Date: Aug 14, 2009 11:45 AM
Author: Tom McClure
Subject: RE: Math Anxiety and Rote Learning

When my dad was just a child his grandfather would give him a dime for every picture he drew, along with the admonition to spend it immediately.  Sometime after drawing pictures for dimes he asked an artist to teach him.  The guy told him to fill every page of a Post or Look magazine with groups of one-inch hash marks, sort of like this: ////, but much closer together.  I suppose the order of magnitude for these marks was in the tens of thousands.  

When he went back for his next lesson he was told to fill another magazine with hash marks going the other direction.  He filled magazines with lines and ovals and every kind of stroke imaginable.  When I heard this story, of course, I much preferred his grandfather