When the School's Method Is Not the One You Learned

27 August 2026 · by Larry

You sit down to help. You look at the question, you know exactly how to do it, and you show your child the way you were taught. And they say the sentence that ends a hundred homework sessions a night across Singapore:

That's not how my teacher does it.

Now you are stuck. Your way works — you can prove it works, the answer is right there. But they will not use it, and you cannot follow the thing in their workbook, and the evening turns into a negotiation about whose method is allowed instead of any actual maths.

The school's method is not a worse version of yours

This is the part that changes everything, and it is worth sitting with for a moment.

When you look at the school's method and it seems long-winded — all those boxes, all that drawing, all those steps to get to something you could do in your head — the natural conclusion is that they are making it complicated for no reason.

They are not. What you are looking at is an earlier stage of the same journey, not a competing route.

Singapore primary maths deliberately works from the concrete, to the pictorial, to the abstract. Children handle real objects, then draw the situation, then eventually write it as symbols. The compact method you were taught — the one that is three quick strokes on a page — is the abstract stage. It is the destination.

Your child is somewhere on the road to it. The long method is how they get there with their understanding intact.

Why handing them the shortcut backfires

It is tempting, because it works immediately. Show a child the quick way and tonight's homework gets done faster and everyone goes to bed happier.

Two things tend to happen afterwards.

The first is that they can produce answers but cannot explain them. That matters more than it used to, because from around Primary 3 the working itself starts earning marks — a right answer with nothing shown can still lose them, which is one of the ways marks disappear from a paper that looks correct.

The second is more serious and shows up later. A child who only has the shortcut has nothing to fall back on when the question gets harder or turns into two or three steps. The long method is not just a way to get this answer — it is a way of seeing the situation, and that is the thing that keeps working when the numbers stop being friendly.

Give them the shortcut too early and you have swapped a durable skill for a quick evening.

The move that actually works: ask them to teach you

If you take one thing from this, take this.

When you cannot follow their method, do not go and look it up first, and do not substitute yours. Say, honestly:

I don't know this way. Can you show me how your teacher does it?

This does three things at once, and it is hard to beat.

• It tells you exactly where the gap is. A child who understands it will teach it to you fluently. A child who is lost will stall at a specific step — and that step is the actual problem, which you now know instead of guessing.
• Explaining is one of the strongest ways to learn. Having to put it into words for someone else forces the understanding to firm up. You are not wasting time being taught; that is the practice.
• It removes the fight. Nobody is wrong any more. You are not the parent overruling the teacher, and they are not the child refusing the parent. You are the one being helped, which most children rather enjoy.

If they cannot teach it to you, you have not failed the evening. You have found the thing to ask the teacher about, which is far more useful than a completed worksheet.

Where to find their method, when you need it

You usually do not have to search for it:

• The workbook or textbook nearly always has a worked example at the start of the exercise, in exactly the format the school wants.
• Their own exercise book is better still. Find a similar question the teacher has already marked. That shows you both the method and how much working is expected.
• Bar models are the most common flashpoint, because most parents in Singapore did not grow up with them and they look like a strange detour around simple arithmetic. They are worth understanding properly rather than avoiding — we went through them in what bar models are and how to help.

When it is fine to show your way

It is not forbidden. It is a question of order.

Once your child can do it the school's way reliably — not once, reliably — a second method becomes genuinely useful. Introduce it as what it is:

Here's a faster way to check it, once you're sure of the proper method.

A second method used as a check is a real advantage. Doing it one way and confirming with another is exactly how you catch a careless slip. A second method used as a replacement, before the first one is solid, is the problem.

One thing worth not saying

Try not to tell your child the teacher's way is silly, or the long way round, or not how it is done in the real world — even when you are tired and it is nine o'clock.

It puts them in a loyalty conflict they cannot win. They have to face that teacher tomorrow. What usually happens next is not that they adopt your method; it is that they stop showing you their work, because showing you invites a critique of their class. That is a high price for a moment of honesty about long division.

And if you genuinely believe a method has been taught wrongly — which does occasionally happen — that is a short, polite question to the teacher. It is not something to settle at the dining table with a child in the middle.

If maths was never your subject

Plenty of parents reading this had a rough time with maths themselves, and being unable to follow a Primary 4 worksheet lands harder than it should. Being taught by your own child is a perfectly good position to be in — arguably the best one available. There is more on that in helping with maths when you were never good at it yourself.

And if the evenings themselves have become the battle rather than the maths, checking homework without a fight is probably the more useful place to start.

The point of all this

The goal was never for your child to do it your way. It was for them to be able to do it without you.

The school's long, patient, box-drawing method is aimed at exactly that. It will turn into the quick method you know — on its own, in time, once the understanding underneath it is solid enough to hold the shortcut up.

Your job in the meantime is smaller and easier than you think. Ask them to show you. Listen to where they get stuck. Tell the teacher what you found.

Related: fractions are where two competing methods do the most damage — see fractions, when they suddenly stop making sense.