No words fit to print, anyway.
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For “Am I excited about it”, both directions would be “maybe”: excavators, open-pit mines, and rock quarries are probably best not stood near, but the shells aren’t going to harm someone (unless they drop it on their foot),
xkcd: Physics Safety Tip
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Nothing quite so satisfying as a flow chart WITH an if/then. Nice.
Then add humor. The physicists I once knew would have heartily approved of this one!
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I guess with math there is little room to hide if you’re not getting it. Not a lot style points handed out.
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Or either they have a weird way to “show” the work. Few years ago I helped my niece with her homework doing multiplication and it said you had to show the work or either you lost 25% of score. So we did the basic over top style or whatever it’s called.
10
x12
——-
But it turned out that they were not allowed to do that. They had to do something with squares. I don’t really remember it. But the way they had to do it, I never saw it before and it made no sense to me and so even though I knew the answers, and knew how to write out how I got the answers, I still was not able to help because they wanted it done differently.
Here is the pic of what I think it was. It was just these squares there and I was like…. I have no idea what to do with them but we can’t still get the answer like this and show it.
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TLDR!!! See the edit with video below instead. You can get little tutorials like this at this site whenever something weird (to us) turns up.
I’m guessing they are emphasizing place value so that, for example, #5 which is 65 * 51, you could write 65 on top of the big square and 51 perhaps on the left hand side. Each of the digits in the numbers we’re to multiply goes above or beside its own ‘cell’. With 65 on top, of course the digit 6 is written to the left of the digit 5. Less obviously, for 51 on the left the 5 goes above the 1. Now you just multiply each of the digits above with each of the digits on the left side and write the sub products in the cell inside which is directly below or to the right of the digits used. When the 6 above is multiplied with the 5 on the left, the sub product 30 goes in upper left cell with the 3 going to the left of the diagonal line that divides the cell and the 0 going to the right.
Finally you add up the sub products and for that you use the diagonal columns which slant down toward the four places of a four digit answer. The 3 from the sub product 30 in the upper left cell will be the only one going to the far left digit in the final answer.
But let’s start writing the final answer from right to left, from the ones digit to the thousands digit. So 5 in the bottom right cell (05) will be the one going in the ones digit of the answer which I suppose we could write directly in the answer column on the worksheet. For the tens place we’d add 5 from 25, the 0 from 05 and the 6 from 06 to get 11. But of course we can’t write 11 in the tens place so we’ll think of 11 tens as 1 hundred and 1 ten. We can write the 1 from ten in the tens place of the final answer. The 1 from 1 hundred we’ll have to include with digits in the next diagonal column which already has 2 + 0 + 0 so plus 1 more = 3 which we’d write in the hundreds place of our final answer … which is 3,315
That’s what I think is going on. They’re really just trying to emphasize place value. When you do the over the top method we learned, it is purely procedural. If you wrote the 65 over the 51 to start you’d then stack 65 over 3250 but why? The reason is much less transparent the way we learned to do it. “Our’s was not to reason why; our’s was but to follow steps or watch the answer die.”
Edited to say I guessed wrong about what to show and how. Here is a video showing the right way:
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I’ll never learn it. It would be a set back lol. I’m sure it’s easy but no way it’s easier then just the normal way. I get fired if I did that at work lol.
True, but its purpose is not to be easy, but to help learn how numbers work, so that knowledge can be used in other ways. One of my weak points is math, and I wish I was more capable, and one of the reasons I am not is I learned procedures, not principles.
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The problem I have with “show your work” is the amount that I just do in my head, or have memorized.
Like for 11, the way I would do it is 50x50=2500 (instant), 50x9x2=900 (a second), 9x9=81 (instant), add those together (near-instant), get 3481.
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I am so tempted to flag that long post of mine up there as inappropriate for the thread. 
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I’m sure there is a math joke in there somewhere. Maybe something about how the square matrix is how snakes multiply, because they are adders.
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I had an old resource book of practice sheets in which the answers decoded a bad gag question.
One of my favorites.
Q: what happened to the butcher who backed into his meat grinder?
A: he got a little behind in his work.
Some days if the lesson was a success and there were a few minute left I or one of the students would share a joke. The only rule was the joke had to be one they wouldn’t mind my sharing with their parents if I disagreed. Seems like elephants came up a lot. Some of mine:
Why did the elephant wear green sneakers?
-So he could sneak across a billiard table.
Or this pair:
Why do ducks have flat feet?
-So they can stamp out forest fires.
Why do elephants have flat feet?
-From stamping out burning ducks.
But this one from a student was the best.
What did the elephant say to the naked guy
-Cute, but how do you drink with it?
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Botulinum toxin, tetanus neurotoxin, poison ivy, and jimsonweed all came quickly to mind when I first saw that quote.
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And just about anything in Australia.
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What did the duck say to the cashier as she bought a tube of lipstick?
–Put it on my bill!
What do you call a farmer who takes care of hens?
–A chicken tender!
These are donations from patients with a corny sense of humor in the last 10 days (most of them know I collect “dad” jokes.)
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There’s a new Russian allergy doctor in town:
Dr. Igot Suchanitch
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