Compendium of human knowledge at my fingertips - eviltoast
  • lemmefixdat4u@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Aren’t those all still based on basic addition and multiplication? If you don’t know 2+2=4, breaking down 2*3 into 2+2+2 doesn’t help.

    Memorization is about speed. Knowing 3*4=12 is much faster than 3+3+3+3.

    • webadict@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      If you can’t break down something, memorizing the answer only teaches you the answer to those problems. Each piece of mathematics is a building block that can be used to help understand another part. You are skipping past the part of why 2+2=4 because it seems forthright and immutable. But, memorizing that means that there may come a time when 2+2 isn’t equal to 4, and without the knowledge of how to get there, could you then solve for 2*3?

      This seems silly (and maybe a little abstract), but it’s meant more as an example to show why knowing how to break things down could solve bigger problems later on. Learning multiple ways to solve a problem can be really helpful!

      It’s really just meant to show that it can be broken down, not that it is faster (because it isn’t).