For homework tonight please remember to show your work. I know that we are not teaching this double digit multiplication in the traditional way. Believe me, at first I was thinking WHY, WHY, WHY!! I had a conversation with my husband the other night. I was explaining how we are teaching kids to break up the double digit number and multiply. Of course, while whining about how it seems so much easier to teach the cross multiplication he proved me wrong.
He told me that even though he learned the traditional way he never pulls out a piece of scratch paper to multiply large numbers. He breaks them up in his head and puts them back together to find the final product when he is trying to figure something out quickly.
When he explained it this way it reinforced for me the purpose of these new standards and the Common Core.
The goal is to get kids thinking about the process, not just the answer.
Teaching them to break the numbers down makes the concept usable to them. Yes, we often have a calculator with us, but it's important to understand our thinking, how we arrived at our answer and develop a deeper knowledge of numbers and how they work together. This is what the process we are teaching achieves. Thank you for your perseverance through all of the math challenges we are facing this year. Your children are incredibly bright and hard working. I am so lucky to be their teacher!
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