Square roots?!, revisited

After our conversation in the car Ben wanted to know what the square root of 25 was... so I wrote on a card for him:
/1=1, /4=2, /16=4, /9=3 [i'm not sure how to get the square root symbol in HTML]
I said he should be able to figure out the square root of 25 on his own...

At first he guessed wildly, then he stared at the card for a while, then he put it away. This morning I gave him a math worksheet and told him to finish it while I got dressed and ate breakfast. I came back to find he had not done a single problem.
"What happened?!" I asked.
"I was thinking!" he replied.
So I went to fold laundry while he did the math worksheet. A few minutes later he came running into my room waving the card, "I figured it out!! The answer is 5, isn't it?! Because if you do 5, 5 times you get 25! I checked it and they all work!"

3 comments:

MoscowMom said...

How fantastic! He must be soooo proud of himself!!!!! And you of him!

Tina in CT said...

Pretty darn good for a boy of 8!

Anonymous said...

Great anecdote.

You can get the square-root symbol () in HTML with the following code: ampersand-radic-semicolon.

Or you can just use the character map in Windows and paste it in, like any other character.

(I'm not positive that works with Blogger, but it should. In the old days, the various character encodings were [a] different, and [b] left implicit across Windows, Mac, Unix, etc., so your web client, the web server, and your reader's web client might all expect different things.)