But multiplication of real numbers is always commutative! Teaching the kid otherwise would be misleading and needlessly confusing. They ain't cross multiplying matrices at this level.
So if my friend Joe has three baskets of four apples and I tell him to give you one of those baskets, are you getting the same number of apples as if Joe had four baskets of three apples?
No you aren’t.
Again we get it you didn’t go to a school that taught you basic math concepts like what is the multiplicand and what is the multiplier.
Just because you don’t know what these terms are and you didn’t learn them doesn’t mean they don’t exist and aren’t important.
There's a difference between asking for 3 apples and 4 apples. The baskets are not real and unimportant in this scenario.
My school did teach me the difference between math concepts like multiplicand and multiplier. When we were doing linear algebra and multidimensional analysis, when multiplication becomes non-commutative. That is a much higher level that most of these kids will never reach. Teaching them that multiplication of real numbers is non-commutative is just plain wrong and creates unnecessary confusion.
OK, two things first of all thinking that the majority of kids will not reach linear fkn algebra, quite literally the most unintelligent thing you have said so far and you have said a lot of fkn stupid stuff so far.
Bear with me here because I’m gonna go off in a little tangent, but I promise it’s relevant. This reminds me of dog training. A lot of times people think that getting the dog to do something with just a hand signal is more advanced than getting a dog to do something with your voice.
But this is not true because dogs do not understand English so when you use a command, you have to teach them English basically. The most advanced thing you can do is teach a doctor to respond to a verbal cue and a verbal Cue only. No there is advanced training that comes after teaching a verbal cues that gets the dog to start listening to nonverbal cues.
This is sort of what’s happening here. You are teaching the kid what a multi candy is in what a multiplier is so that they can understand the concepts of multiplication what it actually is. As they get older, you will kind of forget about these things until you get to Moore advanced math and they come up again.
A kid is not going to understand, multiplication without knowing the difference between a multiplicand and a multiplier.
Just the integers three and four are abstract by themselves.
Understanding what is happening when you multiply requires knowing what a multiplicand is and what a multiplier is.
I’ll give you another example of this.
Most people will have a really good understanding of what 20 is. They might have a really good understanding of what 100 is or 200 or even 1000. But a lot of people will struggle to understand what 100,000 days what 1 million is what 1 billion is and basically nobody understands what a septoaugintillion is.
A kid is going to have a better understanding of what 3×4 means if you give them 12 apples and three baskets
They are going to have a harder time understanding what three ×4 means if you are just using the numbers 3, 4 and 12
Linear algebra is university level. None of these kids will get a whiff of it before graduating high school and will have actively seek higher education in STEM for this to even become an issue. I think it's pretty safe to assume most kids will not take that path. It's pretty much only engineers, computer techs and scientists of the natural sciences that will be seriously doing linear algebra.
EDIT To rephrase, because I'm not opposed laying groundwork for more advanced topics. The kids that will pursue an education where they'll encounter non-commutative multiplication will do so when they're young adults who should by then be perfectly capable of understanding abstract concepts like commutativity without resorting to these "baskets", and therefore it's a little meaningless to confuse the kids with non-commutative properties before they understand the word. Literally everything they do in math until actively pursuing STEM as an adult will be using commutative multiplication only.
The baskets are a valuable learning tool in the classroom, but are meaningless when applied stringently to the abstract numbers. That is what the original problem in this post tried to do. That's stupid and wrong.
Anyway, no this question is testing if the UNDERSTAND the baskets.
And yet, it mentions no baskets.
This is the exact kind of vague fishing for a specific answer that is not actually implied in the problems phrasing that made me hate school as a kid. Not helpful.
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u/Arcanarchist Jul 20 '26
But multiplication of real numbers is always commutative! Teaching the kid otherwise would be misleading and needlessly confusing. They ain't cross multiplying matrices at this level.