During staff development today some math teachers went to lunch together and we had a conversation about math tricks. As math teachers we need to be very careful about teaching students tricks to learn the mathematical process. A prime example is factoring. Some teachers teach the box method and some people teach a type of guess and check method of undoing FOIL. I think these tricks inhibit true learning because students aren't seeing the reason why the trick works. Check out this blog post talking about the same thing...
http://mhsmathematics.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/no-more-tricks-use-the-math-practices-instead/
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