Why would she be punished for getting the right answers? 

Have you ever cried at the dinner table with your dad, trying to figure out your math homework? If you haven’t, you missed out on one of the most formative father-daughter experiences. 

It can be incredibly difficult for parents to help their kids with their math homework because math pedagogy, especially in elementary school, changes every generation! Tom Lehrer sang about «New Math» in 1965, making fun of the methods of teaching mathematics that are «so very simple that only a child could do it.» That «new math» in 1965 was the math that my dad learned as a kid, and he had to adjust to the «new math» that I was learning in the 2000s. As an elder Gen Zer, I see math assignments for today’s elementary schoolers, and I think that they have too many unnecessary steps! Why would you break down 8X5 as adding 8 together 5 times instead of just memorizing your times tables so that you know it’s 40 in an instant? But my thoughts on «new math» are consistent with those of every previous generation about the «new math» their kids learned. Maybe we just have to accept that there are many different ways to solve a math problem, and that’s okay! 

That dad in this story has a daughter who was majorly struggling with math, so he decided to take matters into his own hands and teach her the old-fashioned way of multiplying and dividing. She finally got most of the answers right on her test, and her teacher tried to punish her for not using the methods she learned in class, even though those methods were not working for her.