The biggest win of my public school education was a high school math teacher that used experimental textbooks that presented all problems as practical word problems.
The children’s performance in market maths problems was not explained by memorization, access to help, reduced stress with more familiar formats or high incentives for correct performance. By contrast, children with no market-selling experience (n = 471), enrolled in nearby schools, showed the opposite pattern. These children performed more accurately on simple abstract problems, but only 1% could correctly answer an applied market maths problem that more than one third of working children solved (β = 0.35, s.e.m. = 0.03; 95% confidence interval = 0.30–0.40, P < 0.001). School children used highly inefficient written calculations, could not combine different operations and arrived at answers too slowly to be useful in real-life or in higher maths.