Best practices/analogies for teaching signed numbers

[Joe Callahan]

I saw a post using "bad people" as negative numbers as an analogy for -(-16)=+16:
"If bad things happen to bad people it's a good thing."

I don't like bad things to happen to anyone. An analogy I use is "taking away a negative".

If you are sick and go to the doctors, and she takes that illness away, it's a positive thing. So:
take away illness is subtraction of a negative -(illness)=positive or -(-9)= +9

Any other suggestions?

Joe Callahan

[stapel_eliz]

I'm fairly certain that the analogy was just that: a word picture. Nobody was advocating violence, though I'm not sure why anybody would not want bad people to be prevented from getting away with hurting people....