Thanks!
To his credit, kiddo likes this kind of stuff and picks it up very quickly.
We played around with just linear stuff like 3x+5=20 just from a purely math perspective and he had a lot of fun with that, so I’m kinda glad that his teacher will be introducing them to series type problems.
Edit:
I dunno. I never made it that far.
Don’t ever let him get behind. All mathematics builds on itself.
I know the answer to this one but don’t want to spoil it…
Spoiler alert below:
e^x
I think there is more than one right answer here, you went with the hard one, but F(X)=0*X is valid too (I think?). It returns 0 for all values of X, and the derivative does too.
I don’t know what 0*x represents. If it’s 0 times x all is good.
When presented with my question (given very little time to think about it and no access to any resource) that is the only answer that is correct that ever received. Two people gave F(x) = 0. That is why I gave the hint about solutions to differential equations. Then F(x) = 0 is correct, but absolutely no help in solving differential equations.
Yep, I used the star to avoid confusion of my variable and the multiply sign (also x).
As to the hint, that didn’t help me, TBH, I thought my answer was a gotcha. Kinda one of these type of answers:
I figured there was some other answer that would be more useful. Maybe one of the trig functions with a negative or offset or something like that.
A more “talk it through” type of solution is to just consider how many cookies he would eat if he ate no cookies the first day. For the next four days he would eat 6+12+18+24=60 cookies. He ate 40 more cookies than that and ate those cookies evenly over the five days, so he ate 8 additional cookies on each of the five days and 8 total on the first day.
I did this in kind of a ‘brute force’ way because I didn’t want to write it down and I knew approximately where day 1 should be. So I thought ‘what’s going to be about right to start’? And I used 10. Added the 5 numbers in my head and it came out to 110. So since I was 10 over the goal, I took the 10, divided it by 5, and then subtracted that 2 from my original 10 guess. A pretty silly way to do it, but it’s probably the fastest way I could manage to come to the correct answer, maybe 15-20 seconds of thinking about it.
LOL this thread is hilarious
Actually, that was my first approach but I couldn’t really think of a way to translate it to a procedure kiddo would understand.
I get where you’re coming from with on the fly, intuitive calculation. I’d do that with material stock lengths all the time, but explaining how I got there was harder than coming up with the right answer.
No! The test is tomorrow and he can’t even find the slope of the asymptote.
What am I gonna do with this kid?
I kid, of course. The problem of the week is due tomorrow. This thread has goven me some great ideas to help work through it with him in a way that he can understand and use.
Teach him with Khan Academy. This site got me through Calc 1 and 2
EDIT:
Specifically here
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/precalculus/x9e81a4f98389efdf:rational-functions/x9e81a4f98389efdf:discontinuities-of-rational-functions/e/points-of-discontinuity-of-rational-functions
Thanks. That will come in handy.
I used to watch their youtube sometimes, and should probably brush up on a few things before the little bugger gets ahead of me.
It will be a good day when he does though.
So, this is how my wife worked their way through it with him.
Sort of a truth table format.
So many ways to skin this cat! 
So I’m only just learning about how math is taught in schools these days (my son is in 3rd grade). My observations thus far:
I think it’s pretty good. And the only parents really complaining about it (not you) tend to be the ones who are just incapable of adapting. I do plan to instill a little more rote memory with my son than what is currently in curriculums, though. One of the things I did when I was his age was go through 100 single digit multiplication problems on a sheet of paper, with the goal of finishing under a minute. That’s a solid baseline. I did better than that, but that’s sufficient to be able to work through a lot of shit intuitively. When I learned to speak a second language, the basis of learning was just a ton of brute force vocabulary work, and a lot of math is exactly that.
Maybe for arithmetic, IMO.
For mathematics (especially into calculus) it requires understanding the foundation it is built upon. With only memorization higher mathematics is next to impossible to memorize that volume of information.
From what I understand the new math is an attempt to teach the foundational material. But I would doubt more than 50% actually comprehend what they are teaching.
But I firmly support school kids being capable of calculating simple arithmetic problems (without a calculator) that present themselves in everyday life, e.g., making change, tip calculation, etc.
This is exactly it. It attempts to instill place value and number sense for those students that don’t inherently grasp it (I was one of the lucky ones growing up who did).
The scary part to me is how many engineers I know with young kids complaining that the math they are trying to teach is BS.
Compared to all that kids are exposed to in school, “new math” is more abstract than any subject they encounter. Proficient comprehension is a challenge for a large percentage of students. Part of the problem is that the parents have never been exposed to “new math”, at least to the point that they understand the objective.
Definitely true, but anyone with a heavily math based education should be able to recognize the goal.
These are engineers who quite literally have lives in their hands.
I think this is what you’re alluding to, but I wonder just how many people and parents misunderstand the point of math.
Math=/=arithmetic, and I think for so many people math ultimately just ends up being solely memorizing the multiplication table and being able to add and subtract quickly. These are useful life skills, but they’re not skills useful for understanding math.
