"Show your work"

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Throughout school I was always getting points knocked off for not showing my work. For me it was hard to show all of the steps because I just did them out in my mind and was often told that there is no way I could do some problems without writing things down. Same thing with work now, when working on some large programming projects, I just think it out instead of making notes. Anyone else have similar situations?

Yes. And the teachers were sorry they
asked me to do so.

My distorted figures they cood not
understand a bit, Ihad to have
dad translate for me.

For math, it really does matter if you show your work. They can't read your mind, the closest thing they have is what you wrote down. Think of it as if showing your work well enough so they can understand it were the answer, rather than the answer itself.

For programming, you shouldn't really have to show your work. You do need comments, though.

I am getting quite often reminded that I do need to write comments. I tend to zone out for a while and then write pages of code in a few hour sitting. With math, my problem was if I get the correct answer then why do I need to show the rest. I actually changed my major in college due to my incompatibility with math classes.

I pretty much show my work anyway, especially on Algebra-related stuff, because I need to see the process.

Maybe you could have gotten around this by telling the tutor to ask you another similar math question right there and then, to prove that you were capable of solving it in your mind, and then once they believed you they might have been better able to understand why you find it difficult to "show work" which you never had to go through.

I pretty much just write everything that comes into my mind rather than try to figure out what I'm supposed to show. If I show more steps than I need, that's better than if I show too few. But I used to have that problem. In middle school (7th grade) we had a math quiz. 10 questions, 10 points each, on solving basic linear algebra (7x+3=24, solve for x, that kind of thing). Anyway, I got 9 out of 10 right, but each correct answer was only worth 3, the other 7 was for the work. So I wound up with a 60. But eventually I learned more work is better.

I hate that! I got the answer right, so why do I have to show you how I got it? In the real world, your boss only cares about the results and would only ask you to show your work if it appears like you achieved it in a shady manner. :/

So that he can give you a pat on the back if you did.

Exactly. You may even be given a promotion because of it. Lol, jk.

To me, there are two very cogent reasons why showing your work is an essential skill that needs to be learned:

1) Commonality of understanding.

It is impossible for us to share learning unless we are sure that we have a mutual understanding. If I am working with a group of physicians on a diagnostic problem, it is not enough for one of us to proclaim, "it's membranous glomerulonephritis." We actually have to go through the process of differential diagnosis to arrive at the conclusion.

2) "Debugging"

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you arrive at the wrong answer. By showing your work, it is easier for you (or someone else) to trace through your work to find the point at which it went off the rails.

In the real world, you'd punch buttons on a calculator. If the answer were all that mattered, it wouldn't be math class, it would be calculator-usage class.

Also in the real world, some problems are too hard for calculators or computers to solve for us.

The answers calculate your grade so I guess it is all that mattered. Hell, this is why I'm a writer.

Those problems probably have nothing to do with math, unless it's buying a car, paying back loan and stuff like that.

I can understand that. But I have trouble doing it. With some parts of mathematics I don't really do any working ut, I just look at it and know the answer. Or I figure the answer out using the data shown to me without doing any steps, I just think about it and know the answer. It's hard to explain, but I often do things differently in math.

Other things, like trigonometry are easy to show my working in, but I still get moments where it's impossible to show my working out becasue nothing that I did can be written down on paper in a mathematical way.

If you program in the real world, other people will need to use your code. Giving your colleagues a large pile of uncommented code and then expecting them to wade through it to figure out what you're doing is rude and disrespectful.

As to math... well, it's been a while since I've taken a math class that was as trivial as simple calculations that they wanted us to show. If they're asking you to compute an integral and you skipped a step or two, I can sympathize, that sort of thing is a waste of time. In higher-level math classes they usually ask you to prove something or other, and a proof that skips steps is not a proof at all.

It's worth noting that in many industry situations, it is important to be able to describe what you have done in a calculation, so that others can repeat the process precisely even if you are no longer present.