Merry Chrsitmas 2016

Merry Christmas, Mele Kaliki Maka you guys is nutz, 500 people came to my blog yesterday and 507 people came to the House Of Math on Christmas Day! Of that only 332 were "new" that means 675 people had been to the house of math at leaste once and some of you mathaholics 10x or more. Playing math on Christmas-- I can not think of anything better than that: giving the gift of knowledge for Christmas. And I hope some of those 675 had fun and saw how magical math can be...when you see the wonder and they begin asking "what if" on their own. (They won't ask if you don't.) I also envision a few of those being because boxes of blocks got opened under the tree. Right now it's because parents want their kids to have them but one day kids are going to ASK for them...this was a dream of a man named Jerry Mortensen. Dreams can be contagious, and those are the worst and most dangerous ones.

I am famous among some students for saying math takes no holiday.  Yesterday I took one, starting with missing my flight Christmas eve...so then I took the Red Eye and got in at 6:30 AM, got to drive on an empty freeway at 95 MPH which to a Maui boy is a Christmas Present all in itself. I was doing 80 but kept getting passed like I was standing still so I kicked up to 95 just to keep even.

Sunrise out the airplane window at 30,000 feet.

Guess which City I'm in.

Pretty sure here was math involved.

I went to not one, but two Christmas dinners. Basically ate and drank and laughed continuously for 5 hours…got to drive at 95 again and then ate and drank and laughed and played with my old friend Ziggy the cat for 4 more…still not hungry today…view from 30th story flat in downtown LA.

You do math all the time when you calculate how long it will take you to get there...making adjustments for weather and traffic if you miscalculate and then try to make it up while driving in California you could end up here:

No too smoggy.

You do it automatically...switching between bases without thinking...11:55 plus 10 minutes is is 12:05 not 11:65...people who tell me they can't do math, while speaking it in English, that can tell time make me smile. They are simply victims of clever programming. If you can do ha you can do any of it, and by the way you learned to do that. There was a time when you couldn't tell time and you didn't care.  Very few believe me when I say that the reason the masses can't do math is very much on purpose and by design. Meantime they can't each their own kids rudimentary algebra; but don't feel bad neither can the teachers in public high schools who believe a certain percentage have to fail...they are programmed, too. The better to extract wealth from you. No one wants to hear this. Fine.

And I've watched the problem steadily increase for 27 years now...my website just turned 8 so far it's cost me $2,400.00, in that 8 years I've received a little over 50 dollars in donations. LOL. But I do have a small, but loyal cadre of customers who have paid 100 bucks or more for passwords, YOU support this effort, and for that I thank you. Soon many pages that are currently free are going behind paywalls. Those with passwords won’t be affected, freeloaders are welcome to see if they can find what’s currently at Crewton Ramone's House of Math for free some place else.....when you do, come back and post it here or on Face Book, I enjoy watching other people teach math...speaking of that.

Here is a great website, Education Unboxed for users of cuisenaire rods beware though, people seem to have a little problem with division for example this video is the still the number one hit on youtube for division with base ten blocks...although she clearly doesn't know how to model the problem.  She does know how to divide up base ten blocks into groups...like this...I show you how to use base ten blocks to mirror the notation they get in school and show you why the problems are set up the way they are.  Across and up for multiplication across and down for division--but this book will show you how to put it together and make division easy.

Should be able to get quite a bit done this week...starting with fixing webpages and making stuff work again winter maintenance then password changes. Also in January I will be having One our live Q&A's/AMA's via google chat just look for the link. And on the 21st a live 4 to 5 hour training...those of you who got passwords during the sale ought come as part of your free gifts. Anybody, that bought anything is welcome at the Q&A's/AMA's.  Other's mark your calendar and come on the 21st for $50.00.  

Bases For Practicing Math

Here is a lesson that uses bases for practicing math.

This is again cross teaching or a compound lesson. I am not interested so much in the student memorizing what one number in base ten is in another base, I am interested in the student being able to grasp some basic concepts like numbers are made out of other numbers, a deeper understanding of place value, a deeper understanding of division concepts...how many times is a number contained in another number--that's basic division.

When we convert from base ten to another base like 2 or 3 IT'S FUN to do. Kids enjoy it if you present it correctly.

This blog post is just to give you some ideas. I'll add more video on this later...I made this video on a lark because a parent was having some trouble explaining division. Play with this a little bit and long division will be a snap. I have lots of other videos on long division and using algebra to teach not only division but the other basic operations as well.   Algebra is just generic math.

This video stops before we get to the repeating decimal. As I was doing this I was thinking too many concepts at a time. Keep it simple...next time we come back to this we can take it a step further and see what happens when we divide by sevens or nines...for not finding out how many time one number is contained in a another number with division should become much easier after converting to bases where you have to think about multiplication and subtraction with different numbers. For example converting 100 into base two...we don't need a 128,  but we do 1-64, 1-32, no 16's, no 8's one 4 and no 2's or 1's...so 1100100. When you are a little kid that's a lot of thinking. But it makes sense and they can see that what they are basically doing is adding 64 to 32 to 4 to get 100...and keeping track with symbols in certain places...that one in the middle of the zeros means one four. Converting it into base three or 4 is also FUN.

I didn't get hung up in the details of notation, but instead focused on focused on the basic concepts.  I assure you when they go do base ten or base x division it will be easier...and again doing division in base x makes "regular" long division easier too.  Repetition is the mother of skill and memory but that doesn't mean you repeat the same thing over and over again. We want them to learn the 45 addends and their multiplication tables....this exercise practices all of that. For the little kids stat out with base two and maybe later do some base three. Do a few easy ones and work your way up.

I often start with base two and then make a table...from x⁰ to x¹⁰ across the top (largest on the left to smallest on the right) and then going down the right hand side binary, 3 to 10, 12 and then 16. Just making the table is a great exercise...do as much as you can without a calculator. Then it's fun to punch a calculator and get the answers, unless you are interested in the students practicing the computation. You might want to do it in stages over several lessons so it doesn't get tedious.

Here are the answers...

This gave me an idea for a password protected page called "solutions."

This post is mostly done, check back there may be more...Winter break is proving very challenging for getting things done....lol...