I would expect any good teacher to get his or her students to understand that That's not how I've seen it used. I've seen it used as a procedure for getting t

I would expect any good teacher to get his or her students to understand that That's not how I've seen it used. I've seen it used as a procedure for getting the answer. Compare that to the method shown in the npr link, first line: the numerals are 2 and 3, but the numbers multiplied 20 and 30. That's what I mean by teaching place value. In the the old-school method I learned, we respected place-value by indenting (from the right), optionally writing the zeros.