What Can Division Tell Us About Multiplication? (Part 2)
Preface This post has been sitting in the hopper since the beginning of November. Due to a number of conflicting writing projects and a major presentation I've been preparing to give on Dec. 1., I'm at a point where I need to either fish or cut bait with this now, pending a lot of reading that I don't have time to do immediately. My decision today is to post this "as is," with the major investigation of existing research left hanging fire until I have time to do it real justice. So for some readers, this second post may disappoint, not getting to what I personally think is the nitty-gritty that must be explored to determine whether Keith Devlin's heuristic columns on multiplication and repeated addition are simply provocative pieces that fail to lead to urgent rethinking of how we present multiplication to students in K-12, or if in fact he has put his finger on something mathematics teacher-educators and elementary and middle school teachers need to take very