13 Rules That Expire Analysis

13 Rules that Expire

Throughout late elementary school and early middle school, I was placed into an AIS class for math because my state test scores were too low. Even though I have mainly negative memories of these classes because of my teachers, I learned very valuable tricks and techniques about multiplication and division while in these classes. For example, in my fourth grade math AIS class, my teacher taught us poems and rhymes in order to help us memorize some of our multiplication facts. For example, one of the rhymes was “I ate and I ate and I got sick on the floor” (8x8=64). I still remember most of the tricks that my teacher taught me and they continue to help me do mental math to this day. Throughout our math classes, we learn several

According to the article, these tricks that I learned throughout elementary school and middle school were not helping me truly learn the material. According to the article, these rules and tricks “can leave students with a collection of explicit, yet arbitrary, rules that do not link to reasoned judgment (Hersh 1997) but instead to learning without thought (Boaler 2008)” (Karp, Bush, & Dougherty, 2014). I fully agree with this statement because I believe that these rhymes and tricks that I learned made me much lazier when doing math. For example, instead of memorizing my times tables like my parents had to do during their math classes, I looked for easy ways and tricks to memorize my multiplication facts so that I would not have to study a times table. As a result, I can probably recite my times tables at a much slower pace than someone else who truly memorized and studied their times table during

This acronym is used widely in schools and was extremely helpful during middle school when completing problems that had multiple operations. Over time, I realized that I had formed several misconceptions about the use of PEMDAS because of how my middle school teachers had introduced the concept to us. According to the article “students incorrectly believe that they should always do multiplication before division, and addition before subtraction, because of the order in which they appear in the mnemonic PEMDAS (Linchevski and Livneh 1999)” (Karp, Bush, & Dougherty, 2014). One of the main misconceptions that I had about the use of PEMDAS was that I had to follow each step of the acronym in the same order as it is written in the word. I did not realize that I had formed this misconception until high school when a teacher pointed out my mistake to me. If I had been taught how to use the acronym properly the very first time I had learned it, then I would not have formed this