What is Arithmetic?

Arithmetic was something that never came easy for my son. We spent hours working with him on his multiplication tables. I think it is always helpful for someone to be able to perform basic arithmetic in their head.

When working with my son, I would even make up arithmetic games to help him with his skills. Even now he will always use a calculator over adding or multiplying something in his head.

@oasis11 - I spent four years teaching in Asia, and I suppose everyone knows that Asian students do better in arithmetic than American students do.

If you want to know my honest opinion about why that is, I can think of two things that I observed. Teachers there expose them early on to arithmetic, and they drill, drill, drill.

Unfortunately the drill approach has been mocked by some American educational professionals as the “drill and kill” approach, and has therefore largely been abandoned.

In its place American educators focus more on contextual approaches to learning. They may have their benefits, but I still see drills as the best way to reinforce the material.

@David09 - I think that what you’re describing are logic arithmetic operations. We studied these in college too; they were basically known as truth tables, which had two values, True or False.

You combine these values to get different results. True and True would equal True, for example. True and False would equal False. Those concepts were implemented into computer programming because they were so elementary.

I completely agree that arithmetic, while thought of as basic, is fundamental; you never get away from it, even if you do advanced math.

This even holds true for computers, which we think capable of performing advanced mathematical concepts and functions. At its core, a computer processor just adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides, for every operation that you perform.

It does this through a process called binary arithmetic which is just a sequences of ones and zeros. These numbers act like switches which can turn each other on and off and represent different numeric values.

With these simple switches the computer performs operations that form the basis of the simplest math operations or the most demanding, graphics intensive calculations.

@Oasis11 - Good for you. That is great that your kids are so good at arithmetic. My problem was that I was sort of a math phobic. I did okay in my arithmetic lessons when I was in elementary school, but in high school I struggled. I needed arithmetic help when I got to high school and had trouble with algebra. I never felt comfortable with math so maybe I just did not have a strong enough foundation in arithmetic.

I think that arithmetic lessons are among the most important lessons that kids get from their math class. In fact, I have both of my children enrolled in a supplemental education program that focuses strictly on math computation.

The founders of the program realized that addition, subtraction, multiplication and division were the cornerstones of most mathematical operations.

If you have a solid foundation in these areas you should really have no problems with any type of arithmetic lesson. My children have been doing arithmetic worksheets daily for the last five years and they are not only great at math, but they are also very confident and always get a perfect scores in their math computation exercises and tests that they take in school.