[dboreham]

This resonates very strongly with my experience helping my two kids (11,13) with their math work. Their teachers have not always been as helpful as they might in this respect, for example marking test solutions as entirely incorrect when the student has made a stupid arithmetic mistake in the working but otherwise demonstrated a proper understanding of how to solve the problem. I'm not arguing that incorrect answers should be rewarded, but it does seem to demotivate the student when they are punished for a mistake performing a task that no adult would need to perform (we use computers and calculators for our arithmetic, and have done since I was my kids age in the 1970s).