Children's Math Tip: Don't Calculate Until The End

When I was teaching math to my daughter and her friend, I noticed that sometimes they work hard for a wrong answer. It is because they calculate every step. For example, take a look at


                                         10÷3×9

If you want to calculate 10÷3 , you get 3.33333... and my daughter would round that to 3.33. Then multiplying by 9, they get 29.97. If she would spend time looking at this, she could see that this is

So the point for her to learn from this mistake is that don't calculate until you see what you have to calculate as a whole, and cancel out as much as she could before doing any calculations.

Actually this is probably true for everything in life. If you don't see the entire picture before start working on it, you might be wasting your time working hard for the wrong result. Capture the whole picture first, then think what maybe the right way to go about, then find the best way to attack the problem.

It is easy to say it, but very difficult to get it done. I believe I am doing what my daughter was doing in my life just doing from the beginning without looking at the whole picture. It is easy to see in math, but for me, it is difficult to see in real life. There are many things you can learn from math.