“Why not just teach basic math and leave Algebra to college level studies. You don’t need it until you get into the sciences anyway.”
I’m not anti-math but during my school years I had nothing but trouble understanding mathematics and I didn’t have a teacher that could break it down to its simple list form and make it understandable.
Trying to learn mathematics was like trying to learn Mandarin or Farsi.
Mandarin is approachable with the Hello Chinese app. I dabbled with Farsi 20 years ago, but there was no compelling reason to continue. One of my co-workers is fluent in Pashto from his military service in Afghanistan. I sampled that one in Duolingo...very different. My daily language study includes German and Welsh. I've made good strides in Italian, French and Spanish as well. Still trying to master Scot's Gaelic. The written and spoken forms are still challenging as I don't have all the "rules" figured out yet. Japanese is nicely phonetic with Hiragana/Katakana. That goes off the deep end with Kanji. Pure rote memory.
I have heard it said, can’t attest to its accuracy, that those who are better in math are worse in languages. And vice versa.
I did quite well in math in HS, algebra and trig. Absolute disaster in Spanish (only F I ever got). Two years of a foreign language was a college bound requirement for students in Florida in the 60s.
My daughter is quite competent in math but no interest at all. Excels at and really enjoys languages.