I have a hard time helping people with math because it was intuitive to me, same reason I didn't show enough work and got in trouble with most math teachers.  Thank God my Calc and Geometry teacher knew how I worked.

In any case, helping friends and neighbors with this new math stuff... makes me and my mother, who went to school to teach algebra, cringe.

I just barely missed the new math, which they're teaching in my former school now, at least in the "integrated" classes, which is basically their politically correct terminology for the classes where they try teaching algebra and geometry to kids who never learned to add two digit numbers without a calculator.

Which is where my biggest gripe rests.  Calculators are quite possibly responsible for this total inability to perform what to many of us(especially people older than myself) seems like basic mental math.  Aside from Trig, where a calculator was quicker than a trig table, and once in a long while in Calculus, I never touched a calculator.  One teacher forced me to have one, but had a hard time forcing me to use it.  Then, after giving all these kids calculators, the teachers expect them to show their work, so either the kid writes down pretty much exactly what he punched into his calculator, which seems a waste of time to me, or ignores the directions, writes the answer only, and is docked points.

When I look around, I see young adults from my generation working in retail who get utterly confused when you hand them a cash amount other than something in even dollars.  Give them a dollar and a dime to pay for something that was a buck six, and they'll stare at the other dollar bill in your hand and wonder why you just didn't give them two dollars.  And some of these kids, I know, made it through school with relatively high grades in math.  Then I look at thirty and forty something people, many of whom dropped out of school to work, and older folks from similar backgrounds, and these guys, who may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, can break change for you for pretty much any amount without a calculator or even piece of paper to write on.  Even if they didn't learn the fancy stuff, at one point in time, before calculators were the pervasive plague they are today, they had to learn how numbers worked by adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing on a piece of paper, a chalk board, and/or in their head.

When I help the neighbor girl with math, I swear I'm helping her with English, because half the assignments are vocabulary, and the math, even at the beginning of Algebra, was a menagerie of strange problems and procedures that I was never even asked to do in school.

Hey, I know how to use a slide rule!

Good point about the English in Math, btw.

Thanks.

I have a slide rule somewhere.  My mom taught me how to use it when I was younger.

If you can't tell, we've delved into one of my pet peeves!

I kinda got that... it drives me wild, too.

Another big one is the term "pet peeve," which I just used!

Math is a language I do not speak

A very quotable quote.

did you ever hear Tom Lehrer's satire song from the 60s about the old, new math? It's hysterical.

It rings a bell... I'll have to google it up.