WTF are they teaching kids these days?

Last night I was working on some math with Hayden.  They recently started multiplication and they don't teach it like they used to.  When I was a kid a hundred years ago, we wrote out the multiplication tables over and over and over again until we knew them.  That's no longer the case.

Now, I guess because kids are stupid, there is a trick to learning everything.  Even stupid people learn their 0s, 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s fairly easily.  Then the fun starts.  Instead of learning that 7x3=21, they teach you that 7x2=14 and 7x1=7 and if you add them, it's the same as 7x3=21.

Learning 4s is the same.  You learn to double your 2s, so 7x2=14 and 7x2=14 so 14+14=7x4=28 and there is your answer to 7x4.  Same thing with 8s,  If you know your 2s, you double that to get your 4s and then you double that again to get your 8s.

There are a handful of tricks for 9s, including using your fingers and that leaves 6s and 7s as the hardest to learn.  So, they don't learn them, they simply learn that 7x6 is the same as 7x2 plus 7x2 plus 7x2.  And if you need to do 7s, you just add one more to that.

I thought with two-digit numbers, that stupid way would be a thing of the past.  I was wrong.  Last night Hayden was working on his 11s and 12s.  He's got a big white-board in his room, so I started showing him the process for multiplying two-digit numbers by two-digit numbers.  Apparently I was wrong because Hayden grabbed the marker and showed me how he was taught.

The 'new math' says that to figure 11s, you first take the number times 10, and then add the original number to that number.  For example, 11x11 is 11x10=110 plus 11x1=11 and 110+11=121.

It takes forever to first of all remember all the steps you've got to go through and then actually go through the steps.  I kindly grabbed another marker and showed Hayden the 'proper' way (i.e. the way I was taught) to do it, including how much quicker the proper way was.

Learning Dad's way was fairly uneventful as Hayden didn't fight me like he normally does.  Mostly because I showed him once he did it my way, he wasn't going to have to remember all the bull shit he went through the new way.  In concluding that my way was better, I asked him to figure 1,111 times 222.  He looked at me with that 'Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis" look and said nothing.  I helped him through it and his eyes lit up when he verified his number was correct when checking with a calculator.

It's no wonder the United States ranks so shitty in math compared to some other countries.  We teach things so assbackwards now.  I can remember Hayden learning to count to 10 in German and Spanish.  He couldn't yet read, but someone felt knowing to count to 10 in three languages was more important at the time.

It's a battle most nights when we work on homework.  I know he looks at me like I'm a dumbass because I do things a different way, but the problem stems from the fact that I'm looking at him like he's a dumbass for doing things the wrong way.

I think back to the monotony of how I learned.  While it may have been old school, it worked.  Kids these days have only so much capacity for learning in the course of a day and it's being filled with a bunch of spam mail that's mostly useless.