Practical math is a mix of rote and understanding.
“Practical math is a mix of rote and understanding.”
True, but much tougher to develop the understanding when you don’t have the rote nailed down.
I remember first teaching my oldest kid arithmetic (long before he was old enough for the schools to start on him). I figured that if I showed him 2 apples and then 3 apples, he’d say there were 5 altogether. Pretty obvious to us, and the visuals would help with the understanding.
Forget it, even though he could count, he was clueless, simply guessing at the answer, and nearly always wrong. So I said screw it with the ‘understanding’ part, we’ll go straight to memorization, once he knows the answer, he’ll start to understand it. That worked great, even though it seemed counter-intuitive at the some.