My Way of Learning Math

There is so many ways in which people go about adding or multiplying and dividing, it truly depends on the person and their own thought process. I work in a sub shop so I deal a lot with change, especially at the end of the night when we are closing and I have to count till. At the end of the night we need 400 in the register for tomorrow and what is left over is put into the safe. What I do when I am counting till is I first take all the 20's, 10's, 5's, and 1's. Okay so to show how i go about counting and adding up the 20's lets say there is 18 20's, well I know that 5 20's = $100, so we have 15 20's which means 300 then a left over 3 because 18-15= 3, them I think well 2x3 is 6 I just have to add one zero for 20, making that 60. The total amount of 20's is $360. Another example would be counting the 110's and adding the total without a calculator. Let's say I counted 15 10's that would mean we have $150 because with 10s is is the same number that we just have to add one 0 because ten 10s go into 100 making it a lot like a 1 insinuations like these where we just have to add the zero to the total.

That is my own personal way of addition, however there is so many ways that students go about their own math and I believe that it is very important that we show students there is not just "one-way" there is multiple ways, and that the word, "wrong" should never be used in the classroom, revision would be most appropriate. If we use the word revision students do see that as necessarily wrong, however close to the answer but not quite there this is a lot less of demoralizing the student and having them believe that they are not good at math, everyone is good at math in one way shape or form; but because of the word wrong we as learners instantly think that well I'm not good at math. In my own teaching I will strive my best to not use the word wrong because I want students to know that what they are saying is meaningful, and if it needs revision that is the beautiful thing about our brains is that when we do revise our way of thinking we are open to see many more and some that may even work better for us!