(I must confess I never made it to bookstore to buy "Beach Magic" - - was that the name? At the moment I forget. I've been sick a while. Anyway, it's still my next book I plan to read.)
Thanks Thriftymaid! I knew "Magic" didn't ring right in my head. Yes, I'm feeling better - - now I'm just in that post- sickness tiredness stage or something. :)
This post was edited by WelbyQuentin at November 5, 2016 8:38 AM MDT
Like Thriftmaid's bread, my slab of lardy-cake! Along with Mathematics and keeping the house tidy. Perhaps the latter is a problem in the former, by Three-Dimensional Topology, but if so my Calculus and Vectors is not up to the task. Oh, and keeping pairs of socks united for more than three or four washes.
learning how to do long and short division by hand, not with a calculator...
I'm 75 and when I was in grade school my WORST subject was always arithmetic!!!!!!! holy crap!!!!!!
when it came time to do long/short division, I was totally flustered.......just could NOT grasp it....my teacher, bless her heart, sat down with me one day and we did 2 of each; wow, I got it!!!!!
or so I thought..........next day she wanted me to do one at the blackboard and - horrors!! - I didn't know how to do it.....only one day after doing some!!!
so then she told me not to worry, that she'd help me again............yeah, right.........
SO ALL I CAN SAY IS THANK GOD FOR POCKET CALCULATORS.......now I'm very confident when it comes to dividing stuff on one!!!
believe it or not, I could understand and do fractions better than division.........just my brain not wired for it, I guess!!!
I think I have found from old school reports my parents had kept, what partly led to my being poor at Arithmetic then a few years later, Mathematics. My Dad was a Government scientist, and in 1959 the establishment where he worked was moved to a new location some 80 miles away. Right in the middle of the last term of my last year in Infants' School - brilliant planning by one Department not talking to any others, so disrupting a few hundred families and several schools at the worst time, instead of waiting for the 6-week Summer holiday 2 or 3 months later!
I suspect the interruption was too much for me, but I am not so vain as not to admit my own limit of ability was the bigger factor. For there were plenty of my contemporaries in the same situation but much better at learning and eventually academically far more successful than me.
I know what you mean about suddenly finding the way round the problem. I my teens I could not grasp Calculus at all, and our Maths teacher did not help. He was only interested in the bright, keen, fast-learning ones. Then in my 50s, a geology-club tutorial on rivers presented us with a very simple formula; from memory a fraction with a difference in both numerator and denominator. For some reason, I wrote it in calculus notation and suddenly twigged it! Eureka! Differentiation! The ratio of two differences. The gradient of a short stretch of a much longer river is a real-life version of the point-gradient of a graph, i.e. the Differential at that point!
Calculators are fine and I use one when necessary, but we have to be careful to recognise we still need to understand the problem and how to solve it hence enter it correctly into the instrument, even though the electronics do the actual number-milling.
Thriftymaid 