OPINION — Across Arizona, parents are discovering that helping their children with math homework has become an exercise in frustration. Those who learned mathematics in the 1980s and 1990s now find themselves turning to Google and YouTube to understand how their child's teacher expects a problem to be solved.
Something is wrong if parents with careers in engineering, business, finance and countless other professions are made to feel incompetent because they don't know the latest "approved" method.
There was nothing wrong with how many of us learned math. Students memorized multiplication tables, mastered standard algorithms and practiced. We learned long division, fractions, percentages and algebra well enough to become accountants, scientists, teachers, nurses, business owners and productive citizens.
