Mathsational

  This post is part of an ongoing book study series on Nix the Tricks by Tina Cardone. Each week, a group of math teachers meets to reflect on one chapter of the book and discuss how we can move away from shortcuts and toward true mathematical understanding. You can find our reflections from Chapter 1: Introduction and Chapter 2: Operations in previous posts and follow along as we continue through the book. Chapter 3, “Proportional Reasoning,” was one of the heaviest sections we’ve read so far. It’s packed with tricks that almost every math teacher has encountered at some point: Butterfly Method , Flip and Multiply , Cross Multiply , and the Formula Triangle , to name a few. These are the kinds of tricks that often sneak into students’ repertoires long before they truly understand what a proportion or ratio represents. As we discussed this chapter, one central question emerged: “Do students ever really understand the math behind these shortcuts, or do they lose the reasoning once ...

This post is part of an ongoing book study series on Nix the Tricks by Tina Cardone. Each week, a group of math teachers has been meeting to reflect on one chapter of the book and discuss how we can move away from shortcuts and toward a deeper understanding of mathematics. You can find our reflections from Chapter 1: Introduction in the previous post and follow along as we continue through the book. Our second week of the Nix the Tricks book study focused on Chapter 2, “Operations.” This chapter took us into some of the earliest habits students develop around computation, key words, order of operations, and the tricks we’ve all seen (and maybe even taught) that make math seem like a list of steps rather than something that makes sense. As we worked through the examples, one big question kept surfacing: Are students relying on tricks because they lack mathematical understanding, or because they struggle with literacy? Key Words and Context The chapter opens with a discussion on “Total...