Just in case you don't regularly read Rational Parenting (a mistake on your part, I think, but let that pass), do go there today for an interesting piece by Alice about the maths bit of Britain's current National Curriculum. This key paragraph comes right at the end:

P.S. I've just worked out what this complicatedness is all about: the maths syllabus is apeing real life. It's trying to make itself relevant, by being applied-maths instead of just simple maths-maths. This is nuts. The whole reason maths matters at all is that you can and do apply it; the real-life situations are the applying part. Sigh.

By all means teach maths by referring to particular applications of it in real life – points totals in the Premier League, lengths of bits of wallpaper, areas of wall to determine how much paint you need, speeds of trains to determine times of journeys, etc. etc. By all means, illustrate all those universal statements. But maths itself is of such universal applicability that to embed such illustrative embellishment in the very structure of what must be learned is to limit its universality, and to miss the point of the thing completely.