Reply to Teacher marking things wrong in math if they don't show work

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[quote=pettifogger][quote=Anonymous]For simple operations, it's pretty inane to ask kids to show or explain their work.  The time spent demanding that in K-3 would be better spent with drilling basic math facts.

For word problems and pre-algebra equation solving, the student should at least show some steps.  They shouldn't need to show every trivial operation, but there should at least be enough there for the teacher to figure out how the student arrived at the answer.

I think this example: "6x = 12 6x/6 = 12/6 x = 2" is a perfect example of the teacher being overly picky and expecting trivial steps to be illustrated.  It should be sufficient for a kid to jump to x=2 from the problem statement.  Now, if the problem were 6x + 3 = (-2x -13)/4, then the kid should show at least one intermediate step before listing the answer.  [/quote]

Spot on, 11:11. The real issue is that math class is overly focused on making a mountain out of a molehill, instead of actually solving problems. Any kid in algebra class should not need to write anything else other than 6x=12, x = 2, done. If on the other hand, the kid is in elementary and is being introduced to variables, but not the full rules of algebra (such as doing the same thing to both sides of an equation), then it would be perfectly reasonable to let them solve the problem in any way they choose. Even just saying "x = 2 because 6*2 = 12", done.

As to the less trivial example above, I would definitely expect some sort of work, but up to each kid to decide what to show (as long as it's readable and shows some organized way of thinking). But forcing them to write specific things (like multiplication of 4 by both sides), may be misguided for the kids who are not having trouble, unless they are struggling and not getting the answers correct. Here's the minimum I'd expect to see for this one, but it can completely differ from kid to kid:

6x + 3 = (-2x -13)/4
24x + 12 = -2x - 13
26x = -25
x=-25/26

Basically I want to see a step showing they were able to handle simplifying the fraction on the right hand side, and another step showing how they combined terms, etc. Also, it's much more important for them to write in a somewhat organized fashion such that their reader (teacher) can follow what's going on. That's what really matters here, not necessarily what specific steps they have to write down, which can vary.
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