Mental Traffic Lights

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Imagine trying to drive across town and you hit every single red light.

And you’re just like, “God!” Well, that is what algebra feels like when multiplication facts are not automatic.

I mean, you will eventually reach your destination, technically, but every stop slows you down and makes you wait.

And it is so frustrating.

You know, the student is supposed to be solving equations, right?

Simplifying expressions, isolating the variable, and instead they get stuck on factoring.

What are all the factors of 48?

And they’re sitting there waiting at this red light before they can get back to driving through the problem again.

See, that’s the problem.

The student is not just doing algebra.

They’re doing algebra while constantly having to stop to multiply numbers.

And every time they do that, it takes up extra time, it divides their attention.

They kind of forget what they’re doing, where they’re even going.

And it increases the chance that they make an arithmetic mistake. I mean, just like the red lights, it’s incredibly frustrating.

That’s why multiplication needs to be automatic first, so that the student can then focus their attention on the algebra road ahead.

This teaser is distilled from the following post, if you want to dive deeper: If You Want to Learn Algebra, You Need to Have Automaticity on Basic Arithmetic .

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