“It’s just that I’m never going to use a number line in real life! I would count on my fingers or do the math in my head,” a student protested with frustration.

She was a very capable math student, but the visual number line was bogging her down, and she was not the first to question why the class needed to learn certain math concepts. Another student often pressed me on why we needed to practice skip-counting in various intervals, claiming that she would never count by fives when she could just count by 10s faster.

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