I suck at math.

I really used to HATE math. Now I don't hate it so much as just don't understand it. I can't get my head around even simple arithmetic most of the time.

I just did something that I realize I've done a million times before, but this time I want to share it with the rest of you to find out how *you* handle such things, and how things work for you. It's a story of how I do simple arithmetic in my head, and why I think I'm so bad at it.

Here at work, we have a subsidised soda machine ("pop machine" for those of you who talk funny). A 12 oz can of soda is only twenty-five cents. As I was walking back from the machine with my Diet Sprite, I tried to figure out how much that would be per six-pack and per case, so I could get an idea of how much we save.

This is how I went about doing the math in my head. I suspect some of you are going to be shocked and weirded out by my description of this process, while others of you will nod your heads and agree, having done something similar in the past.

First, I visualized one can. One can costs twenty-five cents, so I mentally placed a quarter on top of the can. One can, twenty-five cents.

Next, I visualized six cans together, in the plastic ring binder, each with quarters on top of them. To figure out how much that cost, I actually COUNTED the number of quarters I could see in my mind's eye. Actually, when I count quarters, I tend to do it in sets of four, since four quarters is a dollar. So what I really did was see that 6 cans, each with one quarter on top, breaks down into four cans and two cans. Four quarters is a dollar, two quarters is fifty cents, so six quarters is a dollar fifty.

Next, for the case. You might think I would visualize 24 cans, each with quarters on them, and figure it out that way. But I didn't. Instead, I visualized four sets of six cans, each with a dollar fifty on them. In fact, Once I had the four sets of a dollar fifty, I mentally dispensed with the cans and just visualized this:

$1.50 $1.50
$1.50 $1.50

This is where it gets REALLY weird. I didn't really mentally do any math. I just kind of knew, from past experience, that $1.50 + $1.50 is $3.00. So what I saw, in my minds eye, were four sets of $1.50 (and yes, I saw it just like that, not as six quarters or as a dollar bill and two quarters, but as the symbols "$1.50")--then, the upper and lower sets sort of flowed into each other, combining to make two sets of $3.00, like this:

$3.00 $3.00

Then, the final step was to combine those two. And yes, I mentally saw the images flowing together to make $6.00. Which is a pretty damn good price for a case of soda, but I digress.

What I really want to know is, how many of you are sitting there shocked and appalled, and how many of you would have done something similar? I find myself using this visualization trick to do math all the time, which I think is why I suck at it so bad--because even though I learn things visually and use visualization in many different areas of thinking and learning, my visualization skills kind of suck--I can't hold a whole lot in my head at once. How do people who are *good* at math see math problems in their head? Do you see them at all? Is it just something that is sort of intuitive, or is there some trick you use?

As an aside, another thing I tend to do is visualize multiplication problems in my head. When I do a simple problem like 24 x 7 in my head, what I actually see is:

24
x7
---

And I actually do the problem in my head as if I were doing it on paper. Meaning I do 7 x 4, then do (7 x 2) + 2 (and yes, I mentally carry the two, so I see it floating up there over the problem) to end up with 168. Anybody else do weird stuff like this?

-- Dave