Guest
Some of you who have small children may have perhaps been put in the embarrassing position of being unable to do your child’s arithmetic homework because of the current revolution in mathematics teaching known as the New Math. So as a public service here tonight I thought I would offer a brief lesson in the New Math. Tonight we’re going to cover subtraction. This is the first room I’ve worked for a while that didn’t have a blackboard so we will have to make due with more primitive visual aids, as they say in the “ed biz.“ Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 - 173. Now remember how we used to do that. three from two is nine; carry the one, and if you’re under 35 or went to a private school you say seven from three is six, but if you’re over 35 and went to a public school you say eight from four is six; carry the one so we have 169, but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer. Here’s how they do it now. You can’t take three from two, Two is less than three, So you look at the four in the tens place. Now that’s really four tens, So you make it three tens, Regroup, and you change a ten to ten ones, And you add them to the two and get twelve, And you take away three, that’s nine. Is that clear? Now instead of four in the tens place You’ve got three, ’Cause you added one, That is to say, ten, to the two, But you can’t take seven from three, So you look in the hundreds place. From the three you then use one To make ten ones... (And you know why four plus minus one Plus ten is fourteen minus one? ’Cause addition is commutative, right.) And so you have thirteen tens, And you take away seven, And that leaves five... Well, six actually. But the idea is the important thing. ...
