Posted on 11/27/2015 10:34:12 AM PST by UMCRevMom@aol.com
We learned how to make change because we played store as children with our little red cash register....c. 1950
In the 1950s, we were taught that 1 & 2 came before 4, 5 & 6.
Stan has 4 nickles, 3 pennies, and 2 quarters. If apples are $1 per pound and oranges are $2 per pound, assuming each orange weighs 4 ounces and each apple weights 6 ounces, how racist is Stan?
I have an ancient (1920-ish) American Correspondence Schools book for tradesman’s math. It’s written for about an eighth-grade level education, and is amazingly comprehensive. First math book I ever saw that showed how to crunch a square root by hand.
Here’s my story from last weekend at a football game concession stand at my college alma mater. The order for three sandwiches and three coffees for my wife, my son and me came to an even $31. I handed the kid two twenties and a single - $41. He handed me back the single and wanted to give me a bunch of ones. I told him the change was just $10, give me two fives or a ten. He almost vapor-locked but recovered to get the change right.
Here’s the kicker: the stand was being run by the local high school band as a fund-raiser so the kid is no dummy. As I pointed out to my son, a band member through high school and college, the kid could be told that he was going to march 8 steps per 5 yards at 135 beats per minute and the music being played was in 6/8 time and he wouldn’t have a problem with doing any of that but math in his head just stumped him. It’s for the reason your illustration shows.
I struggled though math in high school because I hated it. Nearly fifty years later I’m struggling through Tom Apostol’s “Calculus” because I love it.
Mathematics is axiomatic that God is real.
I have had them give me no change at all telling me the change is insignificant especially if it is just pennies or have them give me a quarter instead of 18 cents. I tell them that it is pennies on the burger that pays their wages, that a penny to a fraction of a penny profit on Walmart items earns them billions a year, that if they could come up with a way for McDonald’s to save a penny or two per item they sell they would be in the corporate office instead of the counter, that the pennies in the donation jar in part fund the Ronald McDonald House. Still, they do not get it.
I never struggled with math, but I hated high school math because high school math teachers were incompetent, and university level math is taught by TA’s who are not competent in English, especially at the higher priced universities.
Square root by hand:
https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads//HTML/squareRoot.html
I like it. I tried Newton-Raphson methods, or successive approximation, but this is a direct method.
bad link. :(
I taught Calculus from Apostle back in 1971. Not an easy text.
That said, calc is a beautiful, powerful thing.
The thing about being confused about making change is true, but I have seen that with all ages. I often try to make my change come out to a round number and this sometimes confuses people. But I haven't noticed that this is happening more lately.
...but I looked online and see a long division type method that groups numbers by 2 places, involves using perfect squares and has an interesting way of multiplying the in-process quotient by 2 before subtracting for a remainder to calculate the next digit. I assume that is the method you may be linking to.
LOL
"Yeah, so I went to the Vet for the game last Sunday. I bought a hundred Dollars of beer there, AND I DIDN'T EVEN GET A BUZZ!!!"
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