Too Many Blanks! What Workbooks Don't Teach

Recently I observed a student teacher giving a group of third graders a mathematics quiz. He passed out plain paper and began to read off some addition examples for the children to copy. The children were panic stricken. Aghast! Write mathematics? No one had ever asked them to write mathematics. They had been cast adrift from their comfortable worksheets and workbooks and left to flounder about on a sheet of white paper. The results were illuminating. Fewer than half of the children could consistently and correctly reproduce a correct vertical algorithm. They did not know how to line up the numbers according to place value.