Cultural Mnemonics
Posted by tpc at June 6th, 2006
I was browsing through an American study guide and it recommended remembering the order of arithmetic operations through this mnemonic:
PEMDAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) -
Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.
Locally, I learnt and teach kids this:
BODMAS -
Brackets, Order, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction.
According to this wiki page, this is the UK way.
Another interesting one is
SOHCAHTOA - for the three trigonometric functions.
Locally, we teach students to remember “Toa Cah Soh” which in a local dialect actually means Big Feet Aunty.
