Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
My grade two teacher demonstrated &quot;venn diagrams&quot; one day, it absolutely blew my mind. She had a bunch of coloured shapes scattered on the floor, then put one hoop over the triangles, another hoop over the red shapes, and then, what to do with the red triangles? My six-year-old brain loved it when she put one hoop overlapping the other one. And yet to this day I refuse to memorize the multiplication table.<p>Rote learning is easier for the teacher: easier to teach, easier to mark. It&#x27;s not just mathematics, it&#x27;s all the subjects in school. Many of the &quot;geniuses&quot; merely survive school, nothing more.