I have an old 8th grade math book from the 1950’s.
It was all about practical math. How to balance your checkbook. How to create an invoice. How to calculate a sales discount (”20% off of 15.98”). How to use scale on a map. Heavy emphasis on word problems.
We should go back to that. Elementary school match should be oriented around teaching kids arithmetic and the math they use in daily life. Leave the arcane aspects for high school or college.
Algebraic topology in the sixth grade is a bit much.
If you haven’t started teaching yourself a lot of math while you are in high school, you aren’t going to be a serious math type. Ramanujan had a late start and even he couldn’t make it.
Your math book is a good one.
Percent problems were in basic math at my high school, and were some of the hardest problems the kids had to cope with. We took each section in basic math as individual study with lots of help, to pass the class the kids had to pass each section The other hard part was fractions.
By the way, since one half is the same as two quarters, I allowed both answers to be correct unless the problem asked for lowest terms. My belief is that asking for lowest terms is a teacher’s gimick to make grading easier, and may have led to the idea that there are multiple answers which is false except for this case where I believe two fractions that are equal are also equally correct.