when i was young, my mom sent me to all sorts of enrichment lessons.

i remember my abacus classes. i was one of the youngest there, and periodically, we would have this test where the teacher would recite a whole lot of sums and we were supposed to do 'xin suan' witha fake abacus.

you know like how all the little kids stand there with their fingers moving around an imaginary abacus?

yeah. like that.

anyway, i could never catch the concept of doing that. i always faked the hand movements, and either did the sums in my head(if they were easy enough) or i wrote rubbish.

i think i ended up with a lot of ridiculous answers.


what brought this on? fiddling with calculators.