Relevance of mathematical operations.

The school I attended taught one year of what was in those days called “modern maths”. We pupils were scornful of the subject because it was not in any way intellectually challenging. I remember we were required to do calculations in duodecimal (base 12) using the characters “@” and “*” for the digits 10 and 11. This we found to be gross stupidity, as at the time the UK currency had 12 pennies in a shilling, and we were adept at writing “10” and “11” in the units (pennies) column. We could count in 12s and 20s (there being 20 shillings in a pound) with facility, and being subsequently asked to count in bases 8, 16 and 2 were simply annoying variations on a theme (counting in different bases) we had already mastered. Also I remember a homework in which we had to draw concentric circles around a point and colour them in, the reason for doing so escapes me, I seem to think that is was the various fields of damage from an exploding atom bomb, but there may well have been a less warlike excuse for making the drawing.
What the modern maths project was really about was linking maths to real world situations, and making it relevant to pupils. In this it failed mainly because the real world situations that it utilised were too abstracted from our realities. The counting in octal (base 8) hexadecimal (base 16) and binary (base 2) was designed to prepare pupils for work in digital electronics, which was the developing technology of the day, but this was not explained to us pupils, we had explanations about octal being the base spiders count in! At Puppet Maths we aim to make our maths relevant to the world in which our pupils inhabit. We take everyday activities to explain what the maths are for.