Not confident about place value

August 2, 2011

I was working as a para educator at an elementary school. The students were learning about place value. The worksheets included words such as “seventy-two” and students needed to write the digits such as “72. On 1 particular problem, I was really confused. It said “three hundred fifty thousand, seventy-two and I didn't know if the correct answer was 350,72 or 350,072. I don't really remember how I helped my students with this one, but I really wasn't sure what the correct answer was. A few hours later, after I got home from work, I was talking on the phone with a friend and I was telling her about this math problem. I was able to figure out that the correct answer was 350,072. This is scary that I didn't know this! I’m pretty sure that before the memory impairment symptoms started, this was not a problem for me.