Fill in the Missing Number in Sequence Exercise

This exercise trains you to look for patterns between numbers.  It’s training you to make sense of data.  Find x for each sequence. Write out approaches to each problem, you’ll want to look at them later to compare notes and methods. Answers and explanations tomorrow.

• 1, 2, 4, x, 16, 32, 64
• 30, 23, x, 9
• 84, x, 66, 57
• 63, 61, 59, x
• 32, 40, 24, 16, 24, x  8
• 1, 2, 6, 24, x  120
• x, 12, 18, 10, 6, 14, 5, 0, 10 (this one is very difficult, break it into three parts to find pattern)
• 8, 25, 52, 89, x

Respond to question with question exercise.

Those who are curious ask more questions than they make statements. Practicing asking a question in response to a question teaches you to not assume you know what the asker is asking and to ask for clarification so you better understand what’s being asked.

Answer the following questions with a question.

• Can I have your belt?
• Have you been to Italy?
• Do you want to get dinner?
• Can I punch you in the face?
• Why are people evil?
• Is the personal political?
• What’s the most popular drink here?
• Is blue your favorite color?
• Will coronavirus kills me?
• Should I commit suicide?

Example:

Question: Can I have your belt?
Response: Are you going to hit me with it?

Just learned from parent that Washington state IS using the method we’re teaching to teach Math!!! Drill drill drill until EVERYONE masters the basics, then teach students to do arithmetic left-to-right instead of right-to-left so they develop intuition about numbers.  Sooo happy. So the early elementary school students are taught correctly, it’s the older students and parents who need to go back to 1st grade to learn the fundamentals of Math correctly.

Missing numbers multiplication drills

Here’s the link to the worksheets: https://www.math-drills.com/search.php?s=missing+numbers+multiplication&page=1&sort=weekly

Do the first four, giving yourself 60 seconds to complete each.  Finish all four before grading them. Keep doing it until you score 100 percent. Don’t turn each problem into a division problem. Practice to look at it until the answer arrives intuitively.  Just pound them out.

Example:

6*A=12
A=2

This exercise prepares students for algebra and anyone who knows the multiplication table can complete these drills.  It’s also a way to introduce division. I treat it more as a way to work the brain differently, to run backwards, which is why I don’t them converted into division problems. I’m wondering how these drills affect the way students understand numbers.

Antonym Pair Vocabulary Drills

This drill trains students to think of language meaning in binary terms.  Example of antonym pairs:

In and Out
On and Off
Up and Down

Write 10 of your own antonym pairs.

Now pair the following words into antonym pairs:

• Misandry
• Occidental
• Deduction
• Reduction
• Misogyny
• Oriental
• Induction
• Increase
• Misanthropy
• Philanthropy

Some will find it much easier to learn vocabulary words using the antonym pair method.

Once you’re confident you have know the meaning of each word, write a sentence using each of the above 10 words.  I’ll do the first one for you:

Susan’s misandry is manifested by her refusal hire any men.

Again, I don’t recommend you use flashcards ever to memorize vocabulary. Learning vocabulary should coincide with developing verbal skills and creativity.

The Privileged Poor, once the blog site of a now defunct clothing store, is now the site of the Alive Juice Bar tutoring service.   We’ll be posting daily lesson plans to help students get through indefinite school closures.

Make your own acronym

Memory is a muscle that anyone can develop. Here’s a trick to memorize the known planets in our solar system, acronyms! First, the planets, from closest to the sun to the farthest.

• Mercury
• Venus
• Earth
• Mars
• Jupiter
• Saturn
• Uranus
• Neptune
• Pluto (not sure if it’s still considered a planet, can skip this one)

Now make a sentence using the first letter of each planet, starting in sequence from Mercury to Neptune.  Example:

My Very Edgy Mom Just Slapped Uncle Nathan

Do at least one.  And I don’t want you to memorize popular acronyms for the planets, I want you to make one because the process of making one is a creativity drill. And since you made the acronym, you’re more likely to remember it.

Use your acronym to help you memorize the images of each planet. You’ll need to do this to do the next exercise.

Memorizing Pi

One trick to memorizing numbers is to break it up into groups and associate each group with an image.

3.1415926535 8979323846

Break it this way:

3.14 — Mercury
159 — Venus
265  — Earth
358 — Mars
979 –Jupiter
323 –Saturn
846 — Uranus
264 — Neptune

Now try memorizing it. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can memorize it when you associate numbers with images, when you arrange the numbers this way.

The Privileged Poor, once the blog site of a now defunct clothing store, is now the site of the Alive Juice Bar tutoring service.   We’ll be posting daily lesson plans to help students get through indefinite school closures.

Why Drills are Important
They make a lot of work routine and effortless so you can focus on creative problem solving.  Is there an NFL player who doesn’t do drills, from weight training to yoga to sprints?  Do we let someone who is out of shape play an NFL game?

Then why do we let students who’ve rarely been drilled in fundamentals learn geometry and read Chaucer? And then educators complain that most hate geometry and few do their reading. Well, lack of drilling is like sending the football team out to play without helmets, it’s going to be a bloodbath.

Drilling also helps students develop patience (aka delay of gratification) and discipline, arguably the two most important traits to have to do well in life.

Division Drills
This link takes you to four division worksheets (do 1-3 and 5, from left to right): https://www.math-drills.com/division.php

It’s important to give yourself no more than 100 seconds to finish each worksheet. Time yourself, stop when time goes off.  Do all four.  Then grade all four.  Repeat process until you score 100 percent on all four.

Intermediate Vocabulary Drills — Nuances

You need to know the following 10 words if you want to score >600 on the SAT verbal.

• Surly
• Adamant
• Adjacent
• Nuance
• Mitigate
• Ardor
• Austere
• Adept
• Tactful
• Tentative

Look up the meaning of the words, take as long as you want.  Don’t try to memorize them.  Below are ten words, each with a meaning similar (yet slightly different) to one of the words above.  Pair each of the words below with one of the words above most similar in meaning.

• Next
• Stern
• Zeal
• Lessen
• Talented
• Grumpy
• Stubborn
• Unconfirmed
• Shade
• Considerate

Once you’ve matched the words — take as long as you need, this isn’t timed — for each pair, write two sentences, each sentence using one of the paired words. Aim to write sentences that highlight the slight difference in meaning between the paired words.  Example:

Adjacent – Next
The store is adjacent to the gym.  Next one in line, step up!

“Adjacent” refers to something that’s physically next to another thing.  “Next” refers to what follows.

Another example:

Adept – Talented
He’s adept at playing the piano because he practiced 6 hours a day everyday for 10 years.

Ila is a talented ice skater, she wins competition despite practicing less than her competitors.

“Adept” connotes mastery developed by practice.  “Talented” refers to God given skill.

Now you try!  Do all 10, take your time, it’s not timed.

Those who don’t understand basic economics are more likely to believe in all sorts of asinine social theories that will gradually destroy their will to live.  Here’s a story that explains basic economics.

Once Upon a Time, in a Land Far, Far Away…
Imagine three people — Jeremy, Olga, and Malia.  Each are given two rabbits.  Jeremy, excited about his luck, throws a party, eats his rabbits and throws out the fur and bones. Jeremy is left with no rabbits.

Olga, grateful for the rabbits, decides to breed them.  She soon has a total of 10 rabbits. To celebrate her achievement, she throws a party and serves four of them.  She keeps the fur to make a scarf for herself. The bones are discarded. Olga has six rabbits and a scarf.

Malia also breeds her rabbits. Soon, she too has 10 rabbits.  Instead of eating them, she performs experiments on 6 of them.  The first experiment makes six of the rabbits sick. She had to put them down.  She salvaged and stored the fur and bones. She dissected them, studied their physiology. Malia has 4 rabbits.

Jeremy, not having any rabbits, asks Olga if he can have one of hers.  She refuses.  Jeremy still has no rabbits.

Olga continues to breed her rabbits.  She soon has 20 rabbits.  To celebrate her achievement, she throws a party and serves 6 of them.  She saves the fur to make mittens and a hat.  Olga now has 14 rabbits, a scarf, hat, and mittens.

Malia continues to breed her rabbits.  She soon has 13 of them.  She performs experiments on 10 of them.  Eight of them get sick and die.  As before, she dissects them, saves the fur and makes some tools out of the bones, including one that will make it a lot easier for him to forage for rabbit food.  The two remaining experiment rabbits are remarkably healthy, vibrant.  Malia now has 5 rabbits and some tools.

The Welfare System
Jeremy, not having any rabbits, asks Olga if he can have one of hers.  She relents, gives him two, one of each sex, and tells him to breed them so he won’t have to ask her for rabbits anymore.  Jeremy is annoyed and humiliated but takes the offer.  He immediately eats both because he feels that he’s been without for so long.  He discards the fur and bones.

Olga continues to breed her rabbits.  She soon has 60 of them.  To celebrate her achievement, she throws a party and serves 10 of them.  She saves the fur to make a sweater.  She now has 48 rabbits (two were given to Jeremy) and a growing wardrobe. She’s considering hiring someone to take care of the rabbits.

Malia continues to breed her rabbits.  Something happened to two of her experiment. They have become so horny and fertile, they’re producing 10 times more rabbits than do the others!  Malia discovers rabbit viagra!!!  She now has 100 rabbits and feeds all of them rabbit viagra.  She throws a party, serves a feast of 20 rabbits.  She makes a coat out of all the fur she’s saved.  She’s so busy with research and development, she stores the bones and hires someone to make tools out of them.   She also hires someone to take care of her rabbits and to build rabbit houses so she can devote more time to research.

The Police State
Jeremy, still without rabbits, asks Olga for two rabbits.  Olga refuses and chides him for being irresponsible.  Jeremy explodes and calls Olga a “selfish, greedy cunt,” a “bitch with no feeling for other people except herself.”  “You’ll pay for this, bitch,” he tells her as he heads to Malia’s.  Jeremy asks Malia for two rabbits.  She too refuses but offers him a job cleaning rabbit houses that will pay him two rabbits per week. He grudgingly takes it. He eats both rabbits immediately.  Seeing that Olga has so many rabbits, he asks her why she doesn’t pay him more since she has so much.  Olga reminds him that he’s lucky to have a job because he doesn’t have much experience caring for rabbits, as he eats them immediately instead of breeding them.  That sends Jeremy into a rage.  He storms away and tells Olga she’s a “greedy, cold-hearted bitch who gets her kicks from fucking with polite and nice hard working people like me.”

In the end, Jeremy makes a living stealing rabbits from Olga and Malia, even though it’d be a lot easier to breed the rabbits he once had.   To prevent theft, Olga and Malia fund a security force and build a prison to house Jeremy and others like him. Olga purchases rabbit viagra from Malia.  Olga hires more and more people to take care of her growing colony of rabbits.  She then opens restaurants specializing in rabbit stew, and starts a fashion line offering clothing made of rabbit fur.  Malia now has billions of   rabbits.  She sells as many as she can to those she thinks will use them well and continues her research and development efforts.  Her rabbit empire employs many, as there’s much work involved in caring for billions of rabbits.

The Point of the Story
Too many people think that economics is a zero-sum game, where for every winner there’s a loser, every resource one gains is resource someone else loses.  Those who think economics is a zero-sum game will develop self-destructive habits and attitudes.  They’ll believe it’s necessary to screw other people to get ahead.

There aren’t limited resources because human creativity isn’t limited.  We can produce as many rabbits as our creativity allows.  Some produce rabbits better than others, while others only consume them.  Anything is possible.  Someone may discover a way to use our piss to fuel our cars.  The point is, the economic pie isn’t static, it can grow or shrink.  The Olgas and Malias grow this pie.  The Jeremies shrink it because all they do is consume and destroy.  And then there’s the rest of us who help the Olgas and Malias grow the pie.  We nurse them when they’re sick, we feed them when they’re hungry, we entertain them when they need distraction, we manage their resources so they can produce even more.

There are those who envy those who own the largest portion of the pie.  If you’re one of them, ask yourself if you’d rather everyone share equally a tiny pie — size of pinky tip —  or if you’d rather have a tiny portion — size of your fist — of a huge pie half of which belongs to a few people.  I’ll take the fist sized portion and continue to do all I can to help those who are able to grow the pie.  I’d rather make rabbit stew for Malia than hang out with Jeremy.

Most learn to do addition from right to left because it’s easier to teach and more compact to look at. The downside to doing addition this way is that you don’t develop an intuitive sense of numbers that Mathematicians have.  You end up thinking of arithmetic as a (boring) process instead of the relationship between numbers.  For instance, take:

  528
+ 264

The meaning of and the relationship between the two numbers is irrelevant if you do this problem from right to left:

Step 1: 8 + 4 = (1)2
Step 2: (1)+2+6=9
Step 3: 5+2=7
Answer: 792

This method makes it tempting to not think about what a number like 528 means: 500 + 20 + 8, for instance.

To train yourself to develop a more intuitive understanding of numbers, teach yourself to add from left to right. Example:

  723
+201

Step 1: 700+200=900
Step 2: 20+0 = 20
Step 3: 3+1= 4
Answer: 900+20+4=924

Are you beginning to understand the meaning of a number like 924 more clearly?

Another example:

  569
+789

Step 1: 500+700=1200
Step 2: 60+80=140
Step 3: 9+9=18
Answer: 1200+140+18=1358

Caveat: left to right is an easier, more intuitive, and faster way to do addition only if you’ve mastered basic addition, which we worked on in an earlier lesson. I suspect the reason why most schools teach the right to left method is because most students haven’t mastered basic addition.  Which is unfortunate, because right to left method teaches students that math is a series of dry processes to memorize, whereas left to right approach turns math into a puzzle to put together (and take apart).  Use the left to right method enough times and you’ll begin to visualize numbers, a skill that’s crucial when you get to algebra, geometry, and beyond.

Write 20 three digit + three digit questions for you to solve using left to right method.  Double check your work by doing the questions using right to left method.

Verbal drills to build curiosity
Schools are notorious for beating curiosity out of students.  Steve Jobs said:

Respond to the following statements with a question:

• You should drink orange juice when you have the flu.
• Adolph Hitler was a terrible person
• Coronavirus started in China
• Everyone needs to go to college
• Communism is better than Capitalism
• LeBron James is overrated
• Santa Claus has a big dick
• There are universal human rights
• Mandatory education is necessary for civil society
• Knowledge is power!

Example:

Statement: Everyone needs to know how to read
Question: Why is knowing how to read so important?

Another example:

Statement: The personal is the political
Question: What do you mean by “political”?

Give yourself 10 minutes.  Do it twice, come with new questions the second time around.

The Privileged Poor, once the blog site of a now defunct clothing store, is now the site of the Alive Juice Bar tutoring service.   We’ll be posting daily lesson plans to help students get through indefinite school closures.

Multiplication Trick

(The progression to this trick is mastery of our basic addition and multiplication drills).

Anytime you see a two digit times two digit problem, if the first digits of both numbers add up to 10 AND the second digits of both numbers are the same, you can use this trick to solve the problem faster than if you use traditional method.  Example:

47×67= 6×4=24+7=31, the first two digits of the answer.  The last two digits of the answer is 7×7=49.  So the answer is 3149

27×87=2×8=16+7=23.  The last two digits of the answer is 7×7=49.  So the answer is 2349.

46×66=3036

31×71=2201

42×62=

93×13=

56×56=

Write ten more problems and solve them.  Double check your work by doing the problems the school taught way.

A drill like this is like taking the stairs instead of the elevator. It prepares you for when the elevator is broken.

Reading Comprehension Drill
The best way to improve reading comprehension isn’t to answer reading comprehension questions, it’s to read a passage and then ask three questions about it.  Example:

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

Questions:

• Is “chickenshit” used as a metaphor or as an analogy?
• Is military life, as described in passage, any different from civilian life?
• Can discipline ever not be sadistic?

Find a passage you want to read. Write three questions after you’ve read it.  Find four more and repeat process.

This drill trains your mind to be more curious and engaged instead of merely knowledgeable and usually disengaged.

Why Drills are Important
They make a lot of work routine and effortless so you can focus on creative problem solving.  Is there an NFL player who doesn’t do drills, from weight training to yoga to sprints?  Do we let someone who is out of shape play an NFL game?

Then why do we let students who’ve rarely been drilled in fundamentals learn geometry and read Chaucer? And then educators complain that most hate geometry and few do their reading. Well, lack of drilling is like sending the football team out to play without helmets, it’s going to be a bloodbath.

Drilling also helps students develop patience (aka delay of gratification) and discipline, arguably the two most important traits to have to do well in life.

The Privileged Poor, once the blog site of a now defunct clothing store, is now the site of the Alive Juice Bar tutoring service.   We’ll be posting daily lesson plans to help students get through indefinite school closures.

Multiplication Drills
This link takes you to three multiplication worksheets (only do the first three, left to right): https://www.math-drills.com/multiplication.php

It’s important to give yourself no more than 80 seconds to finish each worksheet, even if the third worksheet recommends five minutes. Time yourself, stop when time goes off.  Do all three.  Then grade all three.  Repeat process until you score 100 percent on all three.

Once you’ve mastered these drills, you can learn advanced multiplication tricks we’ll review tomorrow.

Vocabulary and Writing Drills
You need to know the meaning of the following 10 words if you want to score >700 on the SAT verbal:

• Oblique
• Inchoate
• Ubiquitous
• Nonchalance
• Feckless
• Misanthropic
• Alacrity
• Spiteful
• Cursory
• Acumen

Write a story using the words listed above.  Include the following words: petty, asshole, profanities. Use the words above in any order.  Example:

Cheetah is a feckless, misanthropic asshole. That’s why he took advantage of the covid pandemic to commit all sorts of petty crimes, all carried out with acumen and alacrity. He flashed and groped women, vandalized, shoplifted, whatever he felt like doing to express his inchoate rage against humanity.  The police were usually too busy with covid checkpoints to deal with petty criminals. Once, a police officer tried to arrest Cheetah, who responded with nonchalance and taunts: “arrest me (cough cough) officer, I have (cough cough) coronavirus.” The police officer backed off, and Cheetah walked away screaming spiteful profanities at him.

Cheetah got bolder. He took a cursory glance at the line outside of Costco. He walked up to a woman distracted by her phone and snatched her purse. A few people chased Cheetah but he was too fast for them, disappearing in the woods oblique from the Costco entrance.

Why Drills are Important
They make a lot of work routine and effortless so you can focus on creative problem solving.  Is there an NFL player who doesn’t do drills, from weight training to yoga to sprints?  Do we let someone who is out of shape play an NFL game?

Then why do we let students who’ve rarely been drilled in fundamentals learn geometry and read Chaucer? And then educators complain that most hate geometry and few do their reading. Well, lack of drilling is like sending the football team out to play without helmets, it’s going to be a bloodbath.

Drilling also helps students develop patience (aka delay of gratification) and discipline, arguably the two most important traits to have to do well in life.

The Privileged Poor, once the blog site of a now defunct clothing store, is now the site of the Alive Juice Bar tutoring service.   We’ll be posting daily lesson plans to help students get through indefinite school closures.

Why Drills are Important
They make a lot of work routine and effortless so you can focus on creative problem solving.  Is there an NFL player who doesn’t do drills, from weight training to yoga to sprints?  Do we let someone who is out of shape play an NFL game?

Then why do we let students who’ve rarely been drilled in fundamentals learn geometry and read Chaucer? And then educators complain that most hate geometry and few do their reading. Well, lack of drilling is like sending the football team out to play without helmets, it’s going to be a bloodbath.

Drilling also helps students develop patience (aka delay of gratification) and discipline, arguably the two most important traits to have to do well in life.

Math Drills
Today’s drill is subtraction, timed 80 seconds per worksheet. This link takes you to five subtraction worksheets: https://www.math-drills.com/subtraction.php

It’s important to give yourself no more than 80 seconds to finish each worksheet. This will ultimately force you to look at each problem differently from how you were taught, and you might just look at numbers more intuitively. Time yourself, stop when time goes off.  Do all five.  Then grade.  Repeat process until you score 100 percent on all five.

Some of you are like, WTF, how is it possible to complete the 3 digit minus 3 digit worksheet in 60 seconds?  It’s possible if you stop trying to finish each problem with the process you learned in school and focus instead on the relationship between the two numbers you’re subtracting.  Example:

790
-782
——–

Many will break down this problem into parts, beginning with (1)0 – 2 = 8, followed by 9-1=8-8=0, etc.

No need to do that if you have an intuitive understanding of numbers.  The answer “8” will immediately jump out, less than a second.  Instead of focusing on the process, look at the numbers:

790

and  then

782

You can develop this intuition by first mastering the single digit minus single digit worksheet, then the double digit minus double digit worksheet, and so on and so forth.  You’ll actually start feeling the numbers instead of staring at them like the first time you saw your own shit. Again, the 80 second time limit is key to developing this intuition.

Verbal and Vocabulary Drill

Memorize a poem of your choice. Find a poem with words you’re not familiar with to turn this into a vocabulary drill.  For instance, I once worked with an employee to memorize Edgar Allen Poe’s Annabel Lee and she wasn’t familiar with the word “coveted,” from the lines:

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

I asked her what she thought it meant.  Her answer was “they’re happy for the love that the author has with his beloved Annabel Lee.”  A typical answer from a naive 12 year old. And one which she figured out is the wrong answer after she read the entire poem.

Memorizing poetry not only develops your memory muscles and perhaps your vocabulary, it’ll help you develop your intuition about other people and the world in general. You’ll begin to feel what the author feels and you’ll become more sensitive to the meaning of words so that the common misuse of a word like “impact” (instead of the more precise “affect” or “effect”) will bother you.  And finally, you’ll learn to understand the world from another perspective.  You’ll learn empathy.

Pay attention to the rhythm and intonation of your recitation.  It shouldn’t be monotone and rhythm-less.  Nor should it be over dramatic.  Use this as an opportunity to develop an intuition for what is and isn’t elegant and graceful.

This drill isn’t complete until the poem is memorized perfectly.