This kind of feels like how I constantly get the “which word/shape/number (etc.) in this series is incorrect” questions on tests wrong. I severely overthink it. “Well, these four all have chloroplasts and this other one gains energy from photosynthesis via a symbiotic relationship with another organism, so it must be that one.”
*Gets test back*
“Oh, it was the one that didn’t live in a rain forest.”
I think that third one down is actually how they’re teaching it at my kids’ schools now. It’s called “making a 10” I think, basically that same idea, add up to 10 first, then do the rest.
Why is everything ADHD?
Yeah, this has nothing to do with ADHD.
Why are these posts always shitting on teachers? I don’t know what teachers you’re seeing, but I’ve never seen any teacher of any subject / age-group ever discourage anyone for thinking about something a different way. Quite the contrary, different ways of approaching problems are always encouraged.
My math teacher (at a private school) was just a random students’ mom. She had no higher degree and only taught the book. If you got the right answer by using a method not included in the book, it was marked half-credit because she didn’t understand and wasn’t interested in hearing your logic, because “that’s not what the book says”.
Being taught by people who have no drive for knowledge and just want to teach the standardized test answers SUCKS.
I had to memorize multiplication. We weren’t taught any other way. 3x3 = 9 because it just is that way, memorize it. I had stacks of flash cards. My mom struggled so hard for weeks to teach me my multiplication tables at home. In the end, I (somehow) passed the multiplication quiz or whatever and did my best to do as little multiplication as I could for the rest of my life. As a result, I still have never learned all the multiplication tables, and have a deep dislike of math or numbers in general.
I bet my education would have been a lot different if I could have learned how to multiply effectively from a young age.
Same here. Multiples are just a memorized table in my head. I look at solutions like the one in this meme and having never been taught anything like that, I just shrug and add 7 to 9.
The “ADHD way” is literally what they are teaching in school.
Yup, this is what parents are complaining about when they say math has changed. Before, math was primarily about rote memorization. You just memorized that 9+7 is 16. There were multiplication tables you were expected to memorize and regurgitate ad nauseam. Sure you could count it out on your fingers, but that only works for numbers under 11. For anything above that, you just referred to your memorized addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division tables. But this also meant that numbers outside of those tables were really difficult to do in your head, because you were poorly equipped to actually calculate them out.
Common core math is attempting to make math easier to do in your head, by teaching the concepts (rather than promoting rote memorization) and helping students learn shortcuts to avoid getting lost. 9+7 is 16, but it’s also 10+6 or 8*2, which are much easier to visualize in your head without counting on your fingers.
Yep, and what happens is that when kids need help they can’t explain the “new” way from the beginning and only half remember stuff which is extremely confusing to hear as a parent so then the parents get mad at the method.
Admittedly I was in school multiple decades ago, but our teachers wanted us to memorize addition and multiplication tables. Which of course made anything outside the tables hard to do. I (and others apparently) thought it would be a great idea to use shortcuts like this.
So many failed tests. So many. When teachers saw us write down that we took the 21 apples multiplied by 7 bushels and just did 2x7, and tack a 7 on the end, they broke out the red pen.
this is a false story. everybody knows 7 ate 9
You’re old school, like me. You’re literally describing the “new math” that boomers hate. Teachers are finally teaching kids to do it the way we’ve always done it in our head.
“8 + 7 is awkward, but if you take two from seven and give it to eight, now you have 10 + 5 and that’s easy mental math.”
And the reason they teach it that way is because it’s what the people who are good at math were already doing. Math isn’t about memorization it’s about understanding how numbers work and that’s how numbers work
I realized something. I relate so much to ADHD memes not because i have it but because they simply do a lot of things that they think only people with ADHD do. In my school they encouraged you to come up with techniques like this. Often 9 is hungry in different ways. Another exmple is multiplication. 5099 is 50100-50 which is much easier to calculate.
This isn’t even an ADHD thing.
In my school they encouraged you to come up with techniques like this.
You’re either very lucky and were in a school that went against established norms, or you’re young enough that you were taught the “new” math that boomers hate. Because this is the new math.
Boomers, GenX, and elder millennials were primarily taught via rote memorization. You simply memorized the times tables, and committed “8*3=24” to memory. You didn’t calculate it every time. You just memorized the tables, regurgitated them ad nauseam to appease the teachers, and then referred to those memorized tables for any multiplication you needed to do.
For reference, this is the times table I’m referring to. Our quizzes/tests required you to fill out the entire thing in less than 5 minutes:
We had to fill this out multiple times per week. The goal of the time limit was to force you to memorize it, instead of calculating it out every time. You simply didn’t have time to calculate each one out. Then once you had it memorized, if you ever had to do 8*3, you would just refer to your memorized times tables for it.
But the issue with this is that it doesn’t teach you how to actually do the math in your head, it just teaches you the times tables. You aren’t calculating it out each time, so you don’t develop any shortcuts or methods to make it easier. If a teacher ever saw you turn 9+7 into 10+6, they would bust out the red pen and start slashing. Even though 10+6 is undeniably easier to do in your head, the teachers weren’t concerned with that; They wanted to know that you had memorized what 9+7 is. These memes are primarily aimed at the millennials and GenX with ADHD, because they were the ones who got bored of rote memorization and started coming up with shortcuts (which then got docked points on their quizzes.)
Ahh i understand. I am gen z and i went to a really good school(at least in maths, the other subjects were still thought in an industrial revolution way). I guess you could say people with ADHD are ahead of the curve because they have less patience for shit they dont want to do.
10 is just easier for me to work with so…
9+1=10 10+7=17 17-1=16
No no no. Adding nine is just subtracting one, but adding to the front digit. 9 + 7 is actually 7 - 1=6, then add that 1 to the front. 16. Let’s not make more complicated than it needs to be.
Holy shit! That’s how I do it. Caught so much crap for it when I was a kid.
No no no 10+7 = 17 and 9 is always one less so 16
If your teacher gets mad about breaking an addition problem into easier problems, then that teacher should be fired. Phony tale.
If anything, these are exactly the techniques that “New Math” was supposed to teach. Your brain doesn’t work math the same way as a computer. People who are good at math tend to break the whole thing down into simple pieces like this. New Math was developed by studying what they did and then teaching that to everyone.
I tend to add 9 to things by bumping the tens digit up by one (7 becomes 17) and then subtracting 1 (17 becomes 16).
Most of the arguments against New Math tended to prove the point; our mathematical education was in dire need of fixing.
But they posted in italibold, which makes it 420.69% leejit. pwned.
IT IS ILLEGAL TO WRITE LIES IN ITALLIBOLD.
It took me 3 years to pass HS algebra because the coaches/part-time math teachers didn’t like the way I solved problems. I got the right answers. But the way I got them was wrong apparently.
What does adhd have to do with anything?
Nothing, it has become quite common to say ADHD causes every little odd behavior. I’m not sure if all those people are even actually diagnosed and not just lying for internet points…
I assume people with actual ADHD find it offensive their condition is made fun of by “quirky” idiots online.
Yep. Just because you do something in a nonsensical, stupid way doesn’t mean you have ADHD or that is what someone with ADHD would do. People with ADHD are also “intellectual.”
For me, this is how I’d solve 9+7:
Day 1: Fuck it, I’ll do it tomorrow
Day 2: Alright gotta do that problem now! Just gonna eat and take a walk to prepare my mind
Day 3: okay for real this time
Day 4: staring intently at problem for half an hour before getting incredibly inspired to do anything else
Day 5: anxiety
Day 6: paralyzed but anxiety
Day 7: Either I actually try to do it and it takes 30 seconds or I give up entirely and flunk the class
Not “hehe quirky look at me I’m so stupid because my brain does things differently, ur so smart I wish I was like you and not so dumb! x3”
I wanna be charitable and say that these sort of behaviors might be commonly associated with ADHD because for us they become a necessity to exist in the world.
While an NT person might have no problem adding 9+7 without breaking up the problem, it becomes much harder with ADHD. so ADHD people are more likely to develop them as a coping mechanism.
For me personally, the more steps a math problem has, the less likely I am to follow through. My mind prefers cutting corners rather than breaking equations up
For many of us it is cutting corners. Memory is hard, but I know my fives and anything less than five so really I just need two spots in ram instead of a bunch of tables on my tiny hard drive
Yes! This is true, for example, if I’m given something like 16 + 27, I’ll sooner make an educated (wrong) guess 3 times than stop and think about it. Not sure if that’s ADHD though!
Oh I see you’ve seen my leadership style
The problem here is that what you’re posting is accurate, realistic, and far more importantly, makes no use of italibold. Sorry, friend.
You know how sometimes you go outside and there’s a bird and you’re like, “cool”
classic adhd
If you said squirrel I would’ve called you ableist.
Absolutely fuckall, because apparently no one with ADHD can ever be (an) intellectual.
I don’t think manipulating an addition problem so you can equate it to a multiplication problem would be a normal action.
They are probably just using ADHD (not even a diagnoses anymore IIRC - it’s all ADD now) as a shorthand for ‘funky brain thing goin on’. Not exactly good, but I don’t really think it does any meaningful harm either.
ADHD (not even a diagnoses anymore IIRC - it’s all ADD now)
Other way around.
ADHD is sometimes used as a catchall to mean a set of behaviors that does not coincide with the majority at school or work. Ive met a bunch of people on ADHD medicine, but it was usually because they wanted to force themselves to be good at or like something they didnt want to do normally.
In this case its called ADHD because the student has found their own way to solve it despite the method the teacher is teaching and that the rest of the class uses.
It’s because it’s stupid. The bottom answer is at least sort of similar to a simple rule for adding 9s. But the op is just so incredibly specific that it won’t help most of the time.
Well the OP is a joke form of a more serious example. Its meant to illustrate the point but not actually require much thought or calculation.
Mental arithmetic is all little tricks and shortcuts. If the answer is right then there’s no wrong way to do it, and maths is one of the few places where answers are right or wrong with no damn maybes!
Well, there are certainly wrong ways to arrive at the answer, e.g. calculating 2+2 by multiplying both numbers still gets you 4 but that is the wrong way to get there. That doesn’t apply to any of the methods in the post though.
Unsolved problems do not all fall into binary outcomes. They can be independent of axioms (the set of assumptions used to construct a proof).
I like your funny words, mathemagic man
Unless you consider probabilities. That’s a very strange field—you can’t objectively verify it.
You can’t objectively verify anything in mathematics. It’s a formal system.
Once you start talking about objective verification, you’re talking about science not math.
It is actually the opposite, since it is purely abstract everything in math is objective. There is literally no subjectivity possible in something that isn’t in the real world.
That’s also all common core is. Instead of teaching the line up method which requires paper and is generally impractical in the real world, they teach ways to do math in your head efficiently.
What is “common core” and what is the “line up method”?
Hmm, you seem to be completely discounting calculus, where a given problem may have 0, 1, 2, or infinite solutions. Or math involving quantum states.
In math, an answer is either right, wrong, or partially right (but incomplete).
Quantum states is physics, not math.
And mathematically a probabilistic theorem is still a theorem.
Yes, but physics is math with more variables.
But there’s plenty of math related to quantum states that can make sense, such as if you know a given machine will give the right answer 51% of the time, and you want to know how many iterations you’ll need to get a certain confidence that you are seeing the correct answer. That’s basic statistics, which is also math, but it’s relevant to quantum states in that you’re evaluating a computing system based on qubits.
Those are quite far from mental arithmetic though
Calculus is generally pretty easy to do mental arithmetic on, especially when talking about real-world situations, like estimating the acceleration of a car or something. Those could have multiple answers, but one won’t apply (i.e. cars are assumed to be going forward, so negative speed/acceleration doesn’t make much sense, unless braking).
Math w/ quantum states is a bit less applicable, but doing some statics in your head for determining how many samples you need for a given confidence in a quantum calculation (essentially just some stats and an integral) could fit as mental math if it’s your job to estimate costs. Quantum capacity is expensive, after all…
