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Mark Chu-Carroll My previous post, " Devlin On Multiplication (or What is the meaning of "is"? )" engendered a great deal of discussion on several lists and blogs. However, primary credit for both serious and heated conversations about whether it's sacrilege to teach kids that "multiplication IS repeated addition," "repeated addition is a valid model for learning multiplication," "multiplication of integers can be effectively thought of as repeated addition," and many variations on this theme clearly goes to Professor Devlin himself.  One particularly interesting conversation has arisen on a blog I enjoy reading on occasion, GOOD MATH, BAD MATH by Mark Chu-Carroll, a PhD in computer science. His July 25th, 2008 post, "Teaching Multiplication: Is it repeated addition?" has resulted in over 65  responses as of this writing and seems likely to continue to give rise to interesting commen

I generally like to be pretty sure I'm right about something before I blog about it here (or at least that I'm not absolutely and irredeemably wrong). Some topics, of course, are relatively safe in that it's pretty hard to determine a definitively correct answer (though perhaps that doesn't prevent some answers from being almost certainly wrong nonetheless): matters of just how to teach something in mathematics or other subjects rarely avail themselves of a single right answer that serves all students equally well for all times and places (regardless of what my antagonists at Mathematically Correct, NYC-HOLD, and similar nests of absolutism may believe or claim). On the other hand, it's easy to be shown to be entirely wrong about specific pieces of mathematics, especially if one is not a mathematician, something I neither am nor have ever claimed to be. Not that members of that priesthood never err or that we laypeople are invariably wrong when we disagree with one