Ania - I'm thinking you or Val might know something about the elementary school math path outside the US. My impression, which is possibly completely incorrect, is that in Europe math education proceeds more slowly up until 7th grade (then speeds up for those on a math/science track).
(Joining this thread late.)
The approach to teaching maths in the French system is quite different from what I've seen in US schools.
French math classes move somewhat more quickly than US classes, but not wildly so (eg, they start doing multiplication seriously in late-ish second grade). They also go more deeply and seem to make a greater effort at ensuring that students understand concepts.
For example, the idea of
tens is taught by showing boxes with up to ten balls in them. Once a box gets filled, you close it and it becomes
one ten instead of
ten ones. This idea feeds nicely into regrouping: you take a box of tens out of the tens area, move it to the ones area, open it, and turn it into ten ones. Does that make sense?
I know that US schools teach regrouping, but I've never seen an American example that's as crystal clear as the French method. Plus the French method is used all over France and no one wastes/duplicates effort on designing their own methods.
I don't know about mathematics at the higher levels. The most I can say is that my husband worked for a French company for a while and he always talked about the exceptional math skills of the French employees. And I think that math education in other countries is even better (Russia? Finland?).
We noticed big differences between the French and US approaches when our DS was still in 1st grade.
HTH,
Val
