Ironically I never saw i until my college admissions test for √-1=? and just sat there staring at it, I've got a list of interesting things that surprised the hell out of me that everyone else learned, like that "I before E, except after C, or when sounded as A, as in neighbor or weigh" which I thought was totally cool. I had this old orange algebra book from the 50's or something that I was given to read as a kid and just figured it would be the same crap they taught in high schools. Similarly it was assumed I read enough to know spelling and grammar so I didn't know what a predicate was till my early 20's and I still don't actually know jack about grammatical rules. Informal homeschooling and autodidactism produce some very weird gaps.
Fortunately it was well before we got to logarithms; I did not mind different bases until I started learning logs.
If it helps I sympathize. You are right, of course, and saved me a response that would have somehow managed to be longer yet less exact and accurate; well done. If you keep trying to tell people to simplify operations by treating them as algebra though you will likely end up hung in the public square (despite still being right.) 
The fun of being a 'Mathemagician' I suppose. Once you get a pretty intuitive feel for mid-level math like algebra and calculus you pick up a lot of tricks and rapidly start forgetting a lot of other stuff. Generally I found the best way to teach people stuff was to pretend I was showing them some 'special trick' that let us get around lots of formal boring stuff then show them the formal boring stuff while they assumed they'd just been given the keys to the hidden back gate of the castle of arcana... helped with retention and enthusiasm.
Well, but that is pretty much what math is, no? It is simpler and neater to write an operation as 3^4 than as (((3+3+3)+(3+3+3)+(3+3+3))+((3+3+3)+(3+3+3)+(3+3+3))+((3+3+3)+(3+3+3)+(3+3+3.))) Everything is easy when one knows how, even explaining why the reciprocal of 3^4 is a repeating decimal consisting of the ordinal numbers in sequence (yes, I am counting the "...790..." part, because of carrying.
) A lot of the formal stuff IS rather boring, because it is so simplistic and tedious, but without a good grasp of it the complex stuff does seem more like a mystical incantation than the basic rearrangement of concrete things it is.You may be right about the "technique technique" though; it would certainly explain why so many educators spend so little time on detailed explanations of WHY operations and equations are designed as they are. Time permitting, I always got more out of knowing the why, because, time permitting, if I know the logic I can derive equations without having to memorize them, and memorizing an equation one does not understand is not really learning knowledge, just memorizing a mystical incantation. I am not yet a high enough level Math User to memorize more than a few equations per day, and my Int may be too low to ever learn 9th grade equations.
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Last First in wotmania Chat
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Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
Does anybody know this math trick?
- 29/02/2012 07:29:58 PM
706 Views
Sure, it's an artifact of base 10
- 29/02/2012 08:24:18 PM
504 Views
Your own fault for doing lots of math.
- 29/02/2012 08:37:39 PM
569 Views
- 29/02/2012 08:37:39 PM
569 Views
More my fault for having a algebra textbook that obsessed with abnormal base calculations
- 29/02/2012 09:19:15 PM
561 Views
I think I had one like that one year.
- 02/03/2012 04:16:26 AM
712 Views
Your method for 11 might be even quicker!
- 29/02/2012 08:46:44 PM
391 Views
That is wayyyyy more complicated than 10x+x. But if it works for you, I am happy. *NM*
- 01/03/2012 07:16:40 AM
176 Views
Not really
- 01/03/2012 04:24:20 PM
354 Views