> Doing this way means that you've actually understood algebra, and honestly, the only step of memorization is the substraction itself. No, not really. If you

> Doing this way means that you've actually understood algebra, and honestly, the only step of memorization is the substraction itself. No, not really. If you understood what an equality and a variable means, then you could solve it without having to go thru algorithmic steps. > More often, students find the difficulty in trying to do arithmetic on things that can't be(what's x +y? it isn't xy and it isn't some new letter). I'm beginning to suspect that you yourself struggle with arithmetics.