And that, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with American math education. Too much focus on rote learning rather than actual understanding. What you're describing

And that, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with American math education. Too much focus on rote learning rather than actual understanding. What you're describing is an accounting course, not mathematics. Mathematics is about problem solving, not plugging numbers into a black box and blindly following a prescribed sequence of algorithmic steps. You do not want to just test whether students can follow a procedure; you want to test whether they actually know what they're doing when they're using it (even if you specify the procedure, e.g. Gaussian elimination). This even applies to simple problems. See the comment by Aur Saraf responding to the original article: http://powersfulmath.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/who-or-what-broke-my-kids/comment-page-1/#comment-18 http://powersfulmath.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/who-or-what-br...