Reading isn't a school subject after age 8 at school - it is assumed that all children can read by then.......(By the way, aeh, if there's really no maths in elementary school other than the four operations, you need better elementary schools!)
Yes!
ColinsMum,
Unless you have seen it with your own eyes it is impossible to believe just how drastically the brain tumour of Political Correctness has impacted education in the USA.
Back in the UK in the early 70s the 3 Rs were assumed to have been grasped by 8 with reading (along with using a dictionary), arithmetic and cursive handwriting mastered. Alas! Here on Planet USA a school producing similar results that was not a Homeschool would be a rare bird indeed.
Yup. I was only speaking half facetiously. Elementary math is pretty pathetic in the USA. Which is one of the many reasons why we homeschool. Even if you add in the data analysis that is the last unit of each year (read, the unit that gets omitted if the teacher/class didn't move quickly enough through the curriculum), the spiraling nature of most math curricula means there are about 15 seconds (not an empirically validated number, in case you're wondering!) of novelty for each unit each year, if you've actually mastered the prior concepts. The "new" material each year really is usually the same four operations, only now with one more place value. And then a few units of odds and ends, like very, very elementary geometry (which at this level is mostly definitions/names of shapes), units of measurement (which children who have exposure to real-life measurement, such as in the kitchen or the shop, ought to have some idea of), money (which is, of course, exactly the same as arithmetic to two decimal places, but is usually taught as a separate unit), and telling time on an analog clock (which Common Core expects to take four years to learn (k-3)).
I probably do oversimplify a little bit, but when you consider that fractions are just division, and decimals are just fractions, and percents just decimals...
