conuly

Haven't watched the videos yet-- lots of speech, no captioning, and I'm not in a very good auditory-processing state at the moment-- but I loved this comment of yours:

But who is better at math? The child who can tell you that 12 x 12 is 144 and that 6 x 12 is 72, but has no idea why he's memorized that or that the numbers exist outside of the book? Or the one who needs to use a calculator but who can work out all the right steps to find out how much paint you need to paint the walls (but not the doors or windows) of a given room?

That latter kid? Was me. I was the kid who was terrible at arithmetic, but once we got into algebra, I understood a lot of things intuitively that some of my classmates just couldn't grasp.

Also, I found that some of the "alternative" ways of doing basic arithmetic (didn't do Everyday Math, but did watch one of those Human Calculator videos) were more intuitive for me than the "standard" ways of doing them. Lattice multiplication, in particular, sticks in my head as being a lot easier than the "regular" way. The big issue for me wasn't in the methods-- it was in the fact that I couldn't remember the simple addition and multiplication tables, and always had to derive the sum/product of two one-digit numbers!