Comment on Cheers Bro
lime@feddit.nu 3 days agoi don’t know about that, i would prefer to build an intuition. i know people who simply have the entire thing memorized and “look up” the answer when prompted. which of course completely breaks down if you introduce an operand higher than 12.
Eatspancakes84@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You need both. Take 1718. Your understanding of multiplication should tell you that this equals 1010+107+108+8*7. Now your rote learning will allow you to calculate this quickly as 100+70+80+56=306.
lime@feddit.nu 3 days ago
you’ll need to escape the asterisks:
\*and no, my rote learning has not prepared me for that. nothing like that was ever presented to me. i went from multiplication tables to factorisation and never mentally connected the two. as a result i can’t do factorisation in my head at all, despite doing 80% of a masters in engineering.
Eatspancakes84@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah your education failed you. What I am effectively doing is “factoring” 17*18 into (10+7)(10+8), before working out the parentheses, but it’s easier because you only work with numbers and not with x’s. A nice in-between step towards algebra.
lime@feddit.nu 3 days ago
yeah that’s what’s so interesting. like obviously i can see the steps with actual numbers but replace with unknowns and it’s 50-50 whether i would be able to do it. and since i work with optimisations every day, i have had to reconstruct this stuff from first principles without a theoretical understanding so i need to go the long way around every time.