PERMDAS

Have taught Algebra I, Algebra II, Trigonometry, and Pre-Calculus in high school, community college, university, and individual tutoring settings.

As students' assimilation of new knowledge is more likely with the validation of their ideas, the teacher should incorporate the students' words into the presentation of the subject matter.

The PERMDAS model of the Algebra order of operations offers a more complete framework for understanding the inverse and power relationships among the six operations. Rather than presenting a linear five-operation PEMDAS model, to be memorized by students, the more complete PERMDAS model offers a two-dimension perspective of these six algebra operations and their relationships in simplifying and solving equations and inequalities.

Teaching Algebra to students in high school, community college, university, and private settings prompted the author to question why the operation of Roots, or Radicals, was not included with the other five PEMDAS operations, as Roots is the inverse operation of exponents, as are the inverse operations of addition-subtraction and multiplication-division. Adding the "R" to the traditional PEMDAS operations model, not only completes the three pairs of inverse operations, but also enables the presentation of their relative power to increase and decrease numbers.