No joke, this is how addition was introduced to me in the early/mid 1980's. They called it "touchpoint math," and it worked fairly decently as a mechanism to memorize addition and subtraction tables.

Are you for real? I am literally shocked because I was taught a different faster method which didn't require rote memorization of tables but to actually know what was going on.

Yep. The aim was to show visually how you have "X" of something. Hence all those dots on the page. She even circles a 9 like we used to. It worked. I managed not to fail differential equations.

You were in the clever stream 😜

Well if it worked, I can't argue with results but wow this seems so backward to me. I obviously learnt a different way such that I was looking at it and wondering to myself what on earth is this?! 😭

i learned by the old times table. you don't need any paper to do it. the japanese paper method is awesome though

Maths-Whizz

It’s not magic, it’s math – how the Japanese multiplication method works - Maths-Whizz

In the Japanese multiplication method, we are able to complete a multiplication problem by merely drawing a few lines and counting the points of

i have some classes on the vedic mnemonics but haven't used them much. i can say that the roman room method was a lot faster for me at internalizing numbers than the school's reams of arithmetic work, though. at least until i stopped doing math for a year or two and lost it again. in school i would just make a multiplication matrix on a sheet of paper and reuse it. it wasn't "a calculator" so they couldn't do anything about it. they were so mad.

This is by design