I have a Katz’s Deli T-shirt that says “Send a salami to your boy in the army.”
My younger sibs were taught something like this, in the US in the late 60s, something created/endorsed/sold by IBM as I recall. I was not thrilled with the idea of the younger kids having to learn the alphabet twice, but they turned out OK.
It was interesting when Common Core came out, and much like with the New Math, since parents didn’t understand what was going on and couldn’t help their kids with homework, they revolted and killed the whole thing.
Can you fill in more details? When were these kids born, which state(s) were involved, etc.
I’m not meaning to dispute your story, but it’s utterly unlike anything I’ve ever heard of.
FTR I was born in 1958 so was doing primary schooling in 1964-1970. In a well-off, highly progressive, future-oriented district in bleeding edge SoCal.
My bros were up to 5 grades behind me & had none of what you suggest.
Northern New Jersey, an urban public school, would have been between ‘70 and ‘73, now that I think more precisely.
Math teaching is still pretty whacky, in Florida at least. I recall having difficulty with helping my younger daughter with math homework because they had apparently started by teaching her ‘shortcuts’ rather than basic methods. I forget all the details, but I had to show her how to do basic subtraction the correct way. I guess this could just have been an incompetent teacher…?
So, “three from two is nine”? 
FYI, I was referencing teaching writing using a modified alphabet, not using “New Math” to teach arithmetic. Posting on the phone app does not always capture the part I was trying to quote.
At the risk of being pedantic, there is no correct way. There are many correct ways, and as long as you choose a way that gets you the right answer, that you understand, and that doesn’t take too long, that is one correct way.
which is why I love the song: superficially it is making fun of the newfangled way to teach math, but on a deeper level, it critiques people who only understand one way of doing math, and think any other way is wrong.
As an adult, that’s actually how i do subtraction in my head.
And i love the song, too. Lehrer knew that will those methods worked.
Oh, and i meant to say, my favorite rhyme in his works might be:
Harvard with discovered, at the end of the elements.
Particularly the way he shifts the pronunciation of “discovered” to make it rhyme with “Hah-vard”.
Nowadays he’d have to find a rhyme for ‘created’? When will we see element 119?
But the simplest and most reliable way is to work digit by digit from right to left with carry (over / under) as needed. Works in any base; this is how it is implemented in computers.
On the few occasions when I need to do mental arithmetic nowadays, I use a lot of simplifier tricks myself. But I don’t think those should be where teaching should start.
Actually; there is an earlier version.
And when you need a precise answer and the numbers are large, you use a computer these days. What humans who need to do arithmetic in their head actually do is start from the left and only calculate a couple of digits. CEOs do this in real time with every presentation in front of them. Speaking as a numbers professional, this is what i do in real time, at meetings. And later, i open Excel and have it chug our the correct answer to all 9 decimal places. ($6,531,851.12) I was actually really pleased when the schools started encouraging students to do this in addition to the formal algorithm.
For shame! ITA school was great!!!
Yes, in the late 1960s the five-year-old Kimstu in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US attended a kindergarten specifically themed around the Initial Teaching Alphabet. We had uniforms and everything.
I’m not claiming that ITA was the best choice for early literacy pedagogy in general, but it worked fine for me and I enjoyed it. I liked the logical taxonomy of phonemic/graphemic correspondence, and found it very satisfying (and I think it’s possible that it boosted my foreign-language acquisition abilities and interests later in life).
I don’t remember hardly a thing about transitioning from ITA to regular English literacy, but it was evidently fast and painless; I’ve always been a very fast reader and excellent speller (please do not scan post for typos too carefully, thx).
The one relevant moment I remember is coming across one of my old ITA storybooks when I was in second grade or thereabouts, and leafing through it with a nostalgic feeling of superiority about how I used to read such “little kid” stuff, and being startled to see that a lot of the letters were “funny-looking”.
I could recognize and recall the ITA special characters once I saw them, but I had completely forgotten that they were what I started my literacy journey on.
(OMG, yes, this is it, Mrs. Metzger’s Pitman ITA School in Ventnor NJ.)