Never seen one imagine a cardboard box as a rocket ship, or such? That's simply abstract thought of another kind. To be honest, I feel more like rote schoolwo

Never seen one imagine a cardboard box as a rocket ship, or such? That's simply abstract thought of another kind. To be honest, I feel more like rote schoolwork beats it out of them than the opposite, given how many children I've seen that are more capable than the adults, but that's a bit of a tangent. For the record, it's not actually that hard to teach younger kids advanced mathematics. Just turn it into a game. I managed to teach a ~10 year old about mutually tangent circles, after all. And I was certainly never bound by the imaginary limits of what kids were "supposed" to learn at a certain age. Roughly the first half of the "advanced" branches of math is giving funny names to things and learning a few tricks. Basic set theory, for example, would not be all that hard to teach to a young child, but most don't see any value in it. Anyhow, yes, that test is fairly confusingly worded (partly just from stupid and partly because we lack the context of the lessons). In particular, I agree that coins & coffee cups are a bridge too far, so they could certainly do better. But I guess people would rather WTF over the strange wording and downvote and such rather than consider whether little kids should be taught that there's more to addition than rote memorization of the addition tables? (For the record, yes, they should memorize the tables, too.) I found it quite simple to discern that they were taught to split the problems into the part they know and the whole thing, then look for the missing piece and turn the problems into "stories" connecting the numbers to real objects. Would everyone rather that kids learn that math is a bunch of boring number facts to memorize that have no (apparent) application to real life? Or is it the feeling that the way you were taught is plenty good and nobody should ever try to improve it, especially in a way that you don't understand? Or does this whole line of thinking simply make people uncomfortable and cause them to reject the thought entirely?