You’re right.
A big part of the problem are teachers’ colleges and programs. They focus incessantly upon “methods” and have stopped worrying about results.
A big part of their push on “methods” is to try to make students “understand” math - which is pretty humorous, because it is very apparent that most elementary and secondary teachers don’t understand, much less know, math. Many teachers are downright scared of math - and they pass this on to some kids as well.
Kids aren’t dumb - they might be uneducated, but they’re not dumb. They can smell a teacher who doesn’t know what s/he is teaching a mile away - and tune out very quickly.
The thing that positively infuriates me, tho, is how much money we piss down a hole in the ground on these idiotic new textbooks for math. There is NOTHING new in K-12 mathematics in the last 100 years other than perhaps synthetic division. That’s it. Absent loss or destruction of a book, there is NO need for a new math book in any school in this country. None. We should identify a good, solid math textbook for every grade (or every couple of grades) and then make it standard. So what if some idiotic PhD in a teacher’s college doesn’t like the textbook five years from now? They’re not teaching kids. They’re just scribbling jargon for a paper, which is utterly inconsequential to teaching children math.
Yes, but then the textbook companies wouldn’t make money by making sure that all of the photos showed the appropriate fractions of skin color, and that the word problems were about Joe’s mom the lumberjack.......
Back in the day (when dinosaurs ruled the earth...) the really smart kids like me learned college algebra and trig in high school. And the less-than-brilliant took business and consumer math, so they COULD work with fractions and decimals and percentages.
Now, in Lake Wobegon, everyone is capable of higher level math, if we just let them “discover” it........ (my son, who did not inherit hs mom’s talent, was only interested in discovering lunch)
Also...Education majors have the lowest SAT and ACT scores on campus. It continues in graduate school with their GREs as well.
My homeschoolers are now using **their** Saxon Math books with the own children.
The math in our schools is called “Investigations”. My wife goes in as a volunteer and drills the kids on basic math “facts”. Otherwise they wouldn’t get them.
She also bought a book for our 6th grade girl. “Math Doesn’t Suck”, written by the actress that played “Winnie” on the wonder years. She quit acting for 4 years and went to Stanford or some place and majored in math with straight A’s or something (When she went in, she was terrible at math!) It has seemed to help explain some of the concepts in a way she can understand it.
I was amazed how much fluff there was in HS Math text books. It all diverts from learning math. It is more about experiencing math than learning it.
“Go with three of your friends to the store and ech buy a small bag of M&M’s. Count how many are in each bag. Compute the average count of the bags. Discuss with our frieds how you feel if your bag was below the average. Bla...Bla...Bla...