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Theodore Whitfield's avatar

The quadratic formula is a "messy, silly thing?" :( :( :( I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

I have a question for you. My understanding is that the quadratic formula is a big challenge for many students, and that a substantial portion of high-school students have real difficulty plugging numbers into the expression and then correctly evaluating it. Is that your experience? I'm not making a claim about the exact percentage -- is it 80%? 50%? 20%? I don't know. But it's not 1%, it's some non-trivial proportion of students cannot handle this level of complexity.

Personally, I would think that this formula is exactly the sort of thing that should be memorized. But maybe that just means that I'm not suited to being a middle-school math teacher.

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