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| Andrew getting ready to add some doors to a utility room at our camp, |
Our son, Andrew, has been doing some work for us this summer. The other day was payday, and he let us know that he had put in 11 hours of work the past week. We are paying him $18.75 per hour. (He's 27 and has a degree in Building Technology from NMU, so these are not simple chores.)
As we did the math to pay Andrew for his services, I was interested in the different approaches we picked to determine what we owed him. Kathy grabbed a pencil and paper to do the standard algorithm. Andrew looked at me and asked how I would do it. "Honestly," I said, "when there's money involved, I'd grab a calculator." Andrew proceed to talk through how he would calculate 11 x 18.75 mentally. (He has always had an affinity for numbers, though he struggled with school math that relied on "rules without reasons".)
That same week, I participated with a group of about three dozen elementary teachers in training for Math Recovery. When it came to supporting students' multi-digit multiplication and division strategies, several of the teachers discussed how kids' mental math needed to lead to more efficient strategies. This seems reasonable; it's even in the Standards for Mathematical Practice(emphasis mine):
... procedural fluency (skill in carrying out procedures flexibly, accurately, efficiently and appropriately), ...
But what does "efficiently" mean when it comes to multi-digit computation? Who calculated 11 x 18.75 efficiently: Kathy, Andrew, or me? What criteria are you using for efficiently? This is not a rhetorical question - I really want to know.
