For some people, flash cards and repition works, for others, something more
concrete is needed to hang on to the numbers.
Martha
-----Original Message-----
From: RWW Taylor <RWTNTS@RITVAX.ISC.RIT.EDU>
To: mathed:; <mathed:;>
Cc: RWTNTS@RITVAX.ISC.RIT.EDU <RWTNTS@RITVAX.ISC.RIT.EDU>
Date: Thursday, March 04, 1999 5:38 PM
Subject: Re: [MATHEDCC] multiplication facts
Some suggestions from John Flanigan, including
> 2. Carry flash cards on your person and go over them while waiting at the
> bus stop, dentist's office, ticket line. Throw each away, with ceremony,
> once it is mastered.
I'm not sure what it means to "master" a piece of knowledge -- new layers
of knowledge always seem to carry a risk of driving out the old. I'm not
much of an advocate of blind memorization of anything, and would rather
tie it to some "key" or illuminate it by understanding in order to jog one's
memory (if needed).
This works for bigger problems -- 8 x 13 for example is really easy if you
think of a double deck of cards (2x52=?). If someone were having trouble
with
the recall of 56 as the product of 8 and 7 but could remember that 28 was
4 times 7 I would suggest thinking of 28 as 30-2 and doubling it to 60-4.
you could also conceive of 7x8 as (5+2)x8 or 40+16.
Developing an array of such strategies for a given situation ought to allow
the
person needing to do the memorization to choose one or two approaches that
make
sense to them. If one were working in an environment where such results
needed
to be constantly produced (are there any such environments outside the
classroom?) then the cues and indirections would gradually fade in
importance
-- though they could be switched back to if one ever got "rusty".
A good time to practice mental arithmetic, I find, is when falling asleep
(or
trying to). Start running through the natural numbers, factoring each one as
you go. Or work backwards from 1000 or something...
Well, we each have our tricks, I guess.
RWW Taylor
National Technical Institute for the Deaf
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester NY 14623
>>>> The plural of mongoose begins with p. <<<<
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