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

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[quote=pettifogger][quote=Anonymous]Learning now to do math on paper vs in your head is important. At some point they won’t be able to do it on their heads and will need to know how to write their steps. [/quote]

This is true, the problem is they're learning it in an unreasonable way. One step questions that many kids can do in their head (i.e mental math calculations) are not great candidates for forcing kids to write things down. It can lead to a dislike of math, as kids associate it with writing. The focus should be on the math, not the writing (save that for writing class). Requiring explanations is reasonable if the questions are interesting, such as a puzzle, informal proof, explaining why something is true, where that something is not obvious.

There are many, many great math problems that kids can try to solve and show work on, they're just not being given the chance to try and solve them. Instead they mostly get a set of calculations, which are often trivial for many of them.[/quote]

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