I can only tell my own experience. At a younger age, I had trouble showing my work, I could look at a problem (word problem or otherwise) and know the answer but it took me a while for showing my work to click, but then I became very good at equations. Then, while in grad school working on an Engineering PhD, I had to take a course from the Math department where we had to write proofs. I was horrible. It was a shock to my system because the proofs were not equations and algorithms. They were sentence explanations. I barely got through it with a lot of help from a friend and I frankly still get headaches thinking about it. However, I am now trying to figure out the best way to train my DDs for that type of thinking because I do see the value in it.
