I'll follow up to say that I have no such visual built into my brain for times tables, and thus I HAAAAAAAAATED them. I still don't know what 7x8 is without thinking really really hard, because I don't have a mnemonic trick for 7s or 8s. I actually have to mentally make a factor tree and multiply the 7 by the 2s until I get there. Sometimes I remember that I can do 7x9 and subtract 7. (9s are great. You subtract 1 from the multiplier for the first digit, and then subtract that digit from 9 for the second: 7-1=6, 9-6=3, so it's 63, and I didn't have to do a whit of memorizing numbers. Incidentally, 63-7 is 56, which I just did with visual tubes.)
I pretty much flunked timed worksheets.
My dad is a mathematician, and I felt much better when he told me that not only does he stink at arithmetic but that most of the "real" mathematicians he knows stink at arithmetic, and that I was going to be really good at the conceptual stuff later. And lo, I was.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-02-12 10:11 pm (UTC)I pretty much flunked timed worksheets.
My dad is a mathematician, and I felt much better when he told me that not only does he stink at arithmetic but that most of the "real" mathematicians he knows stink at arithmetic, and that I was going to be really good at the conceptual stuff later. And lo, I was.