[bboop]

I love Algebra, too - it is beautiful patterns, amazing concepts, satisfying relationships. The textbooks are bad, though - what 8th grader needs to know OR understand “If a sparrow flies over Mt. Everest with a twig weighing 2 oz and a headwind of 6 kpm” (always metric, because the libs REALLY want us to be like Europe). They can handle plenty of rote as the learn it and not every single problem absolutely HAS to be applied Physics, imho.

[SpaceBar]

One of the more interesting aspects of advanced algebra, and unfortunately something that is glossed over at the high school level, is that algebra really has nothing to do with numbers per se. Numbers can manifest the underlying principles given their usual interpretation, but the entities under consideration are simply a set of symbols and the collection of rules that combine and transform them in an internally self consistent way. High school algebra is heavily skewed toward the notion of quantity, which is actually algebra as applied to performing symbolic arithmetic, which in turn is geared towards solving real world problems like travelling to grandma's house on half a tank of gas. It's a lot more than that in reality.