Apparently an image is doing the rounds on Facebook, depicting the crazy way schools today are teaching maths.

I haven't seen it – partly because I haven't been spending much time on Facbeook recently (especially over the last few weeks), and partly because I don't think its the kind of thing my friends would be posting ¹. But its one of those things where it isn't until you stop and think about it that you realise that the way 'we' were taught how to do subtraction is actually a) pretty complicated, b) pretty impossible in most day-to-day situations, and c) not the way that you actually tend to do subtraction in your head.

Subtraction is one of those things that I think I assumed we had cracked hundreds of years ago. Turns out we hadn't quite nailed it yet.

I do wonder what sort of things my kids are going to aske me for homework help with in a few years that is going to baffle and confuse me.

[EDIT - updated with working link to the original story...]

At least, not the ones that Facebook predicts that I'm going to find interesting. ↩

Some Random Nerd