Though it isn't worth much, I'd like to put my two cents in as a student currently going through high school. In the district in which I'm partaking in public

Though it isn't worth much, I'd like to put my two cents in as a student currently going through high school. In the district in which I'm partaking in public education, there's a dead even split between contemporary and traditional math courses. Our school offers both the Core-Plus Mathematics Project (http://wmich.edu/cpmp/ http://wmich.edu/cpmp/) and some variation of what I'd consider traditional (Geometry 1, 2, Algebra 1, 2, etc.). The students more often than not will prefer the Core-Plus Mathematics Project over the traditional courses early on in their education - but once the math switches over to a primarily calculating class (take, for instance, Calculus), the opinions shift and favor the other one. What we honestly have in my district is a case of a system that's trying to split itself down the middle politically - as we're attempting to switch to a modern, context driven approach to mathematics, whilst maintaining the link to processes like Advanced Placement, which only judge on the traditional aspects (http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/sub_calab.html http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/sub_calab.htm...). While it might be a better route for the future, the present is demanding math to be calculation based for the near future. It'll only start switching into a better realm when colleges and pre-college programs like those offered by CollegeBoard make the switch to context-based systems, rather than calculation based ones. (I'm very well aware of how rambling that is, sorry!)