legally be used to discriminate against these Asians, because the other very obvious yet unspoken explanation for such racial profiling by universities is that they consider blacks and Hispanics to be the racial inferiors of all other ethnic groups by a very great margin. Such a thing could never be admitted officially of course.

Average discrepancy in SAT scores at UCLA between blacks & whites: 280 points.
Average discrepancy in SAT scores at UCLA between blacks and Asians: "well over" 300 points.
No mention was made by UCLA if these scores were "race normed", but my guess is that they probably were, so I contend that the real SAT score differences between blacks and whites averages at least 380 points, and I'll further speculate that a difference of 500 points or more is the average between blacks and Asians. This is how "race norming" and "centering" works:

Race norming and centering are processes whereby blacks and Hispanics are given handicaps in scoring because of presumed handicaps of "cultural bias". Black students for instance are given a handicap of 100 points on SAT scores right off the bat. Further "centering" or adjusting of scores may follow the actual test. For many years, the major complaint of black activists (mainly the NAACP) with SAT testing, is that such tests are "culturally biased". What this charge euphemistically refers to however, is that blacks have considerable difficulty with standard language praxis.

Blacks tend to fail miserably in areas of basic language skills testing. This "cultural bias" charge began to lose credibility however, after thousands of California's Asians, many of whom had only recently learned the English language or who spoke English as a second language, inevitably scored higher on SAT English tests than did blacks for whom English is a native tongue. In fact, Asians scored higher than blacks even after blacks were given their race norming or centering scoring handicaps.

The NAACP has also charged that SAT algebra and geometry sections might be considered culturally biased as well, since so few blacks go into the difficult pure sciences, life sciences, or engineering schools in college, and tend instead to migrate en masse into the humanities, thereby making subjects like math irrelevant to their college admissions qualification. In other words, the SAT carries much of the "cultural bias" stigma that it does, because English, algebra, and geometry have been indicted by the NAACP, many Hispanics, and white liberals as being racially biased constructs. An abstract construct like algebra for instance, can actually be racist, because Algebra is hostile toward black or Hispanic understanding, in that blacks and Hispanics as cultures are perfectly willing to grasp such a thing as algebra, but so few can, therefore Algebra is a construct of hostility toward cultural acceptance, and is considered "culturally biased" toward those cultures because of it. The same may be said of geometry.

If such back flips of logic are frightening, they should be, because such thinking goes a long way in explaining why American education today is a pathetic shadow of its former self. Thirty years ago, America began its great downward slide, it's cultural "centering", seeking the lowest common denominator with which white liberal educators, blacks, and Hispanics might assuage themselves that a mainstream norm was being established in which no one's self-esteem would suffer. White liberals rationalized that blacks and Mexicans couldn't be brought up to a level of academic accomplishment considered standard at the time, so the entire system had to be dragged down to their level, to a far lower watered-down cultural norm.

And that's exactly what we have today: a pathetic amalgam of alchemy, metaphysics, and pseudoscience passing itself off as academic empiricism, that starts in public school first grade and carries through to postdoctoral studies at Harvard University. Stupidity as an educational median, where self-esteem and cultural hegemony take precedence over anything resembling intellectual scrupulosity. It's a pretend system like that of the old Soviet Union, where the cynical maxim held that people pretended to work, and the state pretended to pay them. Here we pretend to educate, and students pretend they are educated.

California's Asians wouldn't hear of it however. They were too new on the landscape to buy into a sick system based on cognitive distortion and ethnic politics, a system that shouted down any of its former detractors as bigots and racists. It was California's Asians who began to deconstruct this sham called education. It was California's Asians who showed white liberals, blacks, and Hispanics what could be accomplished when people stuck to the basics of learning and spent their time reading books, and doing physics problems, instead of devoting their lives to bellowing at the top of their lungs while playing the race card. It was California's Asians who finally embarrassed a sick system into its inevitable first stage of collapse, and no doubt, if another old maxim can be believed, one that states "As goes California, so goes the world", it will be California's Asians who halt our national plunge into an abyss of ignorance, while teaching America what excellence in learning can really be all about.

© 2001 Tom Sweetnam

 

[ricechickie]

You have it backwards. The entire POINT of memorization is to avoid the answer validation phase. When you memorize 5 x 5 = 25, you shouldn't need to double check your answer.

You've never misremembered something?

It's nice when something is so memorized as to become second-nature. Before then, it's nice to not have to simply make a wild guess.

When you have a question and an answer and a series, then you can apply your thinking to DISCOVERING a pattern.

......trusting that the information they've been given is correct.

 

[boedicca]

Clearly this kid is a subversive. He needs to made to understand that 1+1 = whatever the STATE decides.

I say it's excellent preparation for REAL LIFE.

Your Employer will give you two paychecks every year, one for $8,000 and another for $5,000.

How did you only make $10,000 that year?

Taxes.

 

[RKMBrown]

Wrong. You use the word too when you could easily substitute the word also. My use of the word to, was correct. I guess you failed English and Math?

You're a moron, and if you were a public school teacher you'd be a dangerous moron.

You're an ignorant POS.