PSA: My math tutor drew a number line and it finally clicked why I kept bombing unit conversions

She said, 'Just move the decimal point, you're overthinking it,' and after 3 weeks of trying to memorize formulas, dropping that one habit made my last quiz grade jump from a 62 to an 88, has anyone else had a random tip from a teacher totally flip a subject for you?

2 comments

2 Comments

patricia_singh811d ago

The whole "just move the decimal" tip always sounded too simple to work for me, like it couldn't be that easy. But @kelly.emma's arrow trick is exactly what finally got me too. Used to draw those stupid King Henry charts and still mix up centi from milli every time. Now I just write the prefixes in a line and slide the decimal left or right on my scratch paper. Feels almost embarrassing it took me 20 years to realize I was just making it harder than it needed to be.

kelly.emma1d ago

Started drawing little arrows showing which direction the decimal moves and wrote 'multiply = bigger, divide = smaller' next to them. For some reason seeing it visually like that made me stop freezing up on those metric conversion problems. Also stopped trying to memorize the order of kilo, hecto, deca and just wrote the prefixes in a straight line on scratch paper every time.