@
Adrift What was the difference between the local school's "maths" and that which you were teaching your children?
I ask because some while back now, British schools adopted very peculiar ways to perform normal Arithmetic (not Mathematics - you can't really mess about with that). My brother found this when trying to help his own son and daughter to learn basic arithmatic, the faddy new way baffled him and his wife more than the children!
I don't know if they have reverted to normal arithmetical methods, but they do seem to call anything from counting onwards, "Maths", which seems very pretentious.
My generation learnt "Arithmetic" up to the end of Primary School (so aged 10-11), then "Mathematics" in our upper schools; although the latter syllabus started with purely numerical topics like finding the HCF and LCM of a group of numbers. Oh, and Logarithms and Slide-Rules as arithmetical tools - this was before calculators became commonplace. The course ended five years later having covered many topics including Percentages, Ratios and Proportion, Mensuration, Pure and Applied Geometry, Trigonometry, and Algebra to basic Calculus.
What sort of thinking skills more generally?
