Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 03, 2018

Not these days it isn’t.

The modern answer to that question is to show that you didn’t use a calculator/phone/computer/…

Why? Because.

They want to know how you got there.

More like grammar than spelling…

I disagree with Frazz: showing your work in writing would be submitting not only the finished piece but also the first draft and all the successive drafts, with the misspellings, grammatical errors, unresolved rhetorical points, and unchecked facts, and the various edits and corrections you made along the way.

The memory function is one of the least polished yet one of the most important skills one can learn at an early age. With improved memory comes improved recall, which leads to the enlargement of perspective via comparison of present with past. That includes both language and mathematical processes.

If you don’t show your work then how did they know you didn’t cheat

Showing your work is the teacher’s way of checking that you know how you did it. 8^)

I did not have to show my work in math until algebra in 7th grade. These kids are still in elementary school.

What marvelous strip today. Excellent in setup, construction and punchline with a clever message as well. In just THREE PANELS, that’s genius!!

Letters are to words as numerals are to numbers.

Just answer any math question with 42.

If you didn’t understand what you did, or are not interested in the subject, you will always try to doubt the sensibility of explaining it. Interestingly enough, when people don’t like math, they often tell you it’s the teacher’s fault because the bad teacher didn’t explain it well or in the wrong way (in most cases, they didn’t really listen). And because of that, now they hate Math or are proud not to like it or, on the contrary, they are hidden math geniusses as they always had alternative solutions which the stupid teacher refused to accept. When it’s about any other subject, be it languages or history or chemistry, people more easily admit that they were either too lazy, not talented or not enough interested in the subject (or in learning in general).

PostsFrazz15 hrs ·

I suppose I’m not entirely correct here. Spelling and multiplication and addition are all fundamentals in service of a larger purpose, but you can sort of get your point across while spelling poorly. While I imagine the most glorious equation can be brought low by a single arithmetic error.

On the other hand, getting a point across and getting it taken seriously are two different things, and poor spelling is a loud klaxon warning to proceed skeptically; if the writer couldn’t be bothered to check something as simple as the proper order of letters forming words, what else has gone unchecked?

So I could be wrong. But at least I spelled everything right, so you can’t be sure.

There’s an anecdote about the great mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss as a schoolboy. His teacher wanted to give the class some busy work to keep them occupied, so he set them all to adding together all the integers from 1 to 100. Gauss turned in his answer in just a few minutes. The teacher, suspicious that he was just guessing, double checked, and sure enuf, 5050 was correct. Asked to show his work, Gauss pointed out that 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101 … 50 + 51 = 101, and 101 occurring 50 times = 5050. Probably not what the teacher expected, but then he wasn’t the genius that Gauss was.

Critical thinking.