Pure maths — we're talking algebra here — is the bedrock of the most useful knowledge our pupils will ever acquire, aside from English language skills, and the
real world provides a plethora of examples that we can use to prove it to them.
UC - Riverside and its partners in the Inland Empire College Success and Career Readiness Collaborative, for instance, traced
math deficiencies in arriving college students back to the fourth grade, where they found that there was too much emphasis on
pure multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division, without a sense of how in
real life those computations might be used.