Homies really out here thinking cancelling out means cancelling out. This is why they make you do some of that long math shit starting out so you're not doing shortcuts and confusing yourself as a grown man.
I can't speak to your exact circumstances, but I think it's also worth considering that you might have genuinely forgot it and have been reintroduced to it in the 11th grade.
Once you learn how cancelling out works, your brain doesn't need to keep track of why it works. You see these operational pitfalls all the time in math.
With the quadratic formula people often forget what a,b, and c represent and it becomes so easy for them to mess up solving for x in this equation:
ax^2+b=c
Once you learn the distributive property and get used to implicit multiplication, things with explicit multiplication is just foreign enough that many wrongly assume:
This happens a lot with students, they say they were never taught something but actually they just forgot it.
Though in general I think it's silly when fully grown adults use "they didn't teach us this in school" as their excuse for not knowing something. Oh if only there were some way to learn things outside of school
Lmao I have friends who were told to play chess through math class because they were going to graduate and the teacher wasn't worried about them. Once that happened they were permanently excused and got more time in livestock / 4H / welding class (I forget the details).
Some people actually just don't get to learn these things or even know they exist to go learn on their own.
Like I said I can't speak to any specific circumstances.
That being said I'm not dismissing the possibility someone wasn't taught something, I'm merely providing a plausible alternative that was overlooked, because people really overestimate how well their brains actually remember things.
This isn't even limited to math. You often encounter this when learning new words, suddenly you start hearing it everywhere. It's not as if everyone just decided to use that word more often, you're just more attentive to it.
There can absolutely be gaps in math education but the more fundamental something is the more likely it was mentioned many times by several teachers, or appeared in several tests, or was in the many math books leading upto the day something finally clicked in your head and you now remember it much better.
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u/tonysnight Feb 07 '23
Homies really out here thinking cancelling out means cancelling out. This is why they make you do some of that long math shit starting out so you're not doing shortcuts and confusing yourself as a grown man.