Joining the discussion from the "mathematically disinclined" perspective...

> > And addition
> > and subtraction don't require thought, as far
> > as I can tell.
>
> Ah, see, this is completely a foreign concept to me. Like spelling the word foregien.

I think it has to do with being a concrete thinker vs being an abstract thinker. We concrete thinkers need to visualize THINGS. The abstract thinkers like Wes don't. Apparently. I don't really get how they do it either.

>
> I do addition and subtraction on my fingers. Always have. I don't know how to do it otherwise. Even if I try to do it visually in my head, like say for instance seeing 5 dots then seeing 3 dots, I STILL have to say, "Ok, 5 dots, and 3 dots. So 5, 6, 7, 8 dots!" I count them. I have to.

>
> Certain types of addition I have memorized. I used to play cribbage a lot, so I know that 10 and 5, 9 and 6, and 8 and 7 all add up to 15. If you've ever played cribbage you know why I memorized those. But for most things, it's counting on my fingers time.

Cribbage! My dad & *his* dad used to have Sunday afternoon cribbage tournaments, and they tried to teach me to play too. But it's funny how quickly people lose interest in it when one player (that would be me) had to pause every turn for *eons* while figuring out what added up to 15. Sigh.

>
> I don't get it. I never have. I still get laughed at when I have to do any simple math and someone catches me counting on my fingers. But I can't seem to do it any other way.
>
> -- Dave


There is a whole army of people out there like us who do this, Dave. We just don't usually let on that we do, to avoid being mocked by the naturally mathematical.

I just can't do math in my head. Travholt was telling us how he "stuck" a number in a certain place mentally while solving a problem--
my numbers won't stick. When I go back to get them, they are gone, and then I have to start over again. How do you train numbers to stick?*
Do you just keep having to remind yourself what they are?--if so, and you are constantly having to check back on them to make sure they're still there, how do you manage to move ahead with the rest of the problem? I realize this sounds pretty pathetic to you math majors out there, but, hey, this is how the other half lives.

A mental math nightmare anecdote: I had a job interview once with the president of the company, who asked me to solve a math problem. Right then and there, with no paper and pencil, even! Outwardly, I smiled and joked and blustered to stall for time, while inwardly I screamed in horror and struggled to get myself beyond the initial panicky deer in the headlights mode and onto solving the problem, which I *knew* was ridiculously easy but seemed like climbing Mt. Everest when I had to do it in my head. Maybe it was that extra job interview adrenalin, but somehow I did manage to come up with the right answer. And, I got hired. Actually, I still work there. And yes, there is some math involved, but no, I never have to do it mentally. Thank God.

Having said all this, I still would not consider myself *bad* at math (just bad at *mental* math. I had a garage sale once and broke out in a cold sweat every time I had to make change, finally ended up working things out with a pencil and paper while my customers looked on in disbelief..boy, that was embarrassing..)

I got by in school with A's & B's because I was a pretty diligent student and could apply/recognize (on paper) some/most of the concepts. But I have no natural talent or intuition for it.

Sometimes the way math was taught, made it harder. For instance, let's say the concept for today's lesson is subtracting two digit numbers.
i.e.(22 - 11 = 11). Okay, subtract the ones first, and then the tens to get your answer. Fine. So you'd learn to do that, and for the first 14 homework problems, you'd be cruising along thinking *oh, I am sooo smart at this* UNTIL you got to the 15th problem, which was
(40 - 18 = ?). Wait a minute, 0 - 8 is...hey, you can't *do* that, zero is smaller than eight...but wait, 40 *is* bigger than 18, so....hey MOM!! How do you do this?--and then Mom would come show you but she did it some weird Irish way that didn't make any sense, so you'd have to wait for Dad to get home, and by that point you were like, ooh, forget it, I'm going to go play Barbies.
Well, I was *pretty* diligent.

It was always the LAST homework question that was unsolvable (using the concept you'd just learned). I think it was supposed to be the "ah ha!" question -- the educational theory being that students would have to stop and investigate *why* they couldn't apply that math concept to that particular problem, and this would pique their curiosity, and they would begin to expore the relationship between the ones and tens columns, blah blah blah, which would lead us onto the promised land of *tommorrow's* lesson, which is "How to Borrow". Discovering that kind of concept yourself is, I agree, probably the most profound way to really learn something. But it just never worked for me. I think I'm too much of a concrete thinker, and just needed to be *told*, operationally, *this* is how you do it.

I did manage to make it all the way through trig, (amazingly) but calculus was where they separated the sheep from the goats as far as I was concerned, so at that point I switched to a statistics course, which was easier. Statistics can hide a lot of things, including math pretenders like me.

And life being what it is, I did, of course, marry someone who happens to be *completely amazing* and entirely comfortable with numbers, who is emeshed daily in them and finds them (gasp) relaxing. I don't think I consciously chose someone who would be strength to my weakness there, but that's how it turned out.
Just a thought, Dave, maybe you want to add "good with numbers" to your list of "qualities I'm looking for in H0t chixx0rz"

My, this has turned into quite a ramble.

koala"has happily found some common ground with Dave"mom

*I realize the question really is, how to you train your *mind* to stick the numbers. Doesn't seem you can apply the same mnemonic skills to numbers as you can to words...no rhymes or associations will work very well, and even trying to remember shapes won't work because numbers are all the same height, unlike letters. So is it that you have this ability to recall numbers, or you don't? Or is there another way to remember?