You and your arithmetic, you’ll probably go far!
(3×2)+(3×3)=(5×1)+(5×2)=15
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When you’re ready, you won’t need a calculator.
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I’ll always remember having an argument with a teacher at a similar age. I didn’t accept their statement that the sun is abstract (as opposed to concrete) because, I quote, you can’t touch it with your hand.
The fact I could and did “lose” such an argument was very educational about school and life in general.
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Could be worse
My math teacher in grade eight lost a hand in an industrial accident. This ended his career in professional hockey.
I loved to draw goalies (while tuning the droning out) and i played junior b hockey. One day the teacher came up behind me, slammed his stump into my desk and said, “you won’t play professional hockey unless you pay attention in math” while I was drawing.
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Wait, what? I just can’t wrap my head around a teacher that stupid.
Maybe I should go back to teaching.
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That is the most inane thing I’ve heard today. You can touch it with your hand.
- Gravity
- Photons
- Neutrinos (well, can’t touch those often)
- The Aurora
…or you just fly yourself into the sun. Is Stonehenge abstract since I can’t touch it? What if you don’t have a hand? What if you don’t have nerve endings in your skin?
I hate dumbing things down for kids,they are usually smarter than the average adult thinks.
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“Math could have saved your hand, and you wouldn’t have to be here babysitting us.”
If a tangible object is an object that can be touched, you’re essentially restricting yourself to objects that interact with electromagnetic force. Neutrinos, rather famously, don’t.
Perhaps it would be better to consider an tangible object as an object that is instantiated in the real world from an abstract base class concept. Hence, the sun is an example of a G2 main sequence star. There are other stars, other G2 stars, other main sequence stars, but the theoretical constructs that allow us to say that sun is not a Type 0 hypergiant, and not a brown dwarf, but something in between are all non tangible abstractions.
The commutative property should be one of those intuitive concepts that would kick in as soon as both the 5x3 and 3x5 have you wind up at the same value… this kid could be reasonably assumed to have figured that out.
I take issue with y’all’s definition of touch. To me, touch is when anything passes within the envelope of my person, the boundary of which is at the edges of all the surface atoms of my body, both skin and those of protruding hairs and other structures. This margin stretches around my body like a virtual bubble sack in which I reside.
I exist inside this imaginary bubble. Everything not me is outside it.
Any thing made of subatomic particles that finds its x,y,z coordinates within or contacting that imaginary boundary is touching me. A neutrino that passed through me touched me the entire time it was within my bubble. A ray of light that warms my skin is touching me. An electromagnetic transmission transformed into vibrations that is conveying a rendition of Mr. Roboto which vibrates the air already existing within my ear canals is touching me while it’s there. Etc.
Any phenomenon that occurs within or against my envelope is touching me.
Stop.
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His question should have been “Why the hell are you giving us volumetric measurements instead of weights for non-liquid ingredients?” (Not that big of a deal for chopped nuts, but I’m perpetually astounded at how many recipes in the U.S. use volumes for highly compressible stuff like brown sugar and flour.)
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Yeah, I think I tried a similar line of reasoning. Guess how well that worked. What do kids know, right?
The fact I still remember this argument better than pretty much anything else from the period is living proof that teachers can make a difference in student’s lives.
It was abstract to that teacher, because reality’s all relative, eh? (Oh, except the speed of light in a vaccuum. That, apparently, is absolute.) 
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What’s the speed of light in concrete?
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It depends on the back pressure.
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I was thinking, maybe the teacher in question was confused and thought that “abstract” meant anything not made of concrete. It must have been fairly obvious that the Sun was abstract under that misconception.
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Because no one has kitchen scales?
Well, they can (rarely) decay into an electron that does. So thpppppppt. 
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