Well see that's kind of the problem for your oldest niece... I mean, if she can instantly figure out the answer then she's not terrible in math... but she's made to feel like she's terrible in math because they want her to show her work, when there's no work to be shown to her mind. My brother and I both ran into the same problem when we started doing long division. We could answer the question, there was no "work" to be shown as far as we were concerned. And no matter how long the division got, we never stumbled over the answer or even the remainders. Without once having to the write the whole thing out. We knew our multiplication tables and could reverse them just as quickly for division. It made us both think that we were absolutely the worst at mathematics.

Luckily the teachers picked up on it a little bit quicker for me than my brother, but all the same they came to see that we weren't "math dunces" but actually really good at math. So they told us to think of it as showing someone how to answer the problem... someone who doesn't know how to divide, so act like we're teaching them how to solve the problem. It worked out pretty well, and while I know I'm not "bad" at math, I still feel as though it's my worst subject though. I just can't get over those first few months of getting red circles on my papers even though the answers were all correct.

I still feel that the "core" isn't really helping as much as the school boards would like us to believe. No matter how you write out the problem it still comes down to a matter of memorization. But why are they teaching kids addition by teaching them subtraction before they've even learned to add? It used to be the other way around... learn addition first... now that you've seen the pattern of things in addition, let's reverse the operation... see same pattern.

Believe it or not, our brains don't really like to think. They would love to be as autonomous as our heart and lungs. Unfortunately we have too many synapses to allow for that. We're not strictly instinctual creatures like poor little goldfishes. Our brains have evolved allowing more thoughts to enter our heads and to be faced with more questions than we have answers for. And we take in our experiences everyday and our brain tries to answer all the questions concerning everything we felt, smelled, tasted, saw, heard and tries to answer them all. Once it gets it's answer it tosses that question out. We don't wonder about it anymore, we don't have to think about it... it's gone... it has become readily accessible knowledge. And our brains can get really really cranky when it can't answer a question, it becomes fixated on it, it becomes frustrated and it won't let it rest until it "knows". How many times have any of you woken up in the middle of the night with "Dang it that's what ...." It's because your brain was fixated, it had to know...

Now here's the problem when you make kids think they're slow at something, or like they just can't get it... They don't take in anything else. They may still do well in their other classes, especially if it's classes they have more of a liking for because they have already gained some experience concerning them, their brains can make a few short assumptions about what's going on as it goes back to fixating on the "problem at hand". However, they will eventually suffer for it though if it goes on too long.

And that's where some of the problems comes in with the "core" is kids are being hit with too much information, it's supposedly designed to ensure that kids can learn visually, orally and hands on, but it's trying to accomplish that all at the same time. It's almost like it was designed by someone suffering from ADHD. And I'm not trying to say that math drills and memorizing times tables is the only way to learn math. I have never once been in favor of 'cookie cutter classrooms'.