20150906 THANK YOU, STEVEN LEINWAND:

You told me what's going on.

Between the first and the second catastrophe, I was learning too. The teacher told me there was no textbook - I started reading homework sheets, apparently copied from a book, and it was one and the same book every time.

I have never attended American school. I had to look up too many words. Well, they were sort of teaching numeracy, except they were not teaching it. They were circling around endlessly. Some novelties came from discrete math and adjacent areas rather familiar to me. I would have appreciated this, but again, they were rather touching than teaching. Many things were weird, many others were silly. I straggled to get the meaning of "number sentence" - turned out, it had no meaning at all. They probably just wanted to make transition to algebra even harder. "Number sense" was (and still is) the biggest mystery. I suspect, it's extrasensory.

I commented on "math facts" in SHNUMBERS, did I? I understood it's actually a message. We don't want you to mess with your fingers. Remember simple additions, like there is no way to find them. Why lie about facts then? Just tell the students they got to memorize those additions by rote. Or would it undermine the image of reform math?

Lie was everywhere, and they called it math. I learned about reform math from Wikipedia. It was said to be different from good old math because the later was about computational algorithms, and the former was standard-based. OK, so why would not you include computational algorithms in your standards? You guys are just trying to sell something.

While writing this, I checked with Wikipedia one more time. The current explanation was not much different: a sales pitch, composed of scientifically looking words.

At some lucky moment, through AN OPEN LETTER TO UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF EDUCATION, RICHARD RILEY, I learned about Steven Leinwand's article in Education Week of 2/9/1994 and downloaded it. Instantly, everything started making sense. I realized I was struggling to understand a failed educational system.