Originally posted by: DrPizza
Those 10 rules - what would they be? I can't even think of THAT many!
1. What you do to one side, you do to the other.
2. Don't divide by zero or the universe will implode.
Well I've never written them out or really counted them. Those are two good ones. Lets see what else we can come up with:
3. Combine only like terms - Thanks to Mathlete
4. Commutative rules. a + b = b + a, a * b = b * a
5. Order of operations. Multiply first then add. <- pretty much covers all order of operation rules.
6. Adding zero is always acceptable and doesn't change the result.
7. What is the name of this rule? If a = b and b = c, then a = c.
8. Multiplying by 1 is always acceptable and doesn't change the result.
Ok I'm about out of rules. There are probably a couple similar ones. If you know those ~7, then you can solve 99.9% of math problems you'll ever come across. Even a complete moron can apply those ~7 rules at random and eventually reach the right answer. But, sadly, math is never taught that way.
My wife had the same problem. She HATED math with a passion (she loves the Jimmy Buffet song, "Math Sucks"). She thought she couldn't do it. She took the minimal math in high school and wanted to avoid it at all costs in college (flunked the math entrance exam into the school). After a few years I encouraged her to take less-traditional math courses (voting theory, statistics, etc). These courses went back to the basics, covered everything she needed, and she aced them. Multiple professors called her in outside of class and tried to encourage her to switch majors to majoring in math since they said she understood it so well. And all due to a 5th grade math teacher who was horrible, she missed some of those rules, and thought she sucked at math.
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