you don't need to know long division... for well... anything On that we can more or less agree. Perhaps we could salvage some of that time and put it to more

you don't need to know long division... for well... anything On that we can more or less agree. Perhaps we could salvage some of that time and put it to more productive use. And then perhaps after a few years we can go back and look at it again. People think of math as a sort of tree structure where you need this long chain of tools to get to understand each new concept. I am simply suggesting it's closer to a graph where multiple approaches can reach the same concept and reinforce each other. As to the SAT it's mostly a middle school math test. I suspect after a while you build a little crib sheet of the basic concepts that people needed to understand. And yet considering people "studded" this stuff for ~5 hours a week, 36 weeks a year, for ~10 years I suspect the crib sheet was not all that long.