Yes, I didn't explain myself very well. The second paragraph touches on my feelings about introducing "technology" into math education for kids. Generally, I see very little value of introducing tablets, laptops, or computers as essential items in math instruction. And likewise, I see very little value in instructing children to use alternative methods for the fundamental operations of arithmetic.

I understand math, and I use math professionally in my work. I don't consider myself a mathematician; I'm far from that, but I have had at over twenty-five university courses on mathematics while pursuing degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics from some of the best schools in the world.

Big book publishers lock schools into using a particular Math curriculum. The schools invest in a set of books that fit together from year to year to cover the basics of elementary, lower school, and high school math subjects. The publishers compete with one another by providing their own unique spin on how math should be taught, and I've seen several counterproductive approaches while my kids were in school. It's virtually impossible to get a school to change its approach. The schools commit to very large multi-year contract to purchase books across the entire system. Furthermore, the people making the decisions aren't themselves heavy users of math and are easily swayed by the sophisticated marketing and sales techniques used to justify each publisher's approach.

I had to listen to wide-eyed school math consultant explain to me that there is "more than one way to perform multiplication that gets the same result!" as if this was some startling and life changing revelation. For those that don't yet have kids and don't realize what I'm talking about. I'll sum it up:

(a + b) * (c + d) = ac + ad + bc + bd

but its also true that:

(a + b) * (c + d) = ad + bc + ac + ad

Oh wow! Now, add a grid and a bunch of lines and pull the wool over the eyes of the people buying the books. See [1]

I studied one curriculum, Everyday Math, more than others in an attempt to get my children's school to consider an alternative. Everyday Math, like other curriculum, is based on work done at a University Education department. The University of Chicago is behind Everyday Math. It isn't the worst program in use, but in my opinion it isn't the best either. One glaring problem with the program was the focus on teaching elementary arithmetic operations using alternative methods for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I attended every presentation for parents at the schools on Everyday Math. I read the papers from the Education department at the University of Chicago that justified these alternative methods and I disagree with their conclusions. (For one thing, they completely misrepresent the Knuth's Art of Computer Programming volume 3 as justification for why learning these alternatives are useful.)

After studying the subject, I very much consider the approach used in Singapore for elementary math education to be better. The books are inexpensive (they are simple, straightforward black and white texts) and written in English so they could easily be adopted by schools in the USA. I learned arithmetic in the US many years ago. The way it is being taught now is much worse.

There is no obvious answer to addressing our schools inability to teach math well. If there was, we would be doing better. I'm no expert so my opinions count very little, but I would like to see less of: tablets, laptops and web-sites; and more of: drills, paper and pencil work, traditional methods and teaching of math basics. Everyone shouldn't learn to code. (Should everyone learn how to fix a car just because we drive them?) Those that are going to learn to code should focus on elementary algebra (even calculus) first. Most people need to learn how to divide fractions and what a percentage means before learning to code.

[1] https://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/teaching-topics/computatio...