Well, in this case the data just happens to be the way they've got it out of whatever they're doing, their first decision is how they're going to organise it. You know, you don't say, 'Put it in a two-column table'. And then how to look at it. And doing that a number of times leads them to be able to analyse it better. But if the standards of mathematics are to be improved in this way, there's going to have to be a lot of discussion, probably argument, about the many constraints of time and expectations that currently block students and schools' ability to teach real understanding of maths.
Teachers have a very difficult role to play.
They're charged with covering a curriculum. And there's a lot of pressures on teachers to get through all the chapters in the book or all the topics in the course. And the way education is structured it very much tends to be a place where the fittest survive, and you survive by keeping up. And if you lose it at any particular point, either through being away through illness or just not understanding a critical concept at a particular time, t hen you're forever going to be, as it were, excluded from the knowledge that is rushing on in front of you. And that's a pretty tough task.