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And I in turn can only venture a guess that you have entirely forgotten the brain-liquefying tedium of modern mathematics education, as shown by the fact that y

And I in turn can only venture a guess that you have entirely forgotten the brain-liquefying tedium of modern mathematics education, as shown by the fact that you immediately revert to actually interesting patterns that a properly-educated mathematician might think about. The dollars-and-cents addition problem mapped onto the "fun" toy store narrative is not mathematically interesting until assigned the type of analytical firepower outlined in OP's blog post. It is a deliberately obtuse trick question posed as a learning tool; children labelled "gifted" will figure it out and feel the dull satisfaction of killing another "problem", and those without that benefit will simply experience more fear and boredom.

supportlocal4h 5y ago
The word "label" is very important here. "Smart" children are identified early. After that they are smart because everyone knows they are smart. It is very hard for a person who knows they are not smart to convince a society who knows they are not smart. Dumb people are sometimes lucky and get something right. That doesn't make them smart. Smart people sometimes make mistakes. That doesn't re-label them as dumb. The important thing is the label you start with. Smart people will recognize the grammatical "mistake" in the previous sentence and understand that this post came from a dumb person.