To preface, I normally celebrate mistakes in my classroom as a part of the learning process. But there are some things that really speed the progress of my receding hairline, a large of percentage of which involve bad algebra. I saw this from @lustomatical and thought YES. This is what I need to get my kids to stop distributing powers over terms that are added, and “canceling” things willy nilly, and not respecting the trig functions as operations. Let’s concentrate on the Calculus! So I made these posters for my classroom:

Enjoy. I know my students will, and it will actually give us a funny and memorable way to talk about and avoid these common algebra mistakes.

The other thing that I showed them today to get them to stop just playing around with letters while doing Algebra is the following, which I believe I picked up at a summer workshop:

They literally laughed out loud at this. I said (in a funny, not mean and not sarcastic way), “You think that’s funny?!?!? This is the kind of stuff you guys do on quizzes. When I am correcting your work I sit and laugh and laugh and laugh at the crazy things that you do! No more crazy algebra!”

How do we stop/prevent crazy algebra mistakes besides carefully and repeatedly addressing them when they happen? Any ideas?