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More Math Tools
A while back, I wrote an article on how we should teach students how to use math tools instead of teaching them methods. I gave a couple examples of tools: breaking numbers up, the distributive property, and changing the numbers. I’ve put some thought into what tools I use when doing math and come up with the following:
- Breaking the problem up (including the distributive property and pulling out what you know)
- Simplifying
- Changing the numbers
- Drawing a picture
- Grouping
- using units (a.k.a. dimensional analysis)
Let’s look at the first three of these.
Breaking the problem up
I’ve done some computer programming in my time and computers need to do only 1 step at a time. They can do really impressive math, but the programmer needs to break everything down into micro-baby-steps. If a problem is too hard to do in your head, break it down into steps. Here’s how.
Splitting Numbers
When we work with numbers, we’d prefer to have nice numbers ( 2, 5, 10, etc…) rather than awkward ones (13, 17, 53, etc…). However, we can make awkward numbers into easy numbers by splitting the numbers up.
