May 7, 2020
I’m old enough to remember life before Common Core math. When I was learning to add and subtract, it was all about carrying the 1 and adding columns from right to left. Well, at least that’s what they tried to teach me. What actually happened was that I was so bad at basic math my teacher gave me an old film canister full of buttons so I could have a visual representation of the math equations. I’d count out my buttons. Take away the number of buttons in the equation and count what was left. So if the problem was 10 minus 3 I could visualize 7 buttons left over in the pile.