March 4: Skip Counting

Things have certainly changed since I was in school. Granted, it's been 30 years since I was in grade school and 23 since I graduated high school. Still, I almost feel like today's educators are simply taking old concepts I learned in my day and giving them new names. For example, skip counting. My daughter had homework the other night and this was the topic. This article I found on the Internet explains that skip counting is "counting by a number that is not 1". Thus, skip counting by twos would look like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.... In helping my daughter work through the assignment, my wife and I had the same comment "isn't that just 'counting by twos'?". Neither of us had ever heard the term "skip count" before. Now that doesn't mean it's not a universal term. Heck, someone even wrote a song about the methodology. But, I work in the corporate learning field, and in developing learning solutions for adults, I've learned to subscribe to the K.I.S.S. philosophy - Keep it Simple Stupid (okay, honestly, raise your hand if you thought that philosophy was invented by Paul Stanley). From my perspective, calling "count by twos" something like "skip count by twos" adds an extra, unnecessary word to the equation - both literally and figuratively. Another, completely different, perspective, however, might be that I'm just old and set in my ways. The jury's still out on that one.