Comment by tombert
3 days ago
My parents did New Math, and I always thought it sounded pretty cool.
My elementary school math pretty much completely boiled down to doing arithmetic. A useful thing to know, obviously, but I always felt too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.
It always seemed like planting the seeds of some more advanced math concepts would make math a lot more approachable.
> too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.
I felt the same for a while. Until I realized my college math problems were all selected to make the arithmetic easy. Thus by doing all the arithmetic in my head I had a quick cheat on if I was right or not - wrong answers made for hard math and so I'd start over and thus fix the mistake.
The trick only worked for math though. Physics and chemistry often required harder math and so a calculator was needed to finish on time even when you did the problem right (which wasn't always a given)
I'm not saying that we stop teaching arithmetic, and I'm not even saying that we stop spending a majority of our time on teaching arithmetic, but I think that introducing more advanced concepts early could be a good use of time. It looks like New Math was basically that?