Students' math scores jumped 20% with iPad textbooks, publisher says

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29. I agree with much of what you say

But I still don't see the utility of teaching kids arithmetic. Even less useful is the current approach of trying to get the kid to invent how to multiply, or alternatively, the teaching of multiple ways to multiply.

Also, a lot of time is spent on the manipulation of fractions and doing arithmetic with fractions. Most of this makes a lot more sense after an introduction to algebra.

Math is a pretty big field. Even after six years of undergrad and graduate math course, I was missing the modern algebra needed for coding theory and missing a lot of statistics that would have been useful. So lets cut out the elementary busy work and move on to the meat of the subject.

As for arithmetic, almost all science and engineering calculations are done using some device that implements IEEE 754. The engineers and scientists using them almost always have no clue how the hardware implements some actual algorithm to do the arithmetic. Neither do most investigate what actual algorithms are used to implement the standard math function packages unless they have some need to understand the limits of accuracy.