Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally
P- Parentheses
E- Exponents
D- Divide
M- Multiply
A- Add
S- Subtract
I actually remembered what the letters in the acronym stood for. Wow, it’s been ages (well not literally) since I’ve thought about this acronym or even thought of using it. I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to think about using math each day or applying what I’m learning. I have to say I can’t find an everyday operation for this rule from my own work. Though most likely there is one and I’m just not seeing it right now.
Curse of the bad math teacher
I had very difficult time understanding the concept of rational numbers. Well, I do get them… now, sort of.
Who didn’t have a teacher at one point who totally blanked when it came to teaching math. I was learning about fractions in the late seventies early eighties and I was having an awful time with math in general. I had a teacher who told me… “That’s okay, honey, you’re a girl.” She was insinuating that because of my gender I either wouldn’t need math or was not predisposed at being good at math.
This really still burns me up even now.
Just thinking about what that teacher said makes me even more determined to fully understand what I missed out on or forgot. I could call her a number of things, but considering the old addage… if you don’t have something nice to say… then don’t say it at all, I won’t. I remember though that this teacher was not particularly good at teaching fractions or how to add and subtract them. It took two years and an excellent teacher in the sixth grade to remedy a good part of the damage that was done to my math self-esteem in that grade.
The trick was really learning the power of decimals and understanding that a fraction could be expressed as a decimal by simply dividing the numerator or the top by the denominator or the bottom. This teacher actually made us memorize the fractions and their equivalent decimals as well as gave us various representations of fractions in circles, squares and rectangles and had us assign a decimal value to each of these pictures. I actually think that the visualization was extremely helpful to me.
However I don’t think I fully understood all properties of rational numbers until later on…
To be continued.
Welcome
I’m going to use this blog to keep track of some of the observations I make every day about when I use math.
