www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html
This video got me thinking about how we might go about maths when the dc are older. It lasts 17mins. For anyone who can't see it, it is a speech by world leading mathematician who argues that maths lessons in schools are focussed on all the wrong things. He talks a lot about using computers to do the calculating part of maths and spending more lesson time focussing on the other elements of maths, such as looking at the real world and phrasing a question about it in mathematical language.
One of the things which has drawn me to HE is that I think it gives us an opportunity to improve on the national curriculum to provide an education which is better. I really like the idea of being able to cover things which are interesting and relevant and not wasting time on things which are boring or useless. However I am more than a little scared that if my dc don't learn things which are covered in the national curriculum then it would make it difficult for them to join a school in the future if they wanted to, or difficult for them to go to university. I suppose this is the dilemma of not wanting to teach the curriculum but possibly needing the exam certificates which are based on that curriculum. This is mostly irrelevant to us at the moment because the kind of "maths" we do involves things like using traditional scales to weigh out cake ingredients, however I'm thinking about what we might want to do in the future.