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When students learn the orders of operations, PEMDAS (or GEMDAS as I teach it), few people make the distinction that the P (for parenthesis) or G (for grouping symbols) needs to have some other type of math inside. You cannot have a group of 1. Since there is only one number, it defaults to meaning multiplication. And as stated many times in this thread, those mathematical operations have equal precedence, and should be approached from left to right. If teachers would only make the distinction that there needs to be "something happening" inside the parenthesis (or brackets, braces ...) otherwise ( ) means just multiply, but in the correct order.
Just my $.02 ...
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