My wife teaches second grade and for some time they had a common-core math curriculum that encouraged writing about math, how you solved this problem, and discu

My wife teaches second grade and for some time they had a common-core math curriculum that encouraged writing about math, how you solved this problem, and discussing that with the class. It was interesting to me to see this in person, because children often solve problems in different ways which work for them, discussing it as a class disseminated that knowledge to someone else who may find it useful. The end result is second graders who are good at math but also understand why X+Y=Z, not just that it does. It is hard to teach this and requires a lot of work from the teacher's side to become good at it and to pull the right information from the children. In a state that criminally underfunds public education, many teachers didn't want to learn this and when the time came, discontinued this curriculum for something that required no writing (also a mandate from our worthless state department of education) and did offer more color-by-numbers, which my wife describes as "pre-k stuff". Rant aside, I was astounded to watch how much 2nd graders understood about math when given the opportunity to approach problems like this.