The most revolutionary changes in education come from various corners of the academic spectrum. Often fueled by new ideas sometimes they are not piloted by common sense. And most often they are not monitored for successful implementation soon enough, leaving sometimes critical gaps in learning that are never corrected.

In an attempt to teach myself Calculus, I have discovered it isn't simply my horrendous memory that is entirely to fault, it is a lack of comfort with some basic mathematical manipulations. I originally thought I needed to get back to the basics of algebra. Try as I might, to resurrect the formulas I had once memorized to pass high school classes on the subject, I discovered I can't do simple fractions, you know the multiplication and division of ratio relationships, I can't do them at all. Now I might have burned that portion of my brain out in earlier experiments, (with high frequency energy) or laying in the rain welding under trailers and such. However, it seemed odd, that what was lost was a math skill?
I was bothered at the simple nature of the problem, and hate to actually admit there is such a simple basis for my inability. But when I discovered it was a skill I should have mastered in 5th to 6th grade, and verbalized the fact, my genius wife asked "What was happening at that point in my life?"
In a flash I realized the awful truth!

NEW MATH

I had often remarked the lost years of my youth were wasted in the confines of cement block buildings constructed and manned to mimic the prisons of the era. And with as little interest of making us better citizens as those same structures. I still believe it should be the schools job to teach basic math and reading and then to provide all the books in the universe for the young minds to explore! The only purpose for teachers after that is to help when asked, and lock down the big dumb kids who only want to beat up the little kids.

Back to NEW MATH

When I was in 5th grade, my grade school moved in to the future with NEW MATH! It was an amazing concept of squares and triangles and a totally new way to do mathematics that required some magical understanding of something I never quite understood... and of course neither did the teachers or the parents. But damn it we were really progressive! The only thing saving us was it was NEW MATH that was used to figure the grades too!

6th grade was a repeat of 5th grade NEW MATH because the teacher had about a hundred years under her belt and refused to teach it! So the 5th grade teacher came in and continued the NEW MATH lessons under the guise of "getting us ready to change teachers and classrooms" when we got to JR. High School. Of course we didn't know that was the reason we had two teachers in 6th grade until the next year, 7th grade in JR. High School. Where the funding wasn't available to purchase the required books or upgrade the teachers to go forth with the NEW MATH yet, so we had traditional math. This seemed a real screwed up way to learn things, but as kids, we were expected to not like school. Our complaining was discounted as typical adolescent whining, and may have even been anticipated, and taught as part of the selling of the curriculum. I have since found a couple references to what a total screw job this course was for the schools who embraced it, trained the teachers and bought the expensive books to back it. Who would think a textbook company would promote a totally unproven change just to sell some books?

http://www.math.rochester.edu/people/faculty/rarm/chron.html

Found the above link, apparently I'm not the only one who realized what a waste NEW MATH was!

Then I found the link below, DAMN.

http://www.restoringamerica.org/archive/education/response_to_schlafly.html

And yet....It seems it's happening again! What fools these mortals be!

Anyway, I taught myself decimals, and learned a couple mnemonics to scrape through the math I have needed for the last fifty years, as a machinist, a pilot and a teacher of adults, and didn't realize the problem or where it came from, until just this week. Imagine where I can go now that I know how to multiply and divide any two fractions and reduce them to lowest terms... Algebra is next.. then Calculus.... Then Quantum Mechanics and Genetics....