On last week’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, John Oliver used the mental math/computation strategy of halving and doubling as a punchline to a news story on nuclear waste.
The graphics nicely–and quickly!–illustrate why this strategy works. Starting with 1 × 20 (one football field twenty feet tall), if we double the first factor (area in football fields) and halve the second factor (height in feet), the product (volume in piles of nuclear waste), expressed as 2 × 10, remains the same. Similarly, we can halve and double to visualize that 1 × 20 is equivalent to ½ × 40. (Oliver also throws in the commutative property at the end–twenty football fields one foot tall.)
This reminded me of a video clip from Sherry Parrish’s Number Talks. In it, the teacher poses the problem 16 × 35. The fifth graders share several strategies: partial products (10 × 30 + 10 × 5 + 6 × 30 + 6 × 5); making friendly numbers (20 × 35 − 4 × 35); halving and doubling (8 × 70); and prime factors (ultimately unhelpful here).
I’ve probably shared this video in about a dozen workshops. There are some predictable responses from attendees. Often “not my kids” is the first reaction. I remind teachers that the teacher in this video has implemented this routine three to five times a week in her classroom. This isn’t her kids’ first number talk. Pose 16 × 35 in your fifth–or ninth!–grade classroom tomorrow and, yeah, the conversation will probably fall flat. Also, this teacher is part of a schoolwide effort (seen in other videos shared at these workshops).
Teachers are always amazed by Molly’s halving and doubling strategy. Every. Single. Time. I ask attendees to anticipate strategies but they don’t see this one coming. I note that doubling and halving wasn’t introduced through 16 × 35. I would introduce this through a string of computation problems (e.g., 1 × 12, 2 × 6, 4 × 3). “What do you notice? What patterns do you see? Does it always work? Why?” We can answer this by calling on the associative property: 16 × 35 = (8 × 2) × 35 = 8 × (2 × 35) = 8 × 70 above. Better yet, having students play with cutting and rearranging arrays provides another (connected) explanation.
Rather than playing with virtual piles of nuclear waste, I had fun with arrays of candy buttons:
Update
He did it again! Factoring as a punchline to a story on SLAPPs. “Math. Is. Fun!”
Chris Hunter 