A Memory from Elementary School - what has happened to our education system?

When I was in 4th and 5th grade I lived in Wisconsin. I was in an advanced math class. Every day we would start the class by performing the same practice.

The teacher would hand out a sheet of paper, I believe it it had 50 (maybe more) multiplication questions on it. We would have 60 seconds to complete all the questions.

These were not single digit multiplication, the numbers were two digits each. This was before common core.

I would like to point out that at this time we were being pumped full of vaccines. Maybe this was just part of the "experiment"?

Example:

  32
x 14
__________


Most, if not all of the class would complete these equations in the minute time frame.

When I was in 6th grade, my family moved to SW Florida. It was like going back to the first grade. My first day in the math class, they had us coloring maps.

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Now looking back at this, from many years ahead. I can't imagine that any of the current schools promote critical thinking mathematical tasks such as the one I outlined above.

What has happened to our educational system? Based on what I'm seeing, the schools are intentionally not promoting critical thinking. They are promoting mind-numbed order followers.