It's recently clicked for me that our economies and civilization may in fact rely on a vast majority of people without basic quantitative reasoning skills. If

It's recently clicked for me that our economies and civilization may in fact rely on a vast majority of people without basic quantitative reasoning skills. If I were teaching a middle school kids math today, I'd start by teaching them poker and blackjack with card counting to practice doing fast calculations and then learn risk and probabilities. Then maybe create a stock picking group so they can learn to read charts and calculate simple functions with concepts like averages and moving averages, medians, and then some bayesian statistics, time value of money, interest and compounding on debt with logarithms. An example of a person with two maxed credit cards with different interest rates and a fixed income shows equilibria and how predatory those products are. I might also use a eurorack synthesizer rig with an oscilloscope to demonstrate functions and wave forms, integration, modular arithmetic and combinatorics in musical scales, harmonics, musical transposition as an example of conservation laws, ohms laws and electronics, and pulsed information (binary). Catapults vs. trebuchets and siting a rifle scope for simple ballistics and physics. Bicycle or engine repair to show differential gearing. Another unit would be some variation of cryptopals, because that's an intro to new currencies, economics, number theory, proofs as "shapes," information theory, and computer science. The way I learned algebra in high school was like learning to read music without ever hearing it, let alone playing it. Glimpsing the things I don't understand now as an adult, I can't help but think it was by design.