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Vent: my kid's math homework came home with a sheet of 'shortcut tricks' and I spent an hour proving the first one was wrong
So last Tuesday my 9 year old brings home this worksheet from school, and at the top it says you can multiply any number by 11 by just adding the two digits together and sticking the answer in the middle. Great party trick, right? 23 times 11 becomes 2, then 2 plus 3 is 5, then 3, so 253. Works fine. My kid does the whole sheet in five minutes feeling like a genius. Then I try 68 times 11 and get 6, 6 plus 8 is 14, 8, so 6148, which is way off because the real answer is 748. Turns out the trick falls apart the second the digits add up past 9 and you have to carry, and nowhere on that sheet does it say that. My kid was crushed and kept saying the paper lied to her. I ended up grabbing a pencil and walking through three examples on the back of an envelope, and honestly it made for a better night than any worksheet. Any of you run into school handouts that teach a rule but leave out the one case that breaks it?
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