The problem with common core is that it replaced building arithmetic fluency with less rigorous ways of building intuition, leading to a generation of kids who never gained the basic math skills that are foundational to actually understanding the intuition.
You can't just skip arithmetic drills in favor of intuition and still come out with students who are prepared for further study in math. There's a reason Kumon etc are so popular - parents are replacing the lack of mathematics drills in schools with after school options, leaving behind all of the kids whose parents can't afford it.
Montessori. My kids’ school has kindergarteners solving trinomials [0]. My kids learned multiplication and division by 3rd grade. They’ve also memorized powers of 2 up to 2^20, but that was more me telling them about exponents one day, and then giving those as examples. However, they did learn binary trees (and binary) from their school.
Kids can absolutely learn complex concepts early, they just may not be able to formally write them out until a few years later. But they’re kids, so who cares? By the time they need to be able to write out math equations, they’ll understand the underlying concepts on such a deep level that it doesn’t matter how long you make it, they’ll plow through it.
I was a skeptic, and am aware that I sound like a cultist, but damn if Montessori isn’t something special. I highly recommend it.
You can't just skip arithmetic drills in favor of intuition and still come out with students who are prepared for further study in math. There's a reason Kumon etc are so popular - parents are replacing the lack of mathematics drills in schools with after school options, leaving behind all of the kids whose parents can't afford it.