Why is pemdas misleading

Our children are being asked to learn mathematics in a way that is not the same as the way we learned it ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. This is, and I know this can be tough to swallow , a very good thing. And 1 is not the answer. Multiplication and Division, when not in any punctuation parentheses are tackled left to right.

Similarly, addition and subtraction have the same weight, and are completed left to right. What will happen, though, is that students whose teachers are using Common Core aligned textbooks will be accustomed to justifying their results and communicating well. I understand the resistance. By being asked to justify, my son was given an opportunity to add his voice to the math lesson. He was asked about his thought process, and demonstrated his understanding of a deeper math concept, one-to-one correspondence.

He chose to draw, but he could have chosen to verbally explain, or to grab some objects to make his point, and all of those methods of justification would have been correct.

His choice, and the different choices made by his classmates, were honored and celebrated. We want students to learn multiple methods for solving problems, so that they can also learn the skill of discerning which works best for them. We need to think more about why we are asking our students to learn mathematics. We want our kids to maintain their curiosity about the way the world works, and the role that mathematics plays in explaining scientific phenomena. I actually have one more comment about that video, speaking about the ambiguity of order of operations.

But since there are no brackets, just do the operations as you see them, without changing signs or doing anything more complicated. However, there never seemed to be any difficulty in understanding the concept. It was taught that in order of operations, neither multiplication or division takes priority over the other, and same thing for addition and subtraction. The point is to logically simplify and condense your equation until you are left with something easily solvable.

First you are telling your kids to solve all parenthesis and exponents, and not necessarily from left to write, but first. It is all very confusing.

If you have something even more catchy, post it in the comments below! And parenthesis brackets, isolation, etc. And you are totally right that parentheses is not an operation but a notational convention to indicate what operations to perform first. That MinutePhysics video is horrifically wrong.

There are teachers posting comments saying how disgraceful the video is. It should be deleted. Implied and explicit multiplication are equivalent. That is to makes it simpler, It is the single biggest distinguishing feature compared with possibly every other convention. Thank you for pointing out what we learned in elementary school that a calculus teacher didnt understand. Its just sad that no one wants to teach they need to be told ……… coming from a calculus teacher!!

Thanks for your comment. I am questioning the acronym PEMDAS as a pedagogical tool, not the mathematical convention we use for writing unsimplified expressions.

So I believe you misunderstood my post. Mathematical discussions are always welcome on my posts, but please refrain from using any further ad hominem attacks on either me or other commenters. He literally blew a hole in your article.

And you just brushed off his comment as if HE misunderstood? And you are also definitely taught to switch the division of fractions into multiplication. You both are misunderstanding my post. That is my only point and has always been my only point in this post. I am now a full professor in mathematics.