The Tyranny of “Show Your Work”
When Classroom Rule Became a National Pastime.
I was never a math kid. And in 6th grade it got even harder. This is when my current gripe with society started, when I was told to “show your work.”
Spanish and art, those were my worlds. I could retrace a flower, I could pick the right colors, I had a great Spanish accent, I could roll my r’s and conjugate. For those with natural abilities, requirements like “Show your work” always seemed like an extra hurdle. “Show your work”. I, like some, was just focused on the end results.
For most of the 20th century, U.S. math prioritized correct answers over explanations. After about the ‘80s, however, curricula decided the process mattered just as much as the end result. And we’ve now lived with those consequences ever since.
The concept of “Show your work” was the death of me. And somewhere along the way, the idea escaped the classroom and went national. We now live in a “show your work” society — a perpetual America’s Funniest Home Videos reel where the journey is often valued more than the destination. For results-based thinkers, it’s maddening, but let me try to make sense of it:
I get it, things change. Participation trophies are a thing because it’s not the destination, it is the journey. I get that. The show American Idol taught millions of millennials this too. Do you remember William Hung? He didn’t have Clay Aiken’s voice or Rueben’s presence, or Kelly Clarkson’s delivery, but his story still made him a star. He was actually terrible at singing, which was the perceived goal of American Idol, but the genius of the “She-bang she-bangs all star” is that he understood the bottom line. And today good and bad have blurred into one undifferentiated spectacle: attention.
Look at the recent campaigns of Dunkin’ Donuts and American Eagle. They’ve overstood this concept. They used a very prominent very white very Republican actor in a time where racial tensions are extremely high in the U.S. and gave her a talking point emphasizing “genes” and how hers were “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” superior. Dunkin Donuts followed suit immediately. And what did we do in reaction? We were outraged. and in our outrage we immediately began promoting their product for them.
As Deante Kyle explains in his podcast Grits and Eggs: That’s methodical, that’s purposeful”
The idea of rage bait bridges this concept of “show your work” perfectly. Sure people spoke about the amazing songs they heard on American Idol, but what really made the show blast off were the particularly bad auditions, the ones so off-key they became cultural events. That’s the twist: in today’s economy of attention, the quality of the end product matters less than the display of the process.
And that’s the same bargain I was resisting back in sixth grade math. “Show your work”. that used to mean turning in the messy steps between problem and answer. And it’s a cultural mandate now — we reward the spectacle of getting there, even if “there” is wrong, offensive, or it’s absurd. We’re all turning in half-solved problems, and the messier the better, because the steps are what actually gets graded.
I can’t change the wave we’re riding, but I can acknowledge it. So here I am, showing my work — my process — for all to see. If you like it, I have a free Substack where I collect my writings and lessons learned over the years. Ranging in whatever cultural zeitgeist thing I want to discuss. Fair warning: I use AI to edit my thoughts. But then again, in a world obsessed with the journey, maybe that’s just “showing my work” and apart of my bigger story. We’ll see.