Put The FOIL In The Recycle Bin, Please
That’s it. I’m done with FOIL. Now and possibly forever, unless someone like Alfie Kohn or JD tells me otherwise.
At first I didn’t have a horse in the race. I mean, who cares so long as kids can multiply binomials right? If they get it one way or another way, then they’ll get it and that’s great. So what prompted me to dump it altogether? After school, two of my best students decided to annoy me about their grades after school. They got on my case so much that I said, “You know what? Fine! I’m gonna see if you can do this!” After having taught them how to multiply monomials and binomials in any order, I gave them a product of two binomials like this: (3x² + 5x)(14x³ – 17x + 12).
One of the kids said in her sweet voice: “Mr. V, we’re just KIDS!” I cracked up and said, “Try it!”
Sure enough, they got to plugging away. They started to multiply the binomial with the trinomial as if they had seen the problem before. I couldn’t believe the gall. Then, they saw the FOIL instructions written on the board
