They are introducing this to our schools this year.
And all the teachers hate these math fads.
The last one was “whole math”, where the students had to involve all other subjects in math (English, woodworking, science, social studies). Result: without a focus on math itself, the subject became “diluted” and consequently students fell behind and thus scores fell behind. Fotunately, my kids math teachers saw that math was being diluted and encouraged independent study. My kids did the independent study, and the result was that my 5th grader was doing 9th grade math (Intro to Algebra).
Before that it was the Chicago math. In Chicago math, the goal was to teach the student to “understand” how math works. This is fine if all of the student intended to major in mathematics in college. However, most students only need to know how to get the right answer. For example, they were taught several ways to do division. However, most students combined the different methods and got wrong answers. I told my kids to use only long division, and their teachers agreed, exasperated at the school board for forcing this crap on them.
If the teachers hate these math fads then they should ignore the order and teach the correct way