Different Representations

In middle school, I got stuck on algebra. Specifically, expressions like (x + y) 2 . I was wrong, but at the time, I naively thought it became x 2 + y 2 . To solve this, we were taught FOIL, an algorithm, for expanding (x + y) 2 . It was simple enough. But I was never convinced that the exponent didn’t distribute to both terms, like multiplication does. I just could not understand why it didn’t…