 So I said I had a trick for you to help you get the hang of the four times table. I thought it would be an entirely new and exciting trick but in fact I heard you doing it yourself the other day. It's the doubling trick. The doubling trick The doubling trick Haha Get it? Get it? Anyway. Here's two things I know you are really good at: The two times table Doubling things And of course, if you double the two times table you get the four times table. 2x1=2 4x1=4 2x2=4 4x2=8 2x3=6 4x3=12 2x4=8 4x4=16 2x5=10 4x5=20 2x6=12 4x6=24 2x7=14 4x7=28 2x8=16 4x8=32 2x9=18 4x9=36 2x10=20 4x10=40 2x11=22 4x11=44 2x12=24 4x12=48 But maybe that gets a bit blurry after the five times table here's another way you could do it. Here's another way to use doubling. With my other helpful hints you can learn the entire four times table. 1x4 = 4 - you already know the 1 times table silly 2x4 = 8 - and you already know the 2 times table 3x4 = 12 - you know the 3 times table tooooooooo 4x4 = 16 - you just need to double 2x4 (because 4 is double 2) 4x5 = 20 - you actually already know this but it's double 2x5 4x6 = 24 - just double 4x3 (because 6 is double 3) 4x7 = 28 - well just add 4 on to 24 4x8 = 32 - just double 4x4 (because 8 is double 4) 4x9 = 36 - just add 4 on to 32 4x10 = 40 - um you know this already 4x11 = 44 - and add another 4 on 4x12 = 48 - and another 4 again. YOU ARE DONE - marvelous! Here is a really good bit of doubling that is in a play called Macbeth by William Shakespeare. It is right at the beginning of the play. SCENE I. A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron. Thunder. Enter the three Witches First Witch Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd. Second Witch Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined. Third Witch Harpier cries 'Tis time, 'tis time. First Witch Round about the cauldron go; In the poison'd entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter'd venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i' the charmed pot. ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Second Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and owlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Third Witch Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches' mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Silver'd in the moon's eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver'd by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron. ALL Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Second Witch Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good. TW, Rape and violence. Imagine you were going to create a poster that illustrated the notion of male entitlement. Male entitlement, being the idea that some men feel they have rights to women's bodies, to sex with women, and obviously, those being the key functions of women, to women themselves. And the problem with male entitlement, being, among numerous other major and minor violations of women's self determination, rape. You could have a picture of a naked or near naked woman with a vacuous expression, passive and laid out, clearly for perusal by men. Perhaps you could have some text that reinforces the idea that the woman is not a person, but an object. You could show the man's game is to access the object. Let's get to all the bits of her we can. That could be quite educational, to show how nasty those ideas are and the harm they cause. The way in which attitude is linked to action. Wait! Look! Access Solutions have come to the party.  What do we have, popping up on billboards around the country? A vacuous naked woman, the implication she's just an awkward building that a man has to manouevere around. Yup, she's no more than a thing to gain access to. This ticks all the boxes as a great piece on rape education. But these billboards aren't here as a statement on the way men are educated to believe women should lie around waiting to be accessed. Nor is it a cutting satire to show up the insidious way in which culture normalises the idea that women are men's property and play things. Nope. This thing is for real. This is an advertisement for a company that rents out scaffolding and forklifts. Hahahahaha. A women as an object that we could lend you a cherry (snigger) picker to gain access to. Oooooh loook, he's about to paste up the bit with her nipple on it. She'll just lie there and you can do anything you want, and we'll help you. Hilarious. The problem with promoting these ideas, is not that it's going to insult feminists' sensibilities, or that it's smutty. The idea promoted in this poster, is actually hurting women of all sorts. It's telling certain men that their sense of entitlement is right on. The men who habitually rape and hit their partners. The men who do things to women who are drunk and passed out. The men who in more subtle ways pressure women into doing things they're uncomfortable with. This poster tells women and men, that men with entitlement issues, have the backing of their company and all sorts of large machinery. The NZ Advertising Standards Authority have rejected a complaint against the poster, citing a humour clause in their guidelines:  The owner and directer of Access Solutions, Michael Biddick, assured someone who had written directly to him asking him to remove the billboard that he too abhorred advertising that promoted rape, and went on to say: I disagree with your accusations that our advertising in any way 'condone violence towards women’ as there is nothing in this billboard that is even suggestive of violence, nor does it 'promotes a rape culture by saying that men can access women's bodies at any time with the right equipment’. I am surprised that you have interpreted the concept in this way - we sell equipment that enables workers to reach high levels safely: the billboard shows the use of an EWP (Elevated Work Platform) allowing a worker to do just that - to change out a billboard advertisement. There is no suggestion of the worker (or anyone else) having any intention of rape or inciting violence towards the woman. Hmm, 'I throw my innocent arms in front of me, I'm just a simple guy doing my best, oh I barely noticed it was a picture of a naked woman!' Snigger, snigger. Do we really need to explain again that rape and violence against women are not spontaneous and natural behaviours or inclinations of men? Do we really need to say that all people are equally capable and inclined to gentleness and genorousity? Do we really need to say that a society where rape is common, doesn't emerge in a vacuum? Do we really have to tell you that men are actively trained in minimising and laughing about male violence against women? That this tells them it's okay? Do we really? Again?  The thing about tables is they have legs. In fact they have four legs. Four legs each table. One for each corner of the table. If you didn’t have a leg for each corner the table would be wonky and all the things would slide off the corner with no leg, and then you would have to put a bucket under that corner of the table to catch all the things that fell off that corner of the table. There would be little itty bits of paper mixed up with giant jaffas that someone had taken out of their mouths and put all slimy on the table because it’s terribly important to have a wee break in the middle of eating giant jaffas and think perhaps about the moon, mixed up with felt tip pens whose lids had grown little legs and jumped off the table mixed up with cooked rice and cornflakes and all sorts of things. Then, because we have big clomping feet, your father and me would always always always be tripping over the bucket and saying things like, “Ow, ow, ow, Maggie have you done your homework?” Or roaring “Ouch, I told you NOW”. Because when grown-ups are cross about one thing they sometimes pretend it is about something else like their very nice and perfectly splendid and well-behaved children. POOR them. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and sigh a very big sigh, and say , “But who invented maths?” Well, it was actually a grown-up who LOVED tables. He lived in a house with nine rooms and he decided he would build a table for every room. He knew he needed nine table tops. But he didn’t know ANY of his other times tables not EVEN his four times table. When he was trying to figure out how many table legs he needed, he said to himself, nodding wisely, "Oh well, we’ll need about a dozen and a half legs for all that" Whenever he was unsure of any number he always said “Hmm, a dozen and a half” and did his little wise nod. When people asked him how many children he had he said “Ah yes well, a dozen and a half”. When people asked how old he was he said, “It’s funny you should ask! I’ll be a dozen and half next Thursday". Anyway, you can imagine what happened when he made a dozen and half legs for his nine tables. There weren't nearly enough legs to go around all the tables. A couple of the tables had three legs, some had two, and lots of them only had one leg. The poor silly man was always falling over the buckets in different rooms with his big clomping feet, saying “Ouch Ow, Aaagh, brush your teeth now!” to whichever one of his about a dozen and a half children was in the room, until he was almost half mad with sore bruised toes. One day he finally said in a loud, distinguished voice, “Right then, I am inventing maths!” And so he did. As everyone knows the very first thing he invented was the four times table so he could fix all the tables and take all the buckets out of all the rooms and hide them in the car and when he told his family he was going to work. he actually went to the beach with his buckets and built very large and important sandcastles. They had moats. The four time table goes like this.  Remeber how I told you that when you multiply even numbers by anything the answer is always even. You can see it's true. Everything in the four times table ends in 2,4,6,8, or 0 which of course means the numbers are even. But if you look closer you can see those end numbers, last digit is always arranged in a particular order. 4,8,2,6,0 You could do the pattern up to gazillion and the last digit of the four times table would always be in the same order. 4,8,2,6,0 And if we arrange them in a grid that is 5 columns across we can see the pattern really clearly, like this.  I don't know if that will help you remember the FOUR times table.
To learn it by heart you basically have to do the same thing as with your three times table. Say it over and over to yourself. Say it before you go to sleep and when you wake up. Maybe you'll dream about it and wake up knowing it. But in case you don't learn how to say it quicker than a cucumber without even thinking about it in the next few days, I have another trick that I will write about, which can help you while you're still having to figure it out. Bye bye, Big Mama Clomping Boots |
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