Post by @katrani@elekk.xyz

SO much of math things now are much more intuitive for me than they were as a kid

But I still get static noises when I have to do stuff where radicals interact with each other

Had to tell a student to move onto a different part of his work while I took like 10 minutes to parse how to get from the question to the answer in the answer key

(I can provide the example but like basically I saw it was subtracting polynomial radicals and then promptly forgot order of operations was a thing, and that since radicals are basically division and multiplication I needed to resolve either side of the subtraction symbol first)

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katrani

@katrani@elekk.xyz 1 hr. ago

Okay took me a minute to find paper but

My gut solution: idfk, I see radicals, I think I gotta be canceling shit out.

Actual solution: order!!! of!!!! operations!!!!!!!! Simplify anything to do with exponents and multiplication before any shit with subtraction!!!
And radicals fall in with exponents for these purposes!!!!!!!

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katrani

@katrani@elekk.xyz 56 min. ago

Anyways ways I wish math had been taught to me as a kid:

-"p, e, md, as" instead of "p, e, m, d, a, s"

-"more negative" or "less negative" rather than terms of absolute value or like. Absolutely greater or lesser.

-"think of subtraction symbols as taking the opposite, so minus a negative is opposite of the opposite" (metaphor: playing uno, two reverse cards in a row)

-squaring and rooting are inverses, like multi and div, or add and sub

-instead of rote memorization for multiplication, "opposite signs give a negative answer, same signs give a positive answer"

I think there's others I've realized but can't think of them off-hand, these are just the most common ones now that I work reinforcing math skills haha
(And this is not to say these are perfect thought processes, just. Realizations that helped how my brain works)