How to See the Big Picture in Math

by Sanjana Kulkarni and Justin Skycak on

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You ask a 10th grader to factor something… nothing crazy, just like x squared plus 11x plus 28, and before they even get to the algebra, they’re stuck on the multiplication!

What’s 7 times 4? Seven times what?

What is that? Let me recompute it.

You do four plus four plus… oh, wait, I should just add seven.

Seven plus seven plus seven… geez! Y’all already got one job, which is to do the algebra and now you’re spinning out on computing basic facts?

And even if you’re using some kind of strategy like seven times five, then minus a seven, or seven times two, you know, double it and double it again, I mean, your whole brain is thinking about this.

It’s pulling away your attention from the algebra that you really need to be focused on if you’re gonna see the forest for the trees and really understand and get intuition about what you’re doing.

You need to be able to look up like a basketball player who’s dribbling the ball and is able to look around them, see what’s happening you can’t get good at basketball if you’re constantly having to like look at the ground and you’re dribbling the ball.

Like, it doesn’t work that way. Anybody who plays sports knows the importance of getting automatic on your basic skills so that you can build on top of them and they don’t continually hijack your mental bandwidth.

And it’s the same way with math.

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