Paint-by-Numbers Math

The way 99.99% students worldwide are taught math in school, with everyone painting the same way, and the few who refuse to conform are ridiculed or marginalized—being an odd in a sea of evens often comes with a stigmatizing price tag or a negative label.

Those who refuse to see “math as problem-solving” (read as “math as rote-learning”) in a first class economy should be prepared to be sacrificed as a dead chicken to scare the monkeys—the paint-by-numbers math strategy is good enough for most Asian high-GDP countries to be ranked among the top ten in international comparative studies like PISA and TIMSS, and to win a few dozen medals at math contests and competitions.

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