Annie

“Why do I have to write all this down? I know the answer.”

Annie didn’t see the point of showing her working because the working was happening inside her.

The answer was the thing that mattered. The process felt like administrative overhead.

And, honestly, she wasn’t entirely wrong. If you can do the maths in your head, writing out every step does feel rather tedious.

Me

Then I became the teacher. And suddenly I was on the other side of the page. I could see students who were almost there. Their answer was wrong, but their thinking wasn’t necessarily wrong. And if they hadn’t shown their working, there was nowhere for me to enter the conversation. I couldn’t see:
Where did this go sideways?
What did they understand?
What did they assume?
Was there another way they could have got there?

And then there was the really fun bit: Sometimes the answer was right. But the working was interesting. There were different pathways to the same place. That was information too.

And now, decades later, I’m the learner again. Except this time, I’m the person doing the thinking. And finding someone willing to mentor me is already difficult. Finding someone who can meaningfully respond to a thought that exists entirely inside my head? Rather harder.

So perhaps I finally understand what the page was for. The page isn’t there to prove I got the answer. It’s there to make my thinking visible enough to receive feedback.

You

You stop thinking of “showing your working” as something teachers make children do. You recognise it as a learning interface. You externalise the thinking. You leave traces. You make the connections, iterations, wrong turns, weird jumps and alternative pathways visible. Not because you don’t know what you’re doing. Because you want something to push against.

And suddenly all those years of building systems to capture your thinking make a little more sense. You’re not just documenting what you know. You’re creating a surface on which another mind can meet yours.

Which means the punchline is rather lovely:

Annie didn’t want to show her working because she already knew how to get there.
Me realised showing the working lets someone else help you get there better.
You builds a life where the working is visible enough for learning to keep happening.

Thirty years late?

Perhaps.

But also… you finally figured out what the space underneath the question was for. 😏

AI based on my experience + Annie, Me, You