OK, I can hear the groans already. There are many contexts for answering this question and they are dubious in varying degrees because the real answer is “because I said so.” That is to say, the rule for multiplying negatives is a convention; adopted for good reasons, but a convention nonetheless. Those good reasons are mathematical: we want to make sure that when we extend multiplication and addition to negative numbers the properties of operations still apply. In particular, we want the distributive property to apply. Meditate on this:
The left side is really , so it had better be zero. So the right side had better be zero as well. The first term on the right side is 15, so the other term had better be . So . We want the commutative law to hold, so we had better say as well. Now meditate on
The same reasoning tells us that .
Trouble is, all this is really hard to explain to middle schoolers, so people invent contexts. One context I’ve seen has something to do with sending out bills. If you receive 5 bills for 3 dollars then you have dollars. Sending out is the opposite of receiving, so if you send out 5 bills for 3 dollars, you have dollars. But once you receive payment, you have $15. So .
One problem with this is that you have to buy more conventions to believe it: the convention about negative amounts of money representing debt, the convention about negative receiving being kinda sorta like sending out. That’s a lot of conventions to prove something that is, as I said, a convention itself. Another problem is that all this context really shows is that , five times. The multiplication in this context is really just repeated addition; it doesn’t work for numbers that are not integers. You can’t send out 5.6 bills.
There is one context that I think does a better job here, and that is . This does work with non-integers, and you can make sense of all of the quantities involved as negative numbers. Let’s assume that an object is moving along the number line, and that you measure its position at different times, setting your stop watch to 0 when it passes through the origin. Negative distance is distance to the left; negative speed is speed from right to left; and negative time is time before you started measuring. (Later we use the terms displacement and velocity, but there’s no need to introduce them right away.)
So if the object is moving at m/sec, where is it at time seconds? Well, it’s moving from right to left and it has 3 seconds before it hits the origin, so it is 15 m to the right of the origin. So .
Was I cheating there? Is this context subject to the same objections I made about the money context? Didn’t I just make up a whole bunch of conventions about negative distance, time, and speed? I think these conventions pass the cognitive sniff test better. They don’t seem as artificial to me. You can really make quantitative sense of negative distance, speed, and time. It feels more like the real world and less like an accountant’s convention. (No offense to accountants intended.) In a way, we have replaced the mathematician’s desire to have the properties of operations continue to hold with the physicist’s desire to have the laws of physics continue to hold.
So where is the distributive property in all of this? I think it is built into our physical intuition about this context. If I travel for 3 hours, and then for another 2 hours, I can figure out how far I have gone by just adding the times and multiplying by my speed, or I can add the distances traveled in each time period. That’s the distributive property. If you dig into the reasoning I gave for the object moving at m/sec in the light of this common sense, questioning each claim, you end up with something not too far from the mathematical reasoning I gave earlier.
By the way, this is the approach we take in the Illustrative Mathematics middle school curriculum. Finding contexts for mathematical ideas that are faithful to the mathematics is difficult and requires real sensitivity to both the mathematics and the way students think. Our brilliant curriculum writing team is up to that challenge.