Reply #4: There was a math program back

[SheilaT]

in the 1960's, when I was in high school, called UICSM (University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics) which was the most amazing program ever. I'm yet to find anyone who I didn't go to h.s. with who's even heard of it.

What was so good about it was that we discovered everything more or less on our own. As a consequence I was able some thirty years later to test directly into Algebra II when I needed to take math for a program I wanted at my junior college. And I'd sit in class while information bubbled up from the darkest depths of my brain.

I've never understood why the program didn't become standard. Possibly it would have required a much greater commitment on the part of the math teacher to lead the students along the path of discovery.]\


I also recall that around the time I was in junior high school it had become popular in elementary math to teach kids to work with base-5 or base-12 or other non base-10 systems. I always thought that was a real waste of time. My own kids didn't get that, so maybe it disappeared.