The recipient of a master’s in curriculum and instruction and a PhD in educational leadership from National Louis University, Hilary Agnello is an Illinois-based math teacher who has taught at McHenry County College since 2014. Prior to this role, Hilary Agnello taught math at the middle school level, giving students strategies to make math easier.

One of the more popular strategies for completing multi-digit multiplication without the use of a calculator is the window/box method, which is also referred to as the area model. A common introductory method to the more advanced partial products strategy, the window method prompts students to create a window with a number of rows and columns that reflect the number of digits in the problem’s factors. For instance, if multiplying 47 by 24, the student would create a box with 2 rows and 2 columns. The factors of each problem would then be placed along the top and sides of the box — 40 and 7 along the top, and 20 and 4 down the side.

The trick is then to multiply the numbers that meet in the corresponding four spaces. For example, the student would multiply 40 by 20 in the upper left box, 7 by 20 in the upper right box, 40 by 4 in the bottom left box, and 7 by 4 in the bottom right box. The products from each equation are then added together to get the result of the original 47×24 problem.