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Notes -
Well...
You have to understand, it was the cold war. At least we got a song out of it.
It's worth noting that this "new math" is the basis for all the contemporary complaints about Common Core math. Most of the parents complaining about it aren't aware that the "old fashioned" way of doing things that they learned was actually controversial when it was introduced in the 1960s. A lot of new math stuff like other base systems was eventually ditched, but new math subtraction is all most people who went to elementary school from the 1970s–1990s really know.
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I don't know that much about it, just that the New Math that Tom Leherer talks about in the song is the way that they were teaching subtraction at least as late as the mid-'90s (and probably later), and that Common Core subtraction is different enough that the people who learned subtraction they way I did complain about it. But I'm not a teacher or a curriculum expert or anything like that.
To me, the whole "You can't take three from two, two is less than three, so you look at the four in the tens place" etc. always seemed close to the way I do maths in head, expect just sung fast in an overtly complex way to make it seem sillier than it actually is.
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