We remind our dc that if they don't show what they know, school won't know they know it, and will try to teach them over and over and over until they do it.
This is so, so true!
This is why my brother (who is now a "rocket scientist"--aerospace engineering for the past 25 years) had to repeat calculus in high school. He didn't show his work on the problems (because he did them in his head and didn't have any work to show), and even though he always had the answers right, failed the class anyway. He refused to dumb it down to show work that he didn't need to do to get the answers, and failed. The teacher knew perfectly well that he knew more than the teacher did, and made him his assistant the next year when he had to take the class again--as long as he would show his work on the problems!
I struggle with the same thing with my DS6, hard as it is to get him to sit down for the two minutes required to run through the busy-work papers and show what he knows. He'd rather be working on his 4th grade math book instead, but we do the junk to get to the good stuff. Good luck with yours!
