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When I was a kid in high school, I remember trying seemingly endless combinations of numbers that would factor each assigned trinomial. Well, you can kiss those hours of work good-bye! Factoring by grouping is not only faster, it’s SIMPLE! Just a few steps lie between you and complete trinomial factoring success…
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I know the ruler seems a bit overkill for a simple subject like adding positives and negatives, but I teach 11th grade in Boston and it’s the biggest stumbling block for even my students taking my advanced algebra class.
The problem is that kids are taught a “noun-verb” way of solving problems like “-12 + 7″. They are told to find -12 (noun, static number) and count up 7 spaces (verb, movement) to the right to see what number they land on. This is fine in a classroom with a number line taped to the desk, but it doesn’t teach the kids how to think about the numbers and a lot of kids will get this problem, and ones like it, wrong. It only gets worse with “x + 12 = 7 (solve for x)” or “y + 12x = 7x + 3 (solve for y)”. It’s the same problem over and over again, just disguised.
The problem with the number line and the “noun-verb” way of solving is that it’s not the way we think. It’s not even the way we are taught in school to solve these problems. In the Boston 7th grade curriculum is a book called “Accentuate the Negative” where the very first page of text has a caption over a kid’s head that reads something along the lines of “I owe my dad $4. I have -$4″. So this business of “owing” comes into play very early.
If I owed you $12 (-12) and I only paid you back 7 (+7), how much would I still owe you? Asked like this, it’s a simple problem. You’d count up from 7 until you got to 12, knowing that the answer would be in “owe”, or negative. In school however, the kids are told to start at -12 and count up 7 spaces. This is completely backwards from how we think.
So to get to my ruler…. The ZeroSum ruler allows a kid to find -12, find 7, fold the ruler in half and count the space between the two numbers’ absolute values. This is what we do when we are finding out how much someone owes us, and this is really the way we think. In time, and to answer your question about what a kid would do with numbers beyond -25 and +25, a kid would start to see the relationship between positives and negatives and that if you “owe” more than you “pay” (if the negative is further away from break even (zero) than the positive) then the answer will take a negative sign. But it’s really the space between the absolute values we are counting.
Allan Cohen writes a blog called “Classrooms Without Walls” and gave me a shout out at:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978153616 . How super! Thank you Allan!
The ZeroSum Ruler is on CurrClick! In the FREE informational eBook, you can learn all about the ZeroSum Ruler, how it works, and what makes it a different and more INTUITIVE way to learn. 
