Reading, Writing and 'Rithmetic...

Last week our family watched an episode of "That'll Teach'em", A group of modern-day GCSE(highschool) pupils are put through the rigours of O levels and life in a 1950s state grammar boarding school. Amongst other things, the show suggests that one of the many glaring deficiencies in modern-day education is a failure to master basic arithmetic calculations.

While I can argue that the ability to perform long-division calculations quickly and accurately is far less relevant now than it was in the years before calculators and spreadsheets, I don't disagree that students today seem less able to perform "number manipulations" than students 30 years ago. (I'm basing this statement on my undoubtedly unbiased recollections of my skills back when I was the "glasses held together with BOTH tape and a safety pin", flash-card geek, relative to those of my DDs and their classmates.)

Yup, kids today can't add, subtract or multiply...let's not even get started on long-division.

Where is this going??

Despite the fact that I was schooled with plenty of drill-work and rote memorization of times tables and the like, I missed the basic math/knitting priciple...

If you double the strand, you halve the yardage.

Doh...



Oh, well it was good practice for the "real tank top", which I will restart using



Fortunately, the new yarn looks equally fetching in my citrus tote.