> Calculators do do arithmetic and if you ask me to do the kind of calculations I had to do in high school by hand today I wouldnt be able to

I got scared by how awfully my juniour (middle? 5-11) school mathematics had slipped when helping my 9 year old boy with his homework yesterday.

I literally couldn't remember how to carry the 1 when doing subtractions of 3 digit numbers! Felt literally idiotic having to ask an LLM for help. :(

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wiz21c 3 hours ago | parent [-]

On my part, I don't use that carry method at ll. When I have to substract, I substract by chunks that my brain can easily subtract. For example 1233 - 718, I'll do 1233 - 700 = 533 then 533 - 20 = 513 then 513 + 2 = 515. It's completely instinctive (and thus I can't explain to my children :-) )

What I have asked my children to do very often is back-of-the-envelope multiplications and other computations. That really helped them to get a sense of the magnitude of things.

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zeroonetwothree 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This doesn’t scale to larger numbers though. I do that too for smaller subtractions but if I need to calculate some 9 digit computation then I would use the standard pen and paper tabular method with borrowing (not that it comes up in practice).

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n4r9 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I have a two year old and often worry that I'll teach him some intuitive arithmetic technique, then school will later force a different method and mark him down despite getting the right answer. What if it ends up making him hate school, maths, or both?

	▲	zeroonetwothree a minute ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s valuable to learn different techniques to achieve the same result. That’s what math is all about.
	▲	__s 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I experienced this. Only made me hate school, but maybe because I had game programming at home to appreciate math with Just expose them to everyday math so they aren't one of those people who think math has no practical uses. My father isn't great with math, but would raise questions like how wide a river was (solvable from one side with trig, using 30 degree angles for easy math). Napkin math makes things much more fun than strict classroom math with one right answer