It’s been school years like “08-09″ for so long, how are we going to shorten “09-10″? I keep saying “oh nine, oh ten”, and that sounds really dumb. (And wrong.) I am happy for it to be 2010 so we can start saying “twenty ten”, and all those people who insist on saying, “two thousand AND nine” will stop! (Though interestingly enough, all the students at my cousin’s high school graduation said “two thousand nine” correctly; it was all the adults who threw the AND in there! I guess we are doing a better job of teaching our students place value nowadays! 
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Speaking of the ‘09-’10 school year, I’ve been thinking about what worked well, what didn’t, and new things to try. It seems a bit early, but the end of the school year is always a good time for reflection.
However, I don’t think it’s a good time to get the August/September issue of The Mailbox!
AUG/SEPT 2009, as in for the 2009-10 school year.
I received it in the mail on Saturday. As in Saturday, June 14. School’s not even over yet! I know magazine subscriptions always show up early, but this is a bit much.
Okay. So I said that I was going to tell you some of the behavioral techniques that I used this year that made a difference for me. I know you’re not ready for this information, but you can always refer back to it later. I just want to share it before I forget over the summer.
Basically, rules and expectations are two separate entities. Rules are concrete and do not change for any reason. Expectations change as activities change in the classroom.
My rules were pretty basic.
1. Respect everyone and everything at all times
2. Come prepared and on time
3. Follow directions with one prompt
4. Do not avoid work
5. No toys
For expectations, I use something our district uses called CHAMPs.
C – onversation
H – elp
A – ctivity
M – ovement
P – articipation
I have a power point I can send you that really explains it in detail. You don’t have to be as indepth as I was, but I think it’s a good way to get the kids on focus in the beginning of the year.
Just email me at jon.froehlich@yahoo.com and I’ll send you the power point.
I have to disagree with you. There is nothing wrong with “two thousand and nine”. In this context “and” is simply a common synonym for “plus”.
Some elementary-school teacher a few decades ago got the mistaken notion that “and” was a synonym for “point” and has propagated this mistaken idea. “Two thousand and nine” is clearly “2009″, and should not be corrected. If you want to say “2000.9″, the correct ways are “two thousand point nine” or “two thousand and nine tenths” (the “and” again meaning “plus”).
“And” means decimal point.
I thought I was the only one who had the “and” fetish! Maybe we were separated at birth?
Mr. Outson…did you change your name???
Oh my gosh, I can’t stand it!! My dad (an engineer) gets even more annoyed about it than I do. The other one that gets me is the kids calling a rhombus a diamond. I say, “There are no diamonds in math!” Worse yet was seeing a first grade teacher laminate vocab cards where she called it a diamond. See why we need math coaches??
It can’t be okay to say “and” because “one hundred and fifty” is also incorrect. I think it’s like the “and” is a connotation and therefore acceptable *cringe*, but not saying “and” is the denotation and therefore correct. I tried to look it up on NCTM, but my computer was being obtuse, and I figured quoting the math book was not good evidence.
I will find the proof! (Sorry, Kevin. 
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“And” does not mean decimal point anywhere except in elementary math classes. Among scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, “and” in a number means “plus”. The misuse of “and” for “point” is a result of some elementary math teacher decades ago misunderstanding something like “five and three tenths” and assigning the wrong meaning to “and”. The mistaken notion has propagated through teacher-training colleges, but (luckily) has not caught on in places where numbers are really used nor in the general public.
Wow,
I got into this discussion the other day with some neighbors, two of whom insisted that ‘and’ meant decimal point.
I’d NEVER heard that before. I don’t think that Abe Lincoln did either “Four score and seven years ago” didn’t mean 80.7 years ago, and I’m pretty sure that there were 24 (4 and 20) blackbirds baked in that King’s pie.
And as Kevin pointed out “five and three tenths” means 5 + 3/10, it’s the tenths that makes .3 not the and.
My suspicion is that some kid might drop the and when saying 5 3/10s producing “Five Three Tenths” and some teacher(s) stressed that you need to use and whenever you use a fraction, but that stress got misunderstood.
It’s the only rational explanation I can come up with for this bit of pedantic nonsense.
“I don’t think that Abe Lincoln did either “Four score and seven years ago” didn’t mean 80.7 years ago, and I’m pretty sure that there were 24 (4 and 20) blackbirds baked in that King’s pie.”
These are not traditional place value. A score is a group of 20, but we use Base 10. “4 and 20″ has the ones first whereas in the number 24, the tens are read first and then the ones – “twenty-four”. These are literary examples of number names.
“These are literary examples of number names.”
And there has to be room for literary, poetic, and other constructions, maybe not in 4th grade, but eventually. Poetics and scansion can trump parsimonious usage of conjunctions.
In my Fifty-Six and seven twelfth years on this earth, and a fairly good education marked by 701 verbal and 700 math SAT scores (ca 1970) and enough math to earn an Engineering degree. I can’t recall ever hearing anyone insist that “Five Thousand and Fifty” meant 5000.50 until one of my neighbors did the other day, and then finding out that there are some who seem to firmly believe this.
As far as I can tell this comes out of pedagogical techniques used in teaching 4th grader’s how to read numbers with decimal points. I understand that it’s a common mistake for children when encountering the number
1000.1
to read it out loud as
One thousand and One,
which is clearly not right, at least not to my ear, and to tell the student that “and” means decimal point.
Now I think that this is a bit of a pedagogical ‘lie’ in order to express the thought in a simple enough way to get the point across to a fourth grader’s mind.
Over the course of my educational life, I’ve run across pedagogical lies before, and in most cases the lie told in say High School Physics was exposed, explained, and corrected in a subsequent college course.
I’ve looked at the definition of the word ‘and’ in several English dictionaries, and can’t find decimal point mentioned anywhere. On the other hand the New Oxford American Dictionary defines “and” as a conjunction with one meaning as “used to connect two numbers to indicate that they are being added together : six and four make ten.” Nothing about decimal points.
So and DOES NOT mean decimal point, however, in the number:
1000.1
The ‘.’ means decimal point which indicates that the numbers following are not an integer, but a decimal fraction, and this number should be pronounced as
One Thousand AND 1 TENTH
In other words the AND doesn’t mean decimal point it means that two numbers are to be added together. it’s the TENTH in this case which makes this 100.1 and not 101.
The real rule is something like “when you see . you need to say AND and turn the rest of the number into the correct decimal fraction.” But that’s a bit of a mouthful to get across at that grade level.
It’s similar, it seems to me, to so many people thinking that the phrase “the exception proves the rule” means than an exception confirms a rule, when instead it means nearly the opposite since the sense of proves in this phrase is the same sense as in ‘proving ground’ the phrase really means that the exception “TESTS” the rule.
Now if AND really did mean decimal point then saying One Hundred AND One for 100.1 would be correct and the kid should get a gold star. It’s the fact that AND does NOT mean decimal point which makes this an error needing correction.
Now while it may be true that unnecessary ‘and’s in a spoken or written number are certainly superfluous, and may in some cases lead to ambiguity, for example is One Hundred and One Thousand, 10100 or 1100, this does not make usages like Two Thousand and One, or One Hundred and One, wrong, and interpreting these as 2000.1 or 100.1 is, to my eye, ear, and experience just plain pedagogical ridiculousness.
If you never take the pedagogical ‘training wheels’ off it’s hard to really learn how to ride the bike.
And those two movies were and always will be Two Thousand AND One: A Space Odyssey, and One Hundred AND One Dalmations to me.
You’re right, we do need those literary terms. But like you said, these are fifth graders learning the basics where it does matter. They need to learn one thing at a time. When we come across incorrect grammar, etc., I ask them why it was published that way, because surely a book editor knows what’s right. We discuss how you need to know the rules in order to break them – otherwise a person is just ignorant.
I guess I’ll add it to my list of personal pet peeves like when people use “impact” instead of “effect”. (Though that one I can prove in the Associated Press Style Guide.
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“Two thousand and nine” = 2009
“Two thousand and nine tenths” = 2000.9
One of the ways young children learn the values of numbers is by using 100’s squares.
“Two hundred and nine” would me they have 2 “100’s squares” and 9 little squares, thus giving them 209.
“Two thousand and nine” would mean they have 20 “100’s” squares and nine little squares, thus giving them 2009.
“And” means addition.
You have $10 and you are in a store without sales tax. You need to buy 6 apples and your mom told you to use the remaining money to buy as many oranges as you can. If apples are 2 for a dollar and oranges are 3 for a dollar, how many oranges can you buy?
6(apples) + “x”(oranges)=$10
…
You can get 21 oranges.
“And” means addition!
“Two thousand and nine” is correct!
Is it correct, or just acceptable? Because you guys are saying the number 1,973 could be read “one thousand and nine hundred and seventy and three”. That is ridiculous.
And if it’s correct, why does the math book tell them the word form of 1,973 is “one thousand, nine hundred seventy three”? It’s written by math experts, and is also found in different books by different publishers written by different groups of math experts.
So again, is it “correct” or just “acceptable”? Like in my previous comment where I talked about connotation and denotation. (“Denotation” is the correct definition of a word, and “connotation” is the popular, acceptable use of a word.)
I appreciate you guys are high school math teachers, but when is the last time you taught place value?
“Is it correct, or just acceptable? Because you guys are saying the number 1,973 could be read “one thousand and nine hundred and seventy and three”. That is ridiculous.”
It’s not at all ridiculous.
“And if it’s correct, why does the math book tell them the word form of 1,973 is “one thousand, nine hundred seventy three”? It’s written by math experts, and is also found in different books by different publishers written by different groups of math experts.”
Because one word form, and yes probably the preferred word form is one thousand, nine hundred seventy three, but there are others, and they are just as valid and gramatical.
And if you ever have to write a large check, it can be useful to know that you can also write 1,973 as “Nineteen-Hundred, Seventy-Three” in order to make it fit that line. Since 4th graders usually don’t have to write large checks, it’s probably okay that they don’t know that YET.
Dad, is that you?
Can’t be, because he agrees with me, but he is also an engineer.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree, because I would never write “nineteen hundred, seventy three” on a check. But I would write “and no/100″.
Why does the math world call “do-over” every few years and find a new way to teach the subject? It’s almost as annoying as religion re-writing the rules/stories/etc. It’s no wonder kids don’t want to learn it when the people teaching it can’t agree on what’s right.
Good point! It’s like using commas in a series: when I was a kid, you put a comma before the and/or; in college, they said not to; now, it’s back in. I’ve already adapted to not using it, and half the books we read don’t use it, so I tell the kids to put it in because that’s how it’s going to be on the Writing PSSA, but really they have a choice. How unclear is that??
One of today’s Search Engine Terms: “if 09 is oh-nine, what is 10 and 11?”
See, I’m not the only one who wonders!