I wonder if anyone here has studied the Trachtenberg Method of Speed Mathematics, or Vedic Mathematics. If anyone here has, I'd like to find out what they thought of the way those methods are taught.
I have taught a series of lectures on the Trachtenberg method in high school. It has some cute tricks, but really this is not mathematics, it's arithmetic. Don't waste your time with it. If you're interested in maths, study maths not mental arithmetic. I promise it is much more interesting.
A friend's father was educated in Vedic Maths, and she and her sisters grew up having 'Beat the Calculator' competitions with him. Eg, they'd take turns giving him a series of random numbers to add/subtract/multiply/divide, and he'd do it in his head while they'd do it on the calculator. She said he almost always won.
She attributed that not only to the fact that he was very smart, but also that he had mastered the Vedic techniques that let him quickly organize, simplify, and compute long strings of numbers and operations in his head.
