The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics
About the book
Jakow Trachtenberg devised a system for calculating and teaching basic arithmetic, and Rudolph McShane, with Ann Cutler, translated and adapted it. Instead of setting out rows of numbers to multiply and add, the method has the solver work problems mentally and write down only the answer. The publisher's account describes Trachtenberg demonstrating it with children who had been failing at school, among them a ten-year-old who wrote the product of a 10-digit and a 12-digit number on a blackboard in seventy seconds. By the same account, the pupils took to the method like a game, and their memory and concentration improved.
Tyler Cowen said it showed him how capable a single human mind can be and how much school was not teaching him, though he asked whether the methods are still worth using today.
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Tyler Cowen (Founder/Marginal Revolution University)
From this I learned how powerful the individual human mind could be, and also how much school wasn’t teaching me. It began to occur to me that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily have the best or only methods. That said, non-mainstream approaches still have the responsibility of coming up with the right answer. Query: does it these days ever make sense to actually use this stuff?
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Rudolph McShane, Jakow Trachtenberg