This also seems to be for the sake of the teachers. There's a bunch of different methods to do math problems, and they're supposed to grade both the method and

This also seems to be for the sake of the teachers. There's a bunch of different methods to do math problems, and they're supposed to grade both the method and the result. It's way easier if everyone is using the same method than to allow everyone to make their own. As a straw-man example - you could come up with a more advanced way to format your essay and maybe write it in a new language you learned, but if the teacher can't understand it then it doesn't really fulfill the requirements of the assignment. The "new math" thing also isn't anything new, there's a song about it from 1965 and another from 2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math_(song)