marathoner452

Yeah, that's exactly what my kids were doing -- we had to basically teach them subtraction from scratch, but (amazingly) they were very capable and eager learners, and were just amazed with themselves when they started getting answers right. The key seemed to be to communicate to them that they weren't getting it wrong to begin with, they were just doing the wrong thing, and so we were going to teach them how to do the thing that would get the right answer (with tallies and counting on fingers or with objects and stuff whenever helpful in order to check/prove work). But yeah, it was just blindingly obvious with these kids that it wasn't that they didn't care, it was that someone -- years in the past -- had just told them something like "subtraction means taking the difference" (to the point of several of them quoting that line back to us) and so of course 47-19 is 32, since the "difference" between 7 and 9 is 2, etc. I mean, I even remember being told that when I was a kid, and I remember things like "you take away the smaller number from the bigger number" and so on.