Yeah, the whole cartesian coordinate thing just makes it make sense, huh?
I agree, Bernie, the slide rule ruled.
In 5th grade some idiot educator decided to accelerate the learning of the kids who were already proficient in arithmetic by taking 2 kids from each 5th grade classroom, sticking them off by themselves while the rest of the class labored with standard long divsion problems. The accelerated people had to do 'accelerated' long division problems, which meant 25 or 30 long division problems daily with more digits, like 392836/498, instead of 4524/337.
I was furious. It was mickey mouse. Once a concept is learned, what's the point of doing numerous, senseless long division problems? So I refused to do it and that became a 'discipline' issue at school. When the school brought my Dad into the picture, he was amused. He understood my refusal implicitly and told me he'd show me how to game the bureaucratic system on this one. He bought me a 6" cheapie plastic slide rule and in about 3 minutes showed me how to use it.
With the slide rule, doing that daily set of long division problems became a game of "race the clock" and I think we managed to beat 4 minutes at one point, which left more than half an hour to goof around after cranking out a set of silly answers.
