Re: I wholeheartedly agree
It's all very subjective. My kid sister is a primary school teacher. So I've looked at their maths homework across a class. And some of them are gob smackingly brilliant and some as dumb as I was. Maybe it goes downhill later. Or maybe it depends on the individual and the school.
She's also busy teaching them about "fronted adverbials" and "determiners", all things I never knew at an equivalent age. And they can spell words I'd probably couldn't spell now. It's to your own taste as to whether this is "better" or even useful, in an epoch of spell checkers and auto-suggest.