i 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.
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.
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 master’s in engineering.
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.
i 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.
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.
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 master’s in engineering.
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.