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A comment on An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California. Parent comment

Re:An update on the campaign to defend serious math educatio... by jeffbee on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @02:53PM (#31171556)
But strong arithmetic fundamentals are absolutely necessary for strong algebra. I've watched kids struggle with basic algebra because when they don't instantly recognize that 7x8=56, they also don't recognize that 7zx8z=56z(edit: squared).

Edit: thanks to the reply; HN ate my superscript 2. Apparently it doesn't like the unicode multiplication x, either: × ² ?

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Re:An update on the campaign to defend serious math educatio... by RangerScience on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @05:16PM (#31173287)
Hmm. Alright, I can see solid arithmetic being good for introducing the concept of a variable...

...but the only time I ever saw significant numbers when actually doing math was in toy problems that deliberately chose weird, big coefficients, where the arithmetic part was by far the least significant.

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Re:An update on the campaign to defend serious math educatio... by texaslonghorn5 on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @03:08PM (#31171755)
Good point ... however, 7z*8z=56z^2.
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