Has your hard work ever been undone?

• Have you, yourself, ever been undone?
• Tethered and broken down?
• Could this have anything to do with factoring polynomials?
• What about the ideas, concepts, or teachings that we thought our kids learned or accomplished?
• Have you witnessed undoing?
• Is there any good in undoing it?

I know that was a lot of questions! Let’s think about undoing knots and undoing mistakes. Those examples make it sound like undoing can be positive!

In today’s math lesson, Dirk explains a big concept in Algebra, Factoring polynomials, and presents it as an undoing distributive property. 

But first, pause for a moment.

Check out these math lessons first! 

• Greatest Common Factors 
• Mental Math with the Distributive Property 

Dirk’s approach draws from the wellsprings of coding, scaffolding, success-building, and momentum so that by the time your student reaches the variables at the end of the lesson, they have been led gently along. They have already experienced success! No need to undo any of their confidence or joy here! It’s what we’re all about at MFM. 

The visuals, manipulatives, and language really do reach! It is this variety of instruction that can aid our kids to undo math anxiety and redo a sense of power with numbers! It’s so good that it is also a model for any other practitioners out there who are looking for a fun, visual, multisensory method to teach polynomial factoring. 

Related: Dismantle the Polynomial Terror 

Distilled into three simple steps, here’s how you do it!

1. Find the common factors of each term
2. Find common factors
3. Take the common factors out

Instead of undoing success, we’re undoing the confusion!

MFM Authors