Comments on: The product of my unorthodoxy

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:41:21 +0000

I guess the simplest method for multiplication is to reach for the calculator, eh?

By: Haizum

Haizum — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:08:50 +0000

I feel the same way. :S

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:12:17 +0000

Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin works pretty well, except for having to hack it to your theme.

By: apotheon

apotheon — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:54:35 +0000

Damn, that’s pretty nice. If you’re going to have a limit on how deeply comments can be nested, this is a good way to do it, definitely. It just automatically goes linear.

TR could learn a thing or two from this.

By: apotheon

apotheon — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:53:04 +0000

I just posted this reply to see what happens when I post a reply where it says “Comments won’t nest below this level”.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:18:33 +0000

Naturally, on both items.

By: apotheon

apotheon — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:03:43 +0000

Well . . . I’m hoping for an editable instruction set so I can patch for improvements, of course.

Meanwhile, I’m quite impatient for someone to finally invent nanobots that repair degraded telomeres.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:50:06 +0000

Then we wouldn’t even need to know any techniques for multiplication or division, as they would be built into our instruction set.

By: apotheon

apotheon — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:28:01 +0000

I’m down with the transhuman enhancement, definitely.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:06:55 +0000

An argument for transhuman enhancement. Or at least, a wearable recording device.

By: apotheon

apotheon — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:45:51 +0000

No kidding.

I try that every now and then, but then I end up losing the notebook, forgetting it for a week at a time, et cetera. I’m a comedy of errors, really.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:27:20 +0000

Sounds like maybe you should carry around a notebook on which you could scribble these ideas as they come to you.

By: apotheon

apotheon — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:39:32 +0000

From the sound of it, your kid would do quite well with UCBLogo. The regularity of it syntax should suit him well. Of course, I’m going on a minimum of information about the child, gleaned primarily from your posts here at Chip’s Quips, so I could easily be off-base.

I invented a new notation for division in . . . I think it was third grade. The teacher didn’t like that much, especially since I invented it while I was solving a division problem on the chalkboard. I forgot what exactly I did, though, since she demanded that I learn the way she was doing it instead.

I did something similar in a computer networking class, years later, for purposes of subnetting arithmetic. I had a brain fart, and couldn’t recall the way we’d been taught to do subnetting arithmetic, so I invented a new way to do it. I scrawled stuff on the page while taking a test (real crunch-time stuff — necessity is the mother of invention), got the problem right, and the next day I couldn’t for the life of me remember how I’d done it.

My life seems to be an ongoing series of interesting ideas that I forget before I get a chance to share them with anyone.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:19:34 +0000

French Toast often leads me to multiplication — of fat cells in the omentum. I have to stay away from it, but my very active son can enjoy it and burn it off in an hour or so.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:15:20 +0000

I “figured” you’d know a more excellent way, Stu. Looking forward to it!

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:14:23 +0000

I understand the motivation of wanting to teach number concepts like “regrouping”, as they call it. Certainly, when I was a kid, long multiplication was taught as something you just memorized without understanding how it works. Neither approach is sufficient, IMHO. Children should be given as many different ways to look at a problem as they can handle, along with explanations that make the numeric relationships clear.

I have taught a few courses, but not in elementary school. Maybe someday.

I’m very proud of my son — now I’m looking for an opportunity to introduce him to programming. Maybe UCBLogo for starts.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:07:19 +0000

LOL Yvonne — surely you learned long multiplication somewhere along the way?

By: Robert Hruzek

Robert Hruzek — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:41:33 +0000

What a morning! Not only do I get to start my day with a “blows milk out yer nose” moment AND get a hankerin’ for french toast like you wouldn’t believe – but now I can’t wait to find out that faster way to multiply!

You must be so proud, Chip!

By: Ole Phat Stu

Ole Phat Stu — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:01:57 +0000

Uh oh,
I see I’ll have to teach you both how to do it MUCH faster

Expect another post on my blog about fast mental arithmetic next thursday 29th, when I’ve worked off my existing blog pipeline

By: teeni

teeni — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:27:21 +0000

I find it amazing that they don’t teach them to memorize multiplication tables any more. And I was never a math whiz so I actually enjoyed (and even understood) how you explained it. Maybe you should have been a teacher, Chip? But yeah, you have to worry about him getting in trouble now. Some teachers freak if you learn anything differently than “their” way because then they don’t know how to handle you. Hopefully that won’t be an issue. Either way, I bet you are proud of your son. I sure am. But now I want some french toast too.