144.366 - 2016 project and twelve squared

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

twelve-squared

I don't know how public schools teach arithmetic now.  long ago in another century, it was simple and people still couldn't get it.  I did, but learned not to say so.  people didn't appreciate that, and it didn't help them get it.  back in those days when arithmetic was simple and there was nothing fuzzy about it except in fuzzy minds, we learned to count, and discovered an amazing fact:  no matter how high you counted, there were always numbers waiting!  once we'd mastered counting, we learned adding, then we learned subtracting, then we learned multiplying, then we learned dividing!  what was next, I wondered, but nothing was next.  that was all there was to arithmetic.  in Brasil, we went on to geography and other mysteries.  after I was yanked out of Brasil and dumped in this country, I learned that kids here, year after year after year, learned arithmetic all over:  counting, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, even though they never changed from when you first learned them!  in those faraway and long ago days, we only had to learn multiplication, the "times tables" we called them then, up to the twelves:  one times one is one, one times two is two,...one times twelve is twelve, two times one is two, and so on.  some of us observed an amazing fact:  if three times four was twelve, then four times three was twelve too!  So we really only needed to learn about half of the tables.  and there at the end of everything waited twelve times twelve is one hundred forty-four.  much later some of us would learn that twelve times twelve was also twelve squared and it was still one hundred forty-four.  obviously twelve squared was a magic number!  and it was!  it was also a gross, although I never learned why it was gross.  anyway, way back when, I was glad to learn that twelve times twelve is one hundred forty-four, and I didn't have to learn any more multiplications than that (until I hit hexadecimals, but that was way off into college).  what has any of this to do with anything?  today is DoY 144 and that brought back the twelves and the mysteries of learning.  thank you twelve squared.