Originally Posted by ConnectingDots
... 6x72. "X, you must communicate how you arrived at the answer."

The work, of course, was in his head. Sigh.

Hmm. She wrote "communicate" how he got the answer, so he could write, "I did it in my head." Yesterday DD9 had to communicate how she arrived at the answer to something like 88,645/17 and she wrote, "I did long division." We will see how that works out. smile

But more seriously, I think that many teachers actually believe that this stuff is important. They've probably been taught that students who don't know why 6*12=72 are less likely to get required scores on standardized tests. Or something like that. Remember that many (most?) of them don't really understand mathematics past a very basic level (for examples, see this article or this summary of Liping Ma's book).

If your child's teacher is insisting on showing things that seem obvious to you or your child, it may be because these concepts aren't or weren't obvious to the teacher. It may be that this teacher is anxious about teaching math and is following what's prescribed to the letter because s/he lacks knowledge about the subject.

I'm only explaining here, not excusing. Teachers are adults and know that the cure for math ignorance is to learn more math. Worse, people have known about this problem for years (decades?) and the school and teacher training systems haven't addressed it.

Last edited by Val; 10/10/13 10:05 AM. Reason: typo