Timeline for What is the standard for "simplifying your answer"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Feb 5, 2019 at 19:46 | comment | added | Sue VanHattum♦ | omg, this made me laugh. It's not just high school. It's other math teachers. Students' attention (almost by necessity) fades in and out, so they will take odd meanings from what we say. I just gave this explanation (short version) today. Before calculators... I just showed how I could do it in my head if the square root of 2 was in the numerator, and said that mattered before calculators and doesn't now. | |
| Jan 31, 2019 at 16:54 | comment | added | Brendan W. Sullivan | While working on an example in an undergrad precalculus course, I found the answer to be $1/\sqrt{2}$ and left it there. A student said, "I was told we are not allowed to leave an answer like that." I said, "That is what you were told in high school. Here's why ..." and went through a short historical tangent about arithmetic in the pre-computer days, tables of square roots, and long division. I thought I explained the issued well. On end of semester evaluations, I got a comment: "Teacher said our high school math education was wrong." | |
| Jan 31, 2019 at 8:55 | history | answered | Dan Fox | CC BY-SA 4.0 |