Hum... I though the article was about something like the New Math[1] but... I actually learned math like that. (I'm from Portugal, and finished high-school around 10 years ago).

Sincerely, I have no idea how the "old-fashioned way" works. I mean, venn diagrams and trees to add fractions. A variable change (!) to solve a quadratic equation.

Those "new" methods were the methods I learned, and they were fast, efficient, and we add other algorithms to prove the validity of our answer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

[EDIT] I just read the thread. Apparently it was an april's fools joke. Now I don't feel like I'm living in Bizarro World

I just had a look and all the methods that were listed were taught to me as a kid. Then again, I went to "British" schools in the third world when I was a kid, so that might have something to do with it.

The methods that the Reddit user was saying was the "normal" way were completely alien to me. Both because they had no instructions, and because I wasn't taught them as a kid/ever.

OP describes himself as a professional mathematician and then fails to notice that common core produces an identical result in the third picture.

  (-5/2)-sqrt(57/4) vs (-5-sqrt(57))/2

Looks like op is biased towards one side.

So why downvote my comment if it is apparently an April fools post?

This is an April fool's day post.

Well I'm in the UK and it seems I was taught the "Common Core" way of doing things. All makes sense to me! Right down to using the quadratic formula to solve equations.

The "Old" way just looks weird...