She pulled the paper back and stared at it. Her jaw tightened. "I had the right setup. I factored it right. But then when I went to find x, the numbers..." she stopped.
"Moved around."
"Yeah." She said it low.
"Right. So we're going to do something different." I opened my bag and pulled out a sheet of graph paper I'd prepared on the drive over. Grid format, each step in its own box, visual separation between operations. The kind of scaffolding that nobody had ever thought to build for her because nobody had looked at how her brain actually processed information. They'd just kept handing her the same ladder and acting surprised when she fell off the same rung.
Troublesome? Yes. Worth it? The seven problems on that first sheet answered that.
I put the graph paper in front of her. "Each box is one operation. You don't move to the next box until the current one is finished."
She looked at it. "This looks like something you'd give a ten-year-old."
