Ah, yes. I was told to "show my work", but I didn't have any work to show. If they told me "For sake of illustration, show what the steps would be if you carried out the following algorithm", then perhaps I could have done that. But what they said was "show your work", and there was nothing to show.

Luckily, I had learned several years of the curriculum in advance anyway, and had contempt for what the teachers were doing, so it didn't change my opinion of math, only my opinion of school.

Part of schooling is learning and showing you can follow a specific set of instructions. As long as one was taught how to do long multiplication, I do not see the purpose of taking into account what every kids' parents taught them if the purpose of the exercise is to learn a certain method and then show that you learned that certain method by doing it.

Because in practice, that causes students to disengage from the learning process:

> If we just tell that student their way is the wrong way, we risk turning them off to math for life.

I certainly disengaged from some subjects in school due to frustration with "thou shalt" methods of teaching. I was even removed from an upper level English language class because I didn't draw the same conclusions as the teacher from the material.

I agree if they told you

>23 x 7 is split into ((10 * 7) * 2) + (3 * 7)

was the wrong way, then that is harmful. But if the purpose of the test was to see if you can do long multiplication, and you were not able to do it because you did not want to or like to do it that way, then that is a personal problem.

The reality is that school (non university level schooling) is not purely about education or exploring the 18 million different ways something can be right or wrong. It is also an exercise in navigating one's way around other humans and their expectations and playing the game that you will have to for the rest of your life.

There is also the constraint of limited budgets and schools having to make do with perhaps not the most qualified educators. And there is certainly lots of improvement to be made, but this "racist math" stuff seems to be counter productive.

Additionally, mathematics uses standard notation and uniform rigorous standards for what is/isn't true. There is certainly some utility in teaching mental arithmetic skills, but the higher-level concepts are only accessible if one can formulate ideas in accordance with the rest of the body of research.