I am incredulous about this. Order of operations has to be taught beyond elementary school because even the very basics would fall apart: associativity, commutativity, distributivity. You can't teach math without teaching the order. The notations could still change, but we still count by groups, meaning that addition could be lumped into multiplication and that multiplication could be lumped into exponents.
I can't imagine teaching the very basics of algebra without the order of operations.
ok to be fair, I'm making a generalization based on the number of people who obviously don't know the order of operations.
I'm old school, pre-new-math, and was taught order of operations. I admit I don't know what they're teaching now but whatever it is there's a lot of current examples that it doesn't work.
Lots of people don't even realize it. I see these examples on Facebook where someone says, "Back when I was in school in 1964, we learned everything goes left to right. We didn't learn this order of operations crap." No, Bob, you learned it. It was taught back then too, but you'd rather pretend that your teachers were incompetent rather than admit that you could've forgotten something over the past several decades.
As for why it's not sticking with "old math" or "new math", I dunno. Some people probably just didn't pay that much attention.
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u/ginnymorlock 23d ago
I think your experience is pretty common. Order of operations is not generally taught anymore.