Even back in the early sixties, the goombahs in charge of the public school systems were attempting to “modernize” education in an effort to justify their existence. Hence we got things like “New Math” which attempted to teach us how to add and subtract without learning how. I.E., if you want to add two sevens together, you figure out how to add two tens together because tens are easier than sevens. That gives you two threes left over as a remainder, so if you subtract the two threes from the two tens you get 14 which is the correct answer! Simple, eh? Of course, for those of us who already had several years of math class, actually learning our addition, subtraction and multiplication – this “new” method led to utter confusion. And it’s only gotten worse in the decade since, as new “ideas” thought up by geniuses who couldn’t spell “cat” it you spotted them three letters, crop up in our school ciriculums.
Even back in the early sixties, the goombahs in charge of the public school systems were attempting to “modernize” education in an effort to justify their existence. Hence we got things like “New Math” which attempted to teach us how to add and subtract without learning how. I.E., if you want to add two sevens together, you figure out how to add two tens together because tens are easier than sevens. That gives you two threes left over as a remainder, so if you subtract the two threes from the two tens you get 14 which is the correct answer! Simple, eh? Of course, for those of us who already had several years of math class, actually learning our addition, subtraction and multiplication – this “new” method led to utter confusion. And it’s only gotten worse in the decade since, as new “ideas” thought up by geniuses who couldn’t spell “cat” it you spotted them three letters, crop up in our school ciriculums.