old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3610

I'd take it with quite a bit more than a shaker of salt, because it doesn't match with my experience - either my own or my children.

Ah. The "new math". That was very good for me in a strange, double-negative kind of way. The year I entered 8th grade, we had had one year (or maybe it was two) of the "new math" in our school system. The local powers that be decided that it was tremendously important for us all to have one more year of it. Most years, 8th grade math split into two "tracks"; the people who didn't "get" it had what was basically a year of review, while the others skipped that and went onto, I thnik it was Algebra I. No skipping out on this critically important stuff for my year, though.

To top off the negative part, scheduling conflicts stuck a lot of the brightest kids in math in the same clbutt as a bunch of the slowest ones. We mostly sat in the back of that clbutt room and read books, played chess, or otherwise tried to keep ourselves occupied in ways other than watching the amusing, but boring antics of the rest of the clbutt; the amusement part wore off pretty quickly. My chess skills improved a bit that year. :-(

The next year, one other kid and myself were special-cased (perhaps because we were just too obnoxious?). We skipped Algebra I to get back on a "normal" advanced track. (Never did miss the skipped clbutt much either). The other kid later took enough summer clbuttes to graduate a year early. That left me as the only kid ready for the usual senior calculus clbutt, which, of course, didn't get offerred. Instead, an arrangement was set up for me to take calculus at the University of Virginia during my senior year in high school. The prof at UVa was superb; one of the best math courses I ever took. In that one course, I pretty much learned all the math I needed for undergrad enginneering school (and having learned it ahead of time helped a *LOT* in undergrad school). In grad school, I went back and picked up the more abstract and theoretical stuff; though I was in the school of engineering, I took more math courses than engineering ones I think - or close anyway.

So in the end, "new math" was really good for me because it resulted in my taking that UVa clbutt.

-- Richard Maine Good judgment comes from experience; email: my first.last at org.domain experience comes from bad judgment. org: nasa, domain: gov -- Mark Twain