Why have we made math so complicated for Arizona students?

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.

Supporters argue that these methods promote conceptual understanding and critical thinking. Those goals are admirable. But mathematics stopped being about getting the right answer efficiently and became an exercise in showing your work in a very specific way.

The result has been frustration for students and parents alike. Homework that once took minutes now takes hours. Parents are unable to assist their children because they were never taught these methods. Instead of strengthening the partnership between home and school, the current approach often creates conflict and confusion.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that many of the concepts now presented through elaborate models and diagrams ultimately lead students back to the same standard algorithms that generations before them learned from the beginning.

Parents should not need a YouTube tutorial to help their third-grader with homework. And children should not be taught to believe that the way their parents learned math was somehow wrong.

The question Arizona families should be asking is simple: Why did we try so hard to fix something that wasn't broken?

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