al2simon, I don’t think the strategies are aimed at the top 10%. Those kids, like you and I, were going to figure out the strategies anyway. I’m guessing they were aimed at developing math intuition for the average students. The average student, the one at the 50th percentile, comes out of an American school with horrible math skills. I’d like to think we can do better.
The bottom 10%? That’s harder. But since our current strategies aren’t working for the bottom 10%, new strategies probably aren’t going to make the situation worse.
So many people, women especially, are afraid of the most routine applications of math. You have a sock pattern with 60 stitches around, to fit a woman with an ankle measurement of 8". You want to knit the sock for your husband whose ankle measures 9". How many stitches around do you need? Now round it to the nearest four stitches because of your ribbing pattern. This is not a hard problem, and it’s the kind of real problem that real knitters face, but many knitters can’t do it. Wouldn’t it be better if they could? I hope this kind of math instruction could develop better math intuition for knitters.